walking the plank
Last year (that’s 2018, holodeck readers of the future!) I had my first immersive VR experience. It was with some guys I didn't know very well as a social “bonding” event around a wedding we were all attending. They were cool guys. And these days I’m quite good at letting myself not be good at stuff, even in front of strangers. Both these facts were just as well because, as I quickly discovered, I am not good at VR.
Well, not the version of VR that involves donning a headset connected to cables in a super bland mall-based setting in NY state, and then loading a program called something like ‘Walk the Plank’ (this version, I think). It’s f-ing terrifying. Especially if, like me, you have very longterm and very deeply confirmed vertigo. I remember the first, and last, time I climbed the Eiffel Tower and, inconveniently for everyone, had to sit down halfway up, paralyzed, when I made the mistake of glancing down through some alarming gaps in the old wrought-iron staircase, which in the moment of crisis looked every bit of its 102 years of age…
I didn't go first with the Plank Experience. I watched as one of my new friends took the elevator up to the 50-millionth-floor-or-something, then casually, you know, stepped off the plank and plummeted to his not-death. It looked easy enough. He also tested out the secondary flying mode in the game, going full Iron Man and turbo boosting from tower to tower putting out fires (confusingly the turbo boosters were also, um, fire hoses). This also looked easy. Dear reader, it is not.
My turn came, and as I ascended in the elevator (or “lift” as we call it back home - I might have to link to that in every one of these blog posts) I marveled at how quickly the ugly suburban box we were in disappeared; how soon I forgot I was tethered on all sides and not actually standing petrified in a skyscraper, on a plank, out a window. That’s how “good” the experience was. My head swam in the familiar way as I peered horrified at the street below. My belly lurched. I froze. So totally that any thought of social embarrassment seemed itself ludicrous. Or maybe it was 25 years of Buddhist training. Whatever. The guys were very nice about it.
I couldn't even lift my foot in real life, never mind in the game. It felt so completely real. The experience, which in gaming (as in life) is everything, was enough to convince me that my very existence depended on me not, for once, overriding instinct and impulse with any rational faculty I might be said to possess. I couldn't get that headset off me fast enough.
My only previous major experience of VR-like contexts was quite a longstanding fascination, not to say flirtation, with Second Life. I’ve taught meditation there, I’ve flown as a hawk over mountains, I’ve piloted the starship Enterprise, I’ve ridden the Loch Ness monster – you name it, I’ve probably tried it. Yes, including sex. Sex in Second Life is a whole world of intriguing consideration in itself. Is that really someone who looks like a supermodel pleasuring themselves in the basement at their PC while their avatar is running around a beach wearing a ridiculous member? Is this unfeasibly attractive 7ft. tall brunette in the sewer, in a skybox, actually a trucker in Minnesota? Whatever turns you on it’s available: furries, slavers, strippers, French bondage castles, vampires, nudists, swingers, high rolling socialites, low-life werewolves. It doesn’t matter that, graphically, on any normal computer it’s all not that far north of 8-bit, in terms of average rendering: the mind supplies the rest quite adequately in any of those particular realities…
Presumably this kind of experience – only with less naughty bits, better graphics and server farms thrown at it, and enough in-world advertising to follow you from game to game and back into RL – is what Google have in mind for Stadia when it launches at scale in a post-Fortnite world. Now imagine it tied to untethered VR experiences and you have a depressingly capitalist vision of the future of mass distraction: sort of sub-Ready-Player-One, probably without the happy ending. What will we see then when we look down? Will we all jump?
And that brings me to the most liminal of subjects, and its many elusive questions asked always at the edge of sure human knowledge. Shorn of shame, social or sexual, when we stand on the precipice of experience, virtual or otherwise; or dive deep into experience by ourselves and with others, who on earth are we if experience is all we have to go on and that’s so easy to fake? And is it fake? What is ‘real’, exactly? Where is the crucial distinction to be made between virtual and “actual”? Does it really just come down to a sense of physical presence shared? Are we that social as animals? And how should we act through all of it? What do the worlds we’re collectively busy conjuring up tell us: about the world we already inhabit and are trying to reproduce or improve upon; about the world we might be leaving behind for our descendants?
Because these new immersive, sensory contexts are, in this sense, our current cave paintings, our digital glyphs. Assuming, for a moment, that VR survives and develops apace (hardly a given in the context of human warlike stupidity, tech fragility and the web’s shaky, still electrically-dependent foundations), then what we decide to daub upon the walls – of our own psyches, of our culture, of the future itself – will one day be decoded. Do we know what we mean to say, what or who we are trying to represent? What does any of this mean for ideas of identity, beyond simplistic notions of mere pretending or impersonation as a means of temporary mental escape and relief?
Ok, that’s enough questions to fuel a high school debate team for eternity. I think I might have visited that in SL too. Trying to answer them on their own terms in any definitive way seems a fool’s errand – just asking them and holding them in awareness, letting them soak into our minds, is hard enough. So let’s go the other way around and talk a little about poetry. And more specifically, Fernando Pessoa.
Pessoa, famously if you know the territory, wrote under very many names. Around 75 at the latest count. If you think JKR writing as Robert Galbraith is freaky, you should get a load of this guy. Probably not the original, but possibly the best at doing the whole kaleidoscopic literary identity thing. He’d have loved Instagram. He may have even, sort of, invented the notion of fluid avatars in the very ways they are used today by Twitter natives everywhere. Only he was way ahead of the game, and an excellent poet to boot:
Autopsychography
The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain
The pain he really feels,
And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.
And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.
Translated from Portuguese by Edouard Roditi
***
Oof! That circling clockwork train recalls dynamically the notion of samskaras in Indian and specifically Buddhist philosophy: the idea that, from the angle of experience, we are made up, practically, of habitual volitional impulses conditioned by past behavior, which then condition our future behavior. They – and so we – can be trained to support wellbeing, and even insight into the very nature of reality itself; but they tend to have a lot of cyclic momentum behind them that’s headed in the opposite direction. Their cycle usually involves seeing things to some extent awry, then experiencing things to some degree askew, and subsequently suffering in some way or another. We carry our samskaras with us almost like behavioral, tunnel-visioned genes. Our notions of things are conditioned by our dispositions; our behavior follows; our sense of identity comes into being, with a vague name and an itinerant address and a set of hazy experiences that often only confirm themselves as we wander deep into the country of us. Until sharp reality intervenes. And we are back at a precipice again. Back walking the plank.
What is it Rumi says?
“I don't like it here, I want to go back…
…just be quiet and sit down.
The reason is: you are drunk,
And this is the edge of the roof”
Pessoa may be more or less afraid than he lets on in his pain. Rumi is properly and righteously scared. They are both smart enough to know how provisional, even tenuous the connection is between their experiences and their sense of self.
And yet isn’t our ‘reality’ all metaphor anyway? Isn’t that what we do every day – pick our metaphors and go and live inside them? That’s surely the positive side of VR, electronic imagination and the re-rendering of experience in more or less real time: we make explicit what was hidden; we bring forth into the light what has always been going on in the shadows of “personal” consciousness. And that’s why the machine is such a good proxy for us, is so good at modeling in more than 3D what we have been doing every day as a species since our cortexes first went supernova on us and let us remake worlds in our own image and likeness.
Of course, like us the machine is not a static proposition – it’s a bunch of verbs trying awfully hard to be a noun. Everything does something, that’s its only reason to exist: a set of our intentions made manifest in metals, plastics and rare earth elements. We’re starting to realise that control of this was always an illusion. Perhaps because, from a certain point of view, we were always a bit of a rough hewn illusion, even as we trade on all the assumptions of permanence and mastery when we consider our past, present and future. And, regardless of intention, action unleashed at the scale of all of us is an area we are only just beginning to comprehend, blindly, like very young children in the early days of their existence. We’re still acting as if we’re frightened of the realization and of what it means for our own identity. And in the context of climate change and massive biodiversity loss, we’re likely putting ourselves, and a viable long-term pathway for current technology, in grave danger.
Awareness of the illusory nature of reality and of ourselves isn’t new. The potential starkness of the consequences of our inevitable, mindlessly foolish behavior in the world is. We’re on the edge of the roof, right enough. I was going to say: “all of us” then, but it’s probably the case that the brunt of those consequences (economically, socially, culturally) will be borne mostly by those least able to cope who have contributed least to the causes. That’s beyond just sad. But the deeper complacency it masks behind its brutal truths about the ways we choose to live is that those of us privileged enough to have the means to potentially avoid the worst of any initial upheavals probably assume we’ll still have vast fields of activity and progress available to us. Where tech advances march on despite everything, and space awaits us, and the problems we’re creating will all be solved by billionaires-to-be whose whizz-kid genius the markets will lift up and future history exalt. Maybe so. Maybe not. It doesn't seem like the sort of plan you’d want to bet on. There are better models for international, collective human development than pseudo-venture-capital risk-taking. Those kinds of risks mostly don’t work out and are never guaranteed.
As a “Buddhist tech person”, I see in this quandary some of the failure of old religion to offer a realistic model of alternatives for communal human behavior. Ways of relating that are more sustainably attractive than the short-termism of unfettered acquisitiveness and avarice; that raise us up from the table stakes level of being mere creatures of desire at the trough. Our genes have already allowed the altruistic possibilities to emerge. So why can’t we? It shouldn’t be that hard to have a world where same-day-delivery is not the height of our aspirations as a species, but somehow we’ve managed it.
Ok, that’s hyperbole to some degree. But really, anyone religiously or philosophically inclined, with half a mind for solutions to the mess we’re in, would have to acknowledge at this point that the stories and models of reality we’ve traded in for the past few thousand years are frankly not up to snuff. I include aspects of Buddhism in that, though I think, if it is courageous in embracing change, it has a better shot than most at sorting itself out to be useful as a set of approaches to the future. If only because it dispensed with God from the outset and, in its initial forms at least, presents itself squarely, even proudly, as a product of human culture, with all that this entails. The future, like the past, is human and definitively not divine.
One of the things I think Buddhism will have to come to better terms with is science itself, and the post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment perspectives that helped drive science and technology to the forefront of human culture and make them a memetic, newly evolutionary force for our species. And that will mean more than just a few studies of how the brain behaves when you’re meditating. Not only is the world we experience made up of mind, we now know that at the primal level we ourselves are programs running, hosts for genes which are closer to immortal than any of us could individually ever be. Richard Dawkins has always attempted to rationally and compassionately calm fears about what that means for free will, yet the question of how much of our behavior is driven or tolerated by the genetic imperative is always there for us as a sort of intellectual bogeyman in the background. It haunt us like uneasy, queasy Catholic memories of pre-deterministic Jansenism, with all the fundamentalist force that kind of persuasive, self-perpetuating, circular narrative can still muster in literal minds everywhere. It’s as if we sense all those VR cables again, tethering us to how it was always going to be. So we spin up a compelling hyper-reality as alternative: good dreams, bad dreams, whatever gets us through the day and night of it all. Anything to avoid the grey gloop, monochromatic intake dullness of a world unplugged from the Matrix.
What do we do? I don’t discount the patterns old religious forms represent to our still developing human minds and brains each time we raise our eyes to the sky and wonder what is happening, and what is to come. I just think we need to come up with some better models now things have moved on somewhat from the days when those patterns first coalesced. We can look back, we can compare, we have history.
When we stand on the plank and look over the edge into chaos, we might discern the pattern we are after. Or, to make it less human-centric, in the midst of chaos we might see where the patterns come back together and where they take on new forms quite independent of us. Whatever the causes or origins of this and of us – whatever quantum scarring may say about the nature of energy, matter and anything “spiritual” derived from a universe made up of these, perceived via any arising consciousness – the need to look seems freshly urgent. But then, I suppose it’s always seemed that way to every generation that’s walked the plank and leapt into either the sea or the sky, the depths or heights of shared experience, of being itself. It makes us dizzy, but it’s exhilarating. And that’s how we know we are alive.
