The Day You Discard Your Body Chapter 11 – The proliferation of game worlds

by Marshall Brain

Think about any vacation that you take today. You leave work for a week either alone, with friends or with your family. For your vacation you typically travel to a different place to experience that place first hand. You might be taking your first trip to Paris or Rome. Or you might spend a week at Disney World. Perhaps you like history, so you go to Williamsburg, Old Salem or a historic Gold Rush town. If you like natural wonders you can go to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone or Sequoia national park. If you are an adventurer you might climb mount McKinley, scuba dive in the Caribbean, skydive, hang glide or ski the Rockies. If you like gambling, you travel to Las Vegas or Atlantic City.

 photo by Brian Kelly

You get the idea. When you take a vacation, you often try to go somewhere new to see and experience something different.

Now imagine that you can visit Paris, Rome, Disney World, Las Vegas, Yosemite or the Great Barrier Reef without ever leaving your home. Your tool is Vertebrane and the simulation you experience is entirely real as far as your brain is concerned. Imagine having these experiences together with your family and friends. Imagine doing it with thousands of other real people, or thousands of other artificial people, or completely alone.

One thing that will distinguish these artificial worlds from the real world is that you will be able to visit different times as well as different places, and you will also be able to take on different personas. For example, imagine that you want to have the experience of being Julius Caesar. You will visit a simulation of Rome as it was 2,000 years ago. The city will be completely realistic. In addition, the city will be populated with thousands of characters playing the roles of government officials, servants, citizens and so on. In other words, you will be Julius Caesar in this artificial world. You will face the same types of challenges that Julius Caesar would have faced. The artificial game world and all of its characters will respond to your actions and decrees, for better or for worse. You might continuously live in the simulation for days or weeks. If you do not like the way things are heading, you will be able to reset the simulation and start over.

 photo by Daniela Spyropoulou

Imagine how much freedom this type of ultra-real simulation will give you. If you want to experience Pompeii as it existed before the volcano, you will be able to visit an exact replica of the city complete with thousands of inhabitants living their lives. If you want to fight on a battlefield in World War II, the Revolutionary war or the Civil war, you will be able to do that. If you want to live the life of Attila the Hun, George Washington, Butch Cassidy, John F. Kennedy, Neil Armstrong, Donald Trump, Superman or Luke Skywalker, you will be able to do that. If you want to be a witness to important moments in history, or even participate in them, you will be able to do that. For example, you will be able to attend the signing of the Declaration of Independence. You will be able to see the first airplane fly at Kitty Hawk. If you want to ride on the back of a brachiosaurus in late Jurassic period, you will be able to do that. Or simply sit on a quiet beach and watch the waves. Any place and any time is possible.

It is in these simulated worlds that the limitations of your physical body will completely disappear. You will be able to fly through the air. You will be able to take on the persona of any super hero. You will be able to have unlimited wealth. You will be able to die repeatedly and rise from the ashes. You will be able to eat gigantic meals that feel entirely real to your “mouth” and your “stomach”, but because they are simulated you will never get fat. You will be as beautiful and as athletic as you have ever wanted to be.

If you want to visit with friends, you will do so in a completely real yet artificial setting of your choice. You will be able to see, touch and hear your friends as though it is reality. A group of friends can be physically scattered across the planet, separated by thousands of miles, yet the experience in these artificial environments will feel intimate and seamless. To your brain the experience will be completely real, because the experience is happening to your brain just as it would if you inhabited your physical body.

You can see where we are heading. Given that everything about these artificial experiences will be completely real to your brain, and given that your virtual body will be so much better than your biolgical body, and given that your virtual body will be able to have such a wide variety of experiences, the question is obvious — what reason will you ever have to return to your biological body?

That question will become even more relevant when we start to consider the power of virtual porn.

<<< Go to Chapter 10     |     Intro     |     Go to Chapter 12 >>>

Discard Your Body Table of Contents

The Official Site for Marshall Brain