The metaverse: a glimpse of the future, or just another brain in a bucket?

Imagine receiving an invite to some virtual activities on the metaverse: a walk around the Acropolis; a parachute jump; or joining the maiden voyage of the Titanic, in the class of your choice, of course. The invitation explains that the metaverse provides a faithful replica of reality: the visual, motor and acoustic technology is formidably immersive, the avatars, which have legs, look and sound like real people. The full-body suit you wear allows you to exercise not only your sight and hearing, but also your sense of smell, touch and even taste. For example, you feel the wind in your face, especially intense in the case of the skydive, and bracing while your promenade on the deck of the ocean liner.

Which would you choose? You could jump out of a plane and enjoy the thrill of the descent risk-free; if you opted for the Atlantic crossing, you could even reverse the course of history were you to play the role of the captain or the ship's owner.

The metaverse: a chance to live myriad lives

In short, the metaverse offers the chance to live any number of lives, allowing you to get to know people from faraway places you would never have had the opportunity to meet. Similarly, you could visit previously inaccessible corners of the world.?

As the metaverse takes shape, we’re beginning to see something of its potential impact on our lives. For example, in the field of education and learning, we could apply the flight simulators techniques that have long been used to train pilots.

And as well as developing practical or technical proficiencies, the metaverse could also be the place where we work on our interpersonal skills.??Counterintuitive though it may seem, given that the digital environment has long been seen as a hideaway from the terminally shy, the metaverse is the ideal place to develop our ability to communicate, socialize, understand how to leverage a network, work in a team, or deepen bonds with others, at no risk to our self-esteem. Indeed, we can achieve these objectives if the skills we develop in the metaverse are interwoven with practices in the physical environment. As we know, skills are the result of habits, the repetition of actions that shape behavior.

The second area where the metaverse offers huge potential is diversity and inclusion: putting ourselves in the shoes of others who feel and think differently, who may have an alternative conception of the good life. Imagine that in a role-playing exercise in a professional setting you are assigned the part of somebody from a minority, where possibly the rest of the participants share the views, and prejudices, of the majority. In this situation, you would be asked to fully embrace your role, to try to play it to the best of your ability. As a result you might begin to understand the importance of respect for different life choices and worldviews, celebrate diversity and innovation, and even support inclusion initiatives in the social environment. The results would be similar to those of other role-playing exercises that are implemented in many educational institutions.?

That said, there has been opposition to these types of exercises being carried out by students in primary or secondary education, citing the risk of encouraging certain behaviors. I disagree:??they offer the commendable opportunity to develop tolerance, an understanding of a complex world, along with a cosmopolitan spirit and recognition of the importance of innovation: in short, the ability to understand our fellow human beings and increase our personal leadership capacities.??

The metaverse could enrich our lives by expanding our opportunities to experience new things far beyond what we could within the finite coordinates of space and time, allowing us to live different lives, alternative existences, thus broadening our personal freedom. Moreover, as we have seen, there are no physical risks, and we can even control the extent to which we engage with it mentally. In short, seen in this way, the metaverse, at least conceptually, is intrinsically good.?

The downsides to a life in the metaverse?

After trying out different experiences in the metaverse such as a trip on the Titanic or parachuting out of an airplane, along with attending live seminars led by leading figures from the world of business education, you are given the opportunity to live in the metaverse for the rest of your life. This includes the possibility of enjoying a virtually immeasurable number of experiences, since the metaverse is being fed daily with new applications and experiences, while new people are signing up all the time. Imagine you are??offered the chance to live in the city of your choice, work for the company of your choice, live in the apartment of your choice. And of course, you can spend your weekends - and vacations - in your favorite destinations; what’s more, you can take your friends and family with you, assuming they wanted to join you in the metaverse.

Would you accept?

You can dismiss the proposal as currently beyond hypothetical, and while AI still has some way to go to make such a life possible, if we accept that everything imaginable can be realized—after all, Hegel argued that "the real is the rational and the rational the real"—I would argue that we can seriously consider it, at least in the context of a conversation about the kind of life we would like to live, and therefore with our idea of happiness and personal fulfillment.

In favor of accepting this radical proposal, one could point to the increased freedoms outlined above, but let’s now consider the arguments against it.

In the first place, the proposal would be palatable if the metaverse we’re going to live in is at least equal to or better than the real world. After all, we could end up with metaverse that’s a human jungle. We need only look at some social networks to see what could go wrong. This danger has led me to propose in another article the need to establish principles or codes in the virtual environment, which by nature is extralegal and stateless.

Why should we believe that the virtual world in whichwe will live would be a fairer and more equitable place than the real one. In his book?The Metaverse, Matthew Ball argues that the sector could end up being controlled by an oligopoly, governed by a few companies that would turn it into a "corporate internet". At the moment, the two companies that dominate this sector are Microsoft, which has won a $22 billion contract with the US Army to provide 120,000 HoloLens - the immersive glasses that provide sensory access - and Meta, formerly Facebook, which acquired the VR company Oculus and is investing more than $10 billion annually.?

An oligopoly might make it easier to monitor the metaverse, as well as providing guarantees; but it could also limit its development and innovation, as well as promoting asymmetry, to the detriment of users.???

But I believe that control by a few companies, far from enriching the metaverse, would likely harm it. The tendency towards collusion would impose standardization and conservatism, possibly curtailing new experiences. Something similar to what the South Korean philosopher Byul-Chung Han explains when he compares beauty in the real and digital environments would happen: "Natural beautiful contrasts with the digital beautiful. In the digital beautiful, the negativity of the different has been completely eliminated. That is why it is totally polished and smooth. It must not contain any tear. Its sign is complacency without negativity: the 'I like it'. The digital beautiful constitutes a polished and smooth space of sameness, a space that tolerates no strangeness, no otherness. Its mode of appearance is the pure inside, without any exteriority. Even to nature it turns it into a window of itself."?

Another potential problem with the metaverse is that it will be conceived and developed by others, meaning it may not be fully inclusive and therefore limiting in terms of personal freedom or choices, at least more so than the real world is. The counterargument to that is that in real life we are often unable to broaden our experience because we lack the initiative, knowledge or skills to do so. This is perhaps analogous to how cinema allows us to notice and discover circumstances and stories that we would not have anticipated on our own.

The nature of experiences in the Metaverse

The metaverse brings to mind Gilbert Hartman’s analogy of a brain submerged in a bucket protected by an amniotic fluid. It is connected by electrodes to a computer that transmits a series of stimuli and information. For example, during the day the brain receives images and other sensory information pertaining to a regular working day, followed by some exercise, a few drinks with friends, and finally some time with the family at home, before enjoying a good night's rest. The brain does not know that all the data and stimuli it receives are artificial, because the perceptions and vivid impressions it experiences make them real, even though it might be capable of asking itself whether everything it "lives" is real or invented. Similarly, we would never know we were living in the metaverse unless the computer we were connected to transferred images of us strapped to wires, or somebody found their way into our “world”.?

If we were to experience the same "sensations" of the brain in a bucket, we might not miss our alternative life. We would not realize that our brain is not biologically connected to the body, but to a computer. This deprivation of the relationship with the real world, the absence of a causal relationship with the external, according to philosopher Hilary Putnam's account, is what makes the experiences of the brain in a bucket different from those of a real subject.

It would be something else to make an early decision to forgo that biological connection, and then to be shown pictures of the brain in the bucket and the electrodes connected to a computer. Surely this unexpected warning of our alienation would be too much to bear.??

Perhaps the strongest argument against a life inhabited exclusively in the metaverse is the memory of sensations and sensory memories experienced in the physical environment. Our corporeal, animal nature—we are rational animals—requires the presential, the strength of material and somatic experiences. The hybrid work environment many of us experienced during the pandemic will have reinforced this feeling.

The advantage of the metaverse is that we don’t have to abandon the physical world forever to take part in it. Perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds, the opportunity to live not just two lives, but many more. But I’m not convinced: a visit to the Acropolis on a warm summer afternoon, contemplating the play of light and shade on the marble around us, cooled by a Mediterranean breeze, is beyond compare with any virtual world.?

------------------------

You may visit my INSTAGRAM account here