Virtual Homo Sapiens—A New Human Species
As tangible objects we inhabit physical space but as sentient beings, we conduct our everyday lives in virtual space.?
In fact, in the largest social experiment ever conducted by humanity, five billion of us have at least one foot across the threshold of virtual space. A sizable chunk of the world’s population is rapidly becoming virtual homo sapiens.?Virtual homo sapiens are semiconscious automatons programmed to seek amusement, a new species of humanity as maladapted to life in physical space as they are maladapted to a virtual one.
The resulting struggle has made many of these virtual homo sapiens experience anxiety, depression, or mental illness. Some become suicidal.
How did this happen? How does it manifest itself? And how should we deal with the challenge?
Humankind and its institutions have always sought to control human behavior. The controllers of virtual space use mild forms of psychological addiction to program human behavior to earn profits and gain support for their institutions and causes.?
The controllers study the behaviors, emotions, and interests of their residents. Once they understand the types of experiences individuals enjoy and are vitally interested in, they turn loose recommendation engines to continually present opportunities to provide access to those experiences.?Accessing those pleasurable experiences triggers the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the user’s brain.?Users enjoy those releases and keep coming back for more.?In the process, they become psychologically addicted.
The quest for dopamine releases drives gambling addiction. The gambling casinos in Las Vegas have mastered the art of turning visitors into automatons that pull the lever on slot machines for hours in a quest to earn large payouts.??
The controllers of virtual space leverage dopamine releases in the same way to turn residents in virtual space into automatons that cannot put down their smart devices and spend endless hours perusing social networks and watching YouTube videos. In the process, they create automatons programmed to spend a vast percentage of their waking hours entertaining themselves.?Entertainment replaces purposeful goal-seeking activity.
These automatons are also semiconscious.?Only three of their senses, touch, sight, and sound, work in virtual space.?Those working senses are filtered by the spaces’ intelligent devices and are limited by their bandwidth or can be enhanced to make them more vivid.
Unfortunately for virtual homo sapiens, their bodies, most of their brains, and a substantial portion of their minds are firmly anchored in physical space. This anchorage forces virtual homo sapiens to interact with physical space, an environment to which they are severely maladapted.?
Physical space highly values individuals who engage in purposeful activities that benefit communities and families to which they belong. This provides individuals with self-esteem, one of the key components of good mental health.
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Since virtual homo sapiens engage only in passive activities, many lack the self-esteem that might derive from purposeful engagement. Ill-equipped to rise to the challenges of physical space, virtual homo sapiens experience social isolation, and a lack of meaning and purpose in life. Starved for meaningful relationships, their search for self-esteem in the virtual sphere leads many to TikTok and Instagram – and the endless and demeaning comparison game. Anxiety and depression ensue, especially among teenage girls.
Like their physical counterparts, virtual homo sapiens seek meaningful personal relationships. Yes, they do this deprived of the full engagement of their senses: the power of eye contact, the feel of a hand clasp, the taste of a kiss.?
HOW TO USE VIRTUAL SPACE
We have no choice.?We must engage with virtual space.?It is one of humankind’s greatest inventions. We will greatly benefit if we use it as a tool and suffer if we employ it as an environment.?
We can use virtual space primarily as a tool that makes our lives more efficient in physical space. We can use it as a tool for arranging get-togethers in physical space and sharing memories and following up on actions we agreed to take.
Homo sapiens evolved over 750,000 years and became the world’s dominant species.?They lived in a physical environment that had no purpose.?Homo sapiens invented tools to shape the environment to serve their needs.
Virtual homo sapiens exist in an environment designed to turn them into tools to serve the environment.????
Virtual homo sapiens have an important decision to make.?Do they want to be tools or tool makers??If they want to be tool makers, they will have to spend more time engaged in purposeful activity and less time entertaining themselves.?
The decline of this useless species would be bad for the cell phone industry but good for humanity.
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