VR and Dream

My two favorite sci-fi movies (that do not have time-travel) are Inception and Matrix. If VR and brain cognitive research continue to expand, premises of these two movies are at least somewhat conceivable in some form in possibly next couple of decades. VR obviously keeps getting better every year and VR goggles by then will likely be unrecognizable compared to today's VR goggles (think iPhones now vs Gordon Gekko's brick phone in 80s). Dream is bit tricky but if we learn to "read" dreams real-time and machine-learn brainwave patterns into thoughts and pictures, we might be able to "short-circuit" certain paths in brain mechanically and influence path of dream to influence thoughts.

As a side note, why exclude time-travel from my short list? Time-travel just doesn't seem plausible to me in real life. Traditional time-travel stories, while thought provocating, always have a fundamental flaw even if we do invent time-travel (that's a big if), we also have to invent teleportation as we are hurling through space at incredibly high speed and with a ultra-complex trajectory. And even if we invent time machine to transport Marty McFly back to the future and teleport him approximately close to lill Valley Ca (quantum mechanics requires some uncertainty), it will be virtually impossible to get him to be moving at same speed as earth surface at that precise moment. Anyway I digress. The point is time-travel does not seem possible in reality and, ironically, is only possible in virtual reality or in a dream sequence, which brings to AI and dream where laws of physics can be soft.

But a more interesting question is how do we distinguish between reality and VR? Famous Chinese monk Master Zhuangzi said after dreaming about being a butterfly that he didn't know if he dreamt that he was butterfly or he is in fact a butterfly dreaming to be a man. Indeed if we cannot tell we are in a dream while dreaming, how can we tell reality from dream while we are awake? Makes me wonder if same can be said about advanced VR and reality.

#scifi #movies #Matrix #Inception #VR #dream #reality #brain #cognition #ML