Metaverse vs Reality

[00:00:00] Hello, my name's Brandon Stover, and I'm the founder of Plato University and the host of this podcast For our returning listeners, thank you for coming back and if you're new to the. The way it works is I'm going to narrate one of the essays that I've written about on a topic on life. After giving one full length read through, I'll start to dissect the essay, weaving in details about my life, what's going on broader in society and other issues regarding the topic.

[00:00:41] I wrote about. All of the essays, including this one, can be found at Brandon Stover dot. You can also find all the show notes and the resources that I mentioned during this episode@brandonstover.com. And if you enjoy the show and wanna get the essays in your inbox, you can subscribe to the newsletter@brandonstover.com or follow the links inside the description.

[00:01:02] Let's dive into the essay.

[00:01:17] On the Metaverse in an interview on the Lex Friedman podcast, John Carmack, an engineer working on Oculus stated, The goal has been to make the experience inside the headset better than outside the headset in order to increase time spent using it. Are we not just jacking ourselves into the matrix? I fear that people will be all too eager to leave reality.

[00:01:40] Take as evidence, the large quantity of drugs, pro hedonistic entertainment we consume in order to distract ourselves from reality. Why are we so eager to leave this painful but beautiful existence behind? What is in question is the goal, a goal is an aim, and we should be careful at what we aim at. What is the ultimate aim?

[00:02:01] Human flourishing does increased time spent in the Metaverse lead to that? It's hard to tell. As someone who spent much of his youth playing video games, I can tell you it was a great benefit to my. But so was all the time I did not spend playing. The Metaverse should be a supplement to real life, not a replacement.

[00:02:20] How might we design the Metaverse to enhance our reality, Widen our perspective rather than replacing it? There is value in the Metaverse for its potential to run hundreds or thousands of simulations to solve problems for better ways of living. It could also allow us to test living in a different way, say being transgender before applying it to real life.

[00:02:42] Although the models we create will be quite crude. As humans have a limited understanding of complex systems, this is why I believe we will still long for the real world. The processes that make up nature are too complex for humans to perceive, let alone code. Of course, one could argue we are already living in a simulation and each of our lives are an experiment to test the best possible parameters for survival given a set of circumstances.

[00:03:10] In which case, I would want to know the true reality behind this one. I'm weary of the metaverse, but I think it could be a necessary step in the evolution of humanity if our species is compared to that of a virus using resources until depletion. Putting our consciousness into a virtual reality with limitless resources may be the only way to continue living and growing.

[00:03:33] However, someone will still have to stay here in the real world to tend to energy production, computer servers, and meet suits that still house our consciousness. There may come a time when one must choose which reality to live in. I, for one, believe there's much beauty in human existence. That the act of holding another human of hearing birds in the morning as the sun rises of smelling the rain is too sweet to leave behind.

[00:03:59] I choose reality. So that is the essay on the metaverse. Uh, it's obviously something that is on a lot of people's minds at the current moment. Uh, very hot topic. And I would say that we're at one of those inflection points in history where there's gonna be a lot of people that are afraid of what's coming in the future.

[00:04:16] And a lot of people that are excited. I think there's a lot of great potential to what the Metaverse could be. And I also think there's a large downside. And whether we want to believe it's gonna be good or bad, it's coming , whether we want it to or not. Largely, I think it's gonna be a good thing. But as this essay started to outline, I think there's some things that we need to watch out for and one of those major things being escaping reality.

[00:04:41] I think right now in our current society, we already do too much to escape our reality, to run away from facing the things that are actually going on in our life. This might be drugs, this might be drinking, This might even be social media. Whenever a problem arises in your life and you turn away to something else so that that problem is no longer bugging you, but you didn't face it and you didn't actually fix the problem, then you're running from reality.

[00:05:07] And I feel like there's gonna be problems that are occurring in people's lives, and they're gonna say, This life sucks, and they're just gonna jack into the metaverse. And that's one of my largest fears of the upcoming meta. Let's go ahead and break down this essay in an interview on the Lex Friedman podcast.

[00:05:23] John Carmack, an engineer working on Oculus stated, The goal has been to make the experience inside the headset better than that of outside the headset in order to increase time spent using it. Look, the people that are designing the metaverse, these different corporations, they have a goal in mind. They want you to keep using this, so they're going to design systems keep you inside the metaverse.

[00:05:46] The more that you spend time in the metaverse, the more revenue that they're going to be making. This is exactly how social media was designed. It's designed to keep you on the platform and spending more time there. That way they can continue to put advertisements in front of your eyes. Why would we think that it's gonna be any different when they go to make the metaverse?

[00:06:05] These corporations exist to make money, so they're gonna want you to spend as much time as possible inside that metaverse. Is that a good thing for a society? Hard to tell. Let's keep going. Are we not just jacking ourselves into the matrix? I fear that people will be all too eager to leave reality. Take as evidence, the large quantity of drugs or hedonistic entertainment we consume in order to distract ourselves from reality.

[00:06:29] Why are we so eager to leave this painful but beautiful existence? So this is what I was starting to talk about after I finished the first read of the essay, is that we have all these things that already exist in our world that are trying to take us away from the actual reality of our day-to-day lives.

[00:06:45] Again, this might be drugs, this might even just be flipping on the tv, watching a movie, anything that's distracting you from the actual reality that's going on. When was the last time that you took a walk? You didn't listen to a podcast, you didn't have your phone, and you just walked around and you looked at the actual things that were going.

[00:07:03] You looked at the trees, you seen the people walking there may have seen a few dogs, and it just enjoying the reality that you're living in. Now, that scene sounds pretty nice, but what if you took that same walk and now it's raining and thundering? The wind is going everywhere. You're losing all of your stuff.

[00:07:21] You're soaked. Like it doesn't sound like a very good existence. That existence is becoming painful, so now you want to get out of it. You want to distract yourself. And I think the metaverse is going to offer the ultimate escape from reality. Why live in the real world where everything is painful? When you can go into the metaverse, create anything you want, which means you create no pain or suffering there.

[00:07:43] I think this also brings up the question of to be a human, to have existence, do we need pain and suffer? I would largely say that most of the time people are trying to do good in the world, and often that comes around removing suffering. But we've also seen a ton of stories where people suffered a ton and because of their suffering, they became better people.

[00:08:05] So it's hard to ask. Should we have suffering in the world? In which case, when you go into the metaverse, should we design in suffering? I don't have good answers for that, but I think these are questions we're gonna have to ask. Let's continue with the essay. What is in question is the goal? A goal is an aim, and we should be careful at what we aim at.

[00:08:23] I wrote an essay called On Goals, and there's a podcast episode with that as well. I recommend going back to that episode and listening to what I wrote about. Goals are a specific aim. It's to what you're directing your attention and all of your resources towards in order to achieve. There's an ultimate goal, an ultimate aim that we're often going after.

[00:08:43] I described it more in that essay, but we start to key into it here. Let's go on. What is the ultimate aim? Human flourishing does increased time spent in the metaverse lead to that? I think part of the ultimate aim is the continuation of our species in a way that believes the most suffering possible.

[00:09:03] But I don't think it entirely takes it away. I think that's impossible creating some utopia. But if we say human flourishing, is the goal, the ultimate aim that we're moving towards, then are we actually flourishing as humans inside the metaverse? Again, I don't have a good answer. That's what we're exploring here.

[00:09:19] Let's continue with the essay. Does increased time spent in the Metaverse lead to that? Hard to tell. As someone who spent much of his youth playing video games, I can tell you it was a great benefit to my. But so was all the time. I did not spend playing as a kid. I played a ton of different video games.

[00:09:36] Some of my favorites were Halo Gears of War, Assassins Creed, Fallout, and I would say that the time that I spent playing these video games were a benefit because of all the things that I learned. Particularly two important things that you learned playing video games, it's problem solving, and then going after goals.

[00:09:54] That's pretty much what you're doing the entire time during these games, especially if you're playing like the single player stories. So in those scenarios, it was helping me a lot. It helped me develop as a person, but I wouldn't say it was better than the things that I learned in the real world.

[00:10:08] Obviously, everything that I learned in the real world has helped me thus far too. So as I start to explain this essay, I don't think the metaverse should replace the real world, and I'm not saying that's, that's, we're designing it for. What I am saying is there might be a danger to some people replacing the real world with the metaverse, even if that's not what the design intentions were for.

[00:10:29] But here I explain what I think the metaverse should be. The metaverse should be a supplement to real life, not a replacement. How might we design the Metaverse to enhance our reality, Widen our perspective rather than replacing it? I think the Metaverse could serve as something that helps give us a deeper understanding of the reality that we live in.

[00:10:49] And the next part of the essay, I start explaining a few different youth cases of how that could happen. So let's explore those. There is value in the Metaverse for its potential to run hundreds or thousands of simulations to solve problems for better ways of living. In the Metaverse, we can construct whatever environment we want and to put in whatever circumstances we want.

[00:11:10] I think that's an excellent sandbox to start running different simulations of how we might solve big challenges. So let's take global warming, for example. We could create an environment in the Metaverse and program it with different circum. Then the different ideas that we have for solving climate change, we could run as simulations with inside this environment and we can see how that plays out.

[00:11:33] Because it's the metaverse, we can actually put ourselves into those environments and see if we enjoy in living in the solution that we created. As we run these different simulations, we can see which solutions are gonna be better fit for the world and us as humans. Then we can take that solution and actually implement it in real life.

[00:11:53] I think that would be a fantastic way to use the Metaverse, because then we're not screwing up the real world trying to go through all these different simulations. Let's go to use case number two. It could also allow us to test living in different ways, say being transgender before applying it to real life.

[00:12:09] So here on a personal level, you could test out different ways of living before you changed your identity, specifically in ways that are hard to counteract. So when you change gender, you go through so many changes that it's hard to go back to the original gender. If you decide you wanna change your mind in the future, so before you go through an operation that's hard to turn back, you can spend time living in the metaverse and trying out that new identity.

[00:12:35] So I think those are two really good use cases of what the metaverse to be used for. Of course, being able to program these use cases, have one of running simulations to solve specific problems and another of understanding what it feels like to live in another identity. Means that we as humans have to understand those systems.

[00:12:55] We have to input the code to create those circumstances. And while we are pretty smart when it comes to complex systems, they're usually way too complex for us to understand. We don't understand all the implications of the different factors that are pushing and pulling on these complex systems. So when we go to code in things, we're not gonna get all the causal factors or the circumstances in order to run a hundred percent model on this simulation.

[00:13:20] And that's where we go with the next part of the Yes site. Although the models we create will be quite crude as humans have a limited understanding of complex systems. This is why I believe we will still long for the real world. The processes that make nature are too complex for humans to perceive, let alone coat.

[00:13:39] So earlier I gave the example of walking down the street, you know, seeing the dogs, seeing people walk by might be a really nice sunny day that you can feel on your face. You can hear birds chirping inside the trees. I think inside the Metaverse we'll be able to program similar environments that give you that similar feeling of walking down the street, enjoying life.

[00:14:00] However, I don't think we'll be able to replicate it a hundred percent. There's just too many things for us to understand. I don't think we're able to fully comprehend why that moment is so beautiful, why it gives us that. Now some could argue, well, we don't need to be a hundred percent. If you're 95%, that's good enough.

[00:14:18] And that may be true, but some of the pieces that you le leave out may leave people longing to go back to reality to get that extra 5%. If we took it to the analogy of picking a cake, maybe that person makes the entire cake but never puts sugar in, and that's what makes the cake so sweet. They've got 95% of the other ingredients to bake the cake, but they don't have that core experie.

[00:14:41] What I'm saying is that as humans, I don't think we always understand what that core experience of reality is, and so us with our limited understanding, trying to code another environment that replicates this world, it's not gonna come out the same. I'm also not saying that we should replicate this world.

[00:14:58] Of course, with the Metaverse, we can create anything that we want. So why not create different worlds, different environments? Here though, the Metaverses acting has a supplement, something that you can enjoy on the side, but then you're gonna come back to this world to reality, and you may bounce between those two.

[00:15:14] Let's continue with the essay. Of course, one could argue we are already living in a simulation and each of our lives are an experiment to test the best possible parameters for survival given a set of circumstances. So there's a few people that are putting forward simulation. Basically right now we're already living in a simulation, and that could be, in which case when I'm arguing that we need to still live in reality while we're technically not living in reality, in simulation theory.

[00:15:44] We're just building a simulation on top of simulation, on top of simulation. And if that's the case, if we're living in a simulation, I think about each one of us going through our lives with our different personalities and different ways of living that we have, and it feels like we're all just trying to test out these different parameters.

[00:16:01] So you give person A with this type of personality in person B with this type of personality, and you throw 'em both in the world and you see which one's gonna work out best given this set of per. Maybe that's all our world is and what evolution is. It's just a survival of figuring out which one's running the game the best.

[00:16:18] But if this is the case, well then I would like to know what's beyond this simulation? Where is the reality? If we go back to the matrix, I want to take the red pill and understand what's behind simulation. Let's finish the essay. I'm weary of the metaverse, but I think it could be a necessary step in the evolution of humanity.

[00:16:37] If our species is compared to that of a virus, using resources until depletion, then putting our consciousness into a virtual reality with limitless resources may be the only way to continue living and growing. Now understand, I'm not calling humans a virus. I'm comparing them to what a virus does. When a virus enters a host body, it uses up all its resources until the host eventually dies.

[00:17:02] Right now, humans have been doing that as well because we continue to evolve and grow as a species, and in order to grow, you need to use up resources. So we've been using up the different resources here on the planet if we are going to continue to evolve and grow as a species. Then we're either going to have to deplete the amount of resources that we use per person, or we're gonna have to go find more resources.

[00:17:26] We have some people working on making us an interplanetary species by building rockets and going and exploring different places and space. The flip side of that is making our resource utilization as efficient as possible. And one way that we may be able to accomplish that is uploading ourselves into the metaverse so that our actual bodies in the real world are not using very much resources.

[00:17:49] And then inside the metaverse we have unlimited resources because it's all just programmed and which case we can start to develop our ideas even more faster and larger because we have so many resources at our. So in the most dystopian view of this is that we're all just meat suits jacked in and building with inside the metaverse.

[00:18:08] What I think is really going to happen is, again, we're gonna have this balance of spending some time in the real world and spending some time in the metaverse. And largely, I think the metaverse will be a positive in this situation because we can develop ideas faster inside the metaverse because the amount of resources we have to use inside the metaverse.

[00:18:26] But let's continue down this dystopian view for just a. However, someone will have to stay in the real world to tend to energy production, computer servers, and meat suits that still house our consciousness. There may come a time when one must choose which reality to live in. So what I'm saying is even if all of us are jacked into the metaverse, there's still going to have to be people that tend to keeping the bodies alive and the n g production that's required in order to keep the metaverses.

[00:18:55] And us alive, there's still going to have to be people that live in this reality. And I think that should be a choice for people. And if it is a choice, then I'll explain where I would like to be within that choice. I, for one, believe there is much beauty in human existence that the act of holding another human of hearing birds in the morning as the sun rises of smelling the.

[00:19:16] It's too sweet to leave behind. I choose reality. So here I'm saying if that is the situation where, hey, where you have to choose between the two worlds, then I would rather choose the one that we're currently living in. In the reality, if we return to some of our ancient philosophers, Plato and Socrates.

[00:19:34] They were putting so much energy into figuring out what the truth about reality was, and the closer that they could get to that truth, the better they thought their lives would be and everyone else's life. I think that's an innate drive for humans to do, is to seek out that truth and go deeper and deeper into reality.

[00:19:54] I'm not saying in this essay that we shouldn't embrace the metaverses. In fact, I think we should. But what I am saying is don't forget the world that you're already living in. Don't forget about what's already great about this reality, even the pain or suffering that you may be experiencing in this reality, it helps uncover more truth about the world.

[00:20:15] And if you go through that pain, if you go through that suffering, you'll grow as a person on the other side, and you'll have a better understanding about this world. But if you distract yourself from it, then you never gain that understanding. You never get to see the true beauty of this world. In which case, yes, the metaverse is gonna look like a great alternative, but I don't think it's gonna be as fulfilling.

[00:20:37] But that'll be a choice that you have to decide for yourself. As always, thanks for listening.