When Augmented Reality Becomes Reality

In the film Inception, people can create dreams from their imagination and memory.  There is so much detail and sensations in dreams that while you’re dreaming, you do not think you’re dreaming. (Although sometimes in my dreams, I do realise that I’m dreaming and enjoy the awareness that I’m in a dream. This can be fun. But I digress.)



Similarly, in the film The Matrix, everyone is fooled into thinking that the Matrix, a simulated reality created by machines, is actual reality.  The whole story is based around Neo and other free humans trying to destroy the simulated reality of the Matrix.  But what if people knew about the Matrix and opted into it, simply because the fake reality was preferable to actual reality? After all, as Cypher, the traitor in the film says in this clip, the steak in the Matrix tastes just as juicy and delicious as a steak in real life, even though he knows it’s not real. 

“I know this steak doesn’t exist.  I know that when I put it in my mouth, the matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.  After nine years, you know what I’ve realised?  Ignorance is bliss,” says Cypher.  So why shouldn't we willingly choose ignorance, as Cypher did?

The question of what is reality has been vexing philosophers throughout the ages.  Aristotle believed that all knowledge of reality could be derived from perceptual experience of the physical objects around us.  Plato believed in a dual reality of things: a physical reality and an alternate reality of ideas existing beyond our physical sensory perceptions. Descartes conjectured that if an evil demon trapped someone’s mind in a black box and was controlling all inputs and outputs, the person would not know the difference.

Throughout our cultural and philosophical history, an emphasis has been placed on the importance and goodness of reality because we equate it with truth, and truth is generally seen as a virtue.  An accurate perception of reality is a requirement in logical reasoning.  But one of my favourite philosophers, Nietzsche, argues that reason is what distorts our perceptions of the world, because reason can falsify the evidence of our senses. According to him, the only ‘real’ world is the world which is apparent to our senses. To divide the world into a ‘real’ world and an ‘apparent’ world is an act of decadence, because it is to deny that what is apparent to our senses is real. 

Neuroscience tells us that everything we feel and experience is purely due to motor-sensory perceptions of our nervous system and chemical reactions in our brain.  We are merely billions of cells that react to stimuli every moment, constantly changing.  Nothing is permanent in this sense.  If I took a photograph of myself and then took another photo a second later, in that instant millions of chemical and neurological changes would have occurred in my body although I may not look that different in the two photos. When this process is happening in each one of us moment after moment, and in everything around us, can there be such a thing as an objective reality?  And if there is, can any of us perceive it with our subjective neurobiological systems?     

Augmented reality and virtual reality are still very crude at the moment, but watching films like The Matrix and Inception have made me wonder, what if articificial or augmented reality felt so real that our minds were unable to distinguish it from actual reality? What’s real can be compared to un-reality only insofar as you can distinguish between the two.
 
In my opinion, reverence of ‘the real’ is only a matter of cultural acceptance and practice.  For example, in countries like Korea and China, plastic surgery is very common and there is no stigma attached to it.  The virtue of beauty overcomes the virtue of being true to one’s original or initial appearance.  In the future, we may likewise come to value reality less if virtual reality can be perceived to be better.  It will be ‘augmented reality’ in the literal sense, but we may not even be able to tell the difference between the real and the ‘augmented’ real. 

This is the notion I will explore in my story today:



If anybody had told Tom a few months ago that he would be going through with Better Life™, he would have laughed and told them where to go. But he was seventy-three years old and had decided he was too lonely and hapless to go on with nothing to look forward to.

He was booked in for surgery at noon, and he had not told anyone about it.  He wanted to see Lana again for the last time, even if she wasn't real.      

The surgery would be minor and would take less than an hour. The doctors would insert a microscopic chip into the part of his brain that created desire and connect it to the part that received sensory perceptions. His brain would then fill in the gaps and create an illusion of reality just like in a dream.  Except it would be in waking life. He'd be able to see Lana again. Although she wouldn't be real, she would appear to be real and he wouldn't be able to see the difference.

He had had a fulfilling life, gone out and done things. He travelled round the world on his sailing boat, had taught in schools in five different countries, was briefly the regional kungfu champion and had found true love in Lana. And unlike most people, he had actually done these things, not just done them in Better Life™.

But as he got older, more and more people began to go Better.  They perceived themselves getting the dream job, the dream house, the dream girl. What's the difference if you can't tell the difference, they asked.  For Tom, this felt simply wrong.  He didn't want to live in a world where everyone lived in their own perfect worlds. He wanted to be able to look into someone's eyes and know that they were seeing the same things he was.  That's why he had started the Be Real movement. He wanted things and people to be real, not perceived to be real. There was a critical difference between the two things in his mind.

That’s what he had loved about Lana – she was not afraid to see things as they were. He loved her for always looking at the truth with unflinching courage and kindness. (And the way she looked).  They had met at the first BeRealist meeting and had married a year later.  As more and more of their friends converted to Better Life™ over the years, Lana could always be relied on to ridicule them with her wry remarks. 

But now Lana was dead, the government had started offering Better Life™ on the NHS and Tom was the only BeRealist left of his friends. He had tried to keep himself busy but what really depressed him was the fact that the one person who had understood him, really understood him and felt the same way about things, was dead. 

The fact that Lana didn’t exist anywhere in the world any more, the fact that she wasn’t walking down some street in her favourite blue sandals with one hand in her pocket and her shopping in the other, breathing the same air as him, drove him insane.     

It simply felt unfair that she had been there and now she was not.  He was so angry.  That’s why he had decided to go for Better Life ™. 

He’d thought about killing himself before but the thought that nobody would remember him scared him.  It can only get better, and if it doesn’t work out, I can always do myself in.  These were his last thoughts as he drifted off to sleep under the glaring lights over the operating table.      

When he opened his eyes after the surgery, his overwhelming desire was to drink water.  He thought he tasted water in his mouth and felt the cool liquid go down his throat but he knew he hadn’t drunk any.  The doctors had warned him about this.  He had to remember to eat and drink at regular intervals otherwise he could die of hunger and thirst.  He saw a glass of water by his bedside and drank it.

Then he realized that Lana was standing watching him in the corner of the room. 

“You bloody idiot.  How could you do this to yourself?” she said.

"I only did it ‘cause I missed you," he stammered.  He knew she wasn’t real but if he hadn’t held her stiff dead body in his own arms, he wouldn’t have believed it.  “Look, I know it’s wrong, I know you’d hate me for it, but otherwise I would’ve gone mad.  I would’ve… killed myself.”  

Lana looked at him coldly.  

“Don’t look at me like that…  I know you’re not real but I still don’t want to upset you.  Oh, this has all been a big mistake.”

Tom put his head in his hands and began to cry. 

But then he heard her footsteps walking quietly towards him and felt her arms around him, embracing him.  He felt her fingers stroking his hair. 

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed.  “I know I shouldn’t have.”

“Shh,” she whispered.  “I know.”          

He looked up at her and was amazed to see that Lana’s face had become young and soft again.  She held his face in her hands and smiled at him in just the way that used to melt his heart. 

For the first time in a long time, he felt happy, alive.