Computers are now largely invisible. They are embedded everywhere – in walls, tables, chairs, desks, clothing, jewellery, and bodies. People routinely use three-dimensional displays built into their glasses.… These ‘direct eye’ displays create highly realistic, virtual visual environments overlaying the ‘real’ environment.
Ray Kurzweil
In this anticipation of daily life in 2019, virtual worlds will become ubiquitous. By bracketing ‘reality’, Kurzweil – one of the pioneers of computer science – points to a possibility that has long intrigued metaphysicians: all reality is virtual. The world disclosed in ordinary perception is a makeshift of habit and convention. Virtual worlds disrupt this consensual hallucination, but in doing so they leave us without a test for a reality that is independent of ourselves.
The disorienting effects of virtual reality have been explored by a number of writers and filmmakers but the first anticipation of its potential rewards and risks occurs in Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae, written in 1964. Lem envisages a ‘phantomatic generator’, which enables users to enter into simulated worlds:
What can the subject experience in the link-up to the phantomatic generator? Everything. He can scale mountain cliffs or walk without a space suit or oxygen mask on the surface of the moon; in clanking armour he can lead a faithful posse to a conquest of medieval fortifications; he can explore the North Pole. He can be adulated by crowds as a winner of the Marathon, accept the Nobel Prize from the hands of the Swedish king as the greatest poet of all times, indulge in the requited love of Madame Pompadour, duel with Jason, revenge Othello, or fall under the daggers of Mafia hitmen … he can die, be resurrected, and then do it again, many, many times over.
Lem’s phantomat is the endpoint in a new technology of virtual reality; but humans have always sought relief from their lives. Many of their oldest institutions are tributes to the need for make-believe. As Lem writes:
Phantomatics appears to be a sort of pinnacle towards which sundry forms and technologies of entertainment converge. There are already houses of illusion, ghost houses, funhouses – Disneyland is in fact one big primitive pseudophantomat. Apart from these variations, permitted by law, there are illicit ones (this is the situation in Jean Genet’s Balcony, where the site of pseudophantomatization is a brothel). Phantomatics has a certain potential to become an art.… This could therefore lead it to split into artistically valuable product and mediocre kitsch, as with movies or various types of art. The menace of phantomatics is, however, incomparably greater than that represented by debased cinema.… For, due to its specificity, phantomatics offers the kind of experience which, in its intimacy, is equalled only in a dream.
Lem could have traced his phantomat farther back. Virtual reality is a technological simulation of techniques of lucid dreaming practised by shamans for millennia. Using fasting, music, dance and psychotropic plants, the shaman leaves the everyday world to enter another, returning to find ordinary reality transformed. Like virtual reality technology, shamanistic techniques disrupt the consensual hallucination of everyday life. But with this crucial difference: the shamans know that neither the ordinary world nor the alternate worlds they explore in trance are of their own making.
The phantomat’s power comes from the immaculate realism of its illusions. Inside it, we can have only the experiences we want to have. We can escape not only our personal limitations but also those that go with being human. We can swim and climb despite the fact that we lack the ability to do so; we can fly like a bird and live in different epochs in the same lifetime. We seem to escape the limits of our everyday world. Our lives are knotted through with irretrievable acts and unalterable events; but in the phantomat this one and only life of ours is only one of many we can live, an iteration in an unending series in which we can be born, die and be reborn again and again.
What is lost in the phantomat is not the one undying reality that metaphysicians seek in vain. It is the hold on our lives we gain when we know we are mortal. We may believe – as Christians say they do – that this life is a prelude to life everlasting; we may agree with Epicurus that after death we are nothing, so death is nothing to us; or we may affirm with Chuang-Tzu that dying is only waking from a dream, perhaps to another. Whatever we believe, death marks the limit of the only life we know. The phantomat enables us to live, die and be born again at will. By glazing over the fact of mortality, it leaves us with no check on our wishes. Our experiences are confections of our desires, and no longer connect us with anything else: ‘Phantomatics means the creation of a situation in which there are no exits from the created fiction to the real world.’
Lem’s prescience regarding virtual reality technology is extraordinary; but the risk of all-encompassing unreality to which he points is itself unreal. The idea that we may be on the way to contriving a fiction from which there is no exit endows technology with a power it can never possess. The phantomat is vastly superior to any virtual reality machine we have yet devised. Even so, it can no more enable us to escape fate and chance than the cryogenic vats that promise everlasting life to frozen corpses.
No technology can create a world that matches human desires. Lucid dreaming is a dangerous sport; those who practise it must expect to encounter things they could not have imagined. Whether they allow the shaman to delve into the unconscious or enable him to perceive realities unknown to the rest of us, the worlds he explores are no mere fabrications. They are journeys into unknown lands, stranger than those we know through ordinary perception, but like them in their hidden limits and sudden surprises.
Lem envisaged his phantomat as a generator of perfect illusions, but any actual machine will be prone to accident and decay. Sooner or later, errors will creep into the program its designers have written for it, and the virtual worlds it conjures up will come to resemble the actual world it was meant to transcend. At that point, we will find ourselves once again in a world we have not made. We have dreamt of machines that can deliver us from ourselves; but the dream worlds they make for us contain rifts and gaps that return us to mortal life.