You Can’t Upload Your “Self” Into Virtual Reality
Metzinger made waves by publishing an article in Frontiers in Robotics and AI that argued that virtual reality technology—the ability to create illusions of embodiment—will “eventually change not only our general image of humanity, but also our understanding of deeply entrenched notions, such as ‘conscious experience,’ ‘selfhood,’ ‘authenticity,’ or ‘realness.’”
Now, of course, this offers itself for mortality denial; there is a religion already in California. It’s all these uploading freaks—the Singularity University, the techies. It promises immortality, but it doesn’t have all the old-fashioned stuff with God. You find these people who say will we upload our self-models into virtual reality in 30 years. They get big investors by saying this.
The problem—the technical problem—is that a large part of the human self-model is grounded in the body, in gut feelings, in inner organ perceptions, in the vestibular sense, and therefore you cannot really copy the human self-model out of the biological body unless you would at some point really cut it off, so to speak. And then you would maybe have a sense of self jumping into an avatar, but you would not have all that low-level embodiment, the gut feelings, the emotional self-model, the sense of weight and heaviness—all that would be gone.
Nevertheless, I think we’re going to see some dramatic changes in human self-awareness through these new technologies in the coming decades—no doubt about this. We may generate wildly different forms of self-experience.
One key word is “embodiment.” The bodies we have now and the way our conscious self-model is grounded in these bodies has been optimized for millions and millions of years, with our biological ancestors,.... This dense form of embodiment in virtual reality may be far away.
There is another possibility: We might have another form of embodiment, a technological form. Maybe it is something without gut feelings; maybe it is something without the sense of weight, for instance. Maybe we will have different artificial self-models that we learn to control, and with this process have different forms of self-experience as well. Why should we just replicate what biology has created? Maybe we want to create something more interesting or more cool?
See the full article here: http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/you-cant-upload-your-self-into-virtual-reality