Vampires and Reality.
More questions for the world.
Do you know the movie “Buffy the Vampire Slayer?” It’s a horror comedy about vampires. It’s a PG 13 movie.
When I was 6 or 7, I slept over at a friends house for the first time, or second time, and we watched it. I was freaking out. I was in a new house, with new ideas about flying vampires who suck out your blood, and I wigged out, and called home and had my parents pick me up.
When the dust had settled, my Dad said “You know none of that stuff is real.”
I’m 33 now, and I still don’t like horror movies, seems pretty real to me.
My Dad’s intent was more for me to understand that the actors, the make up, the vampires that were floating, none of those things were in this reality. Everything was in my head. It was someones idea being brought to life by real life people.
I intellectually understood that the movie was scripted and the humans were actors, but there was another part of my brain that was like “Vampires are EVERYWHERE.” And seeing as I’m the one who has to live inside my brain, it feels as though to me, the vampires ARE real, and to you the vampires may not be.
The digital world presents a real conundrum of “What is real.”
Because I have spent a significant amount of time in VR, I have started to have memories in VR. Memories of meeting people, conversations, memories of destroying some AI robots that were sent here to enslave man kind.
The scenes of the content have been designed by people, but now that I can interact with the scene, does that make it more real? My brain has this dual belief while playing games, that I am simultaneously in this reality in California and also destroying AI robots. What happens when the technology can trick my brain completely?
When I meet real people, but they aren’t in geographic region I am in, does that still count as meeting them?
What constitutes the separation between what is real and what is not when it comes to living in the digital world?
Could someone live an entire normal and happy life, only in VR?