[Forbes] Legal Heroin/Is Virtual Reality our next hard drug?

If I opened a third floor window and fell out I’d call that an actual experience, with trauma and broken bones to prove it. Falling out of a virtual window would give me a thrill. Virtuality in the future will let me fall out of a window in actuality, but without the resulting pain, injury or death: a sort of transference of consciousness into an illusory or alternate reality.

The Talosians casting a whole world of illusion over the crippled Pike is illusion becoming reality by choice. You see, the Talosians know a thing or two about virtual reality.

A broken bone only proves it's real to the owner, therefore the broken bone can also be mere illusion.
Dreaming I fell out of a window and suffered trauma seems just as "real", until I wake up.

A broken bone is not an illusion in the physical universe - I may will myself to believe that intense pain is illusory, and that my broken bone is not broken at all. But that doesn't alter the fact that the bone is broken - or that I fell out of the damn window, which some mischievous devil put there to tempt me... to fall out of.

"Ever drifting down the stream
Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream?"

"GableRatchet" wrote:
A broken bone is not an illusion in the physical universe

You still have to go one more level. Certainly, the broken bone is not an illusion. The problem is, there seems to be not such physical universe.

This is essentially the back story to TekWars

The Rift will only be able to allow one to experience something similar to visual effects of drugs; this is highly dependent on the underlying software, not the Rift itself. While it may lead a "flow" mental state, I find it a hard comparison to real world drugs. It isn't the visual aspect of drugs that most people get hooked on, it's the mental cradling and "capture" of the soul so one feels painless. Someone hooked on heroin isn't going to be able to use the Rift as a substitute, for example.

I'm not that experienced with drugs, but even I can tell you there is no way the current generation of VR is going to be able to faithfully recreate marijuana, let alone heroin. Seeing trippy things and going into a light trance is cool, but it in no way is going to reproduce the complex mental and physiological effects of an actual drug. Now, once we get direct access to the brain, then things get interesting, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

"BluePinguin" wrote:
I actually think this can be a problem, movies like Surrogates for example, I think that might be what we're heading towards.

Let's think about the sex industry. There is a decrease in population in Japan, why is that? That is because people get their satisfaction elsewhere where you don't have to do all these social etiquettes before having sex but just buy toys, virtual girlfriends etc etc (Good 13m Vice Doc on that). This is what Oculus could provide with augmented reality and all this 3D porn etc.

Maybe I am heading towards the wrong subject, but overall VR is a way to escape reality. Like being addicted to any MMORPG i.e. I played that when I was younger because there I mattered, I felt good there, and that wasn't even a reality. With VR I think that problem might even grow bigger.

Well I sure don't hope so, but while I don't think you can call this a drug such as you can call any video game a drug, addiction might become a huge issue here.

agree differently, addiction is bad when its harmful, obsession is bad because most people think focusing so much on just 1 thing in life is bad. I don't think its bad, i think its the bad start to a natural split, imagine 50-100 years from now when people can realistically live only in other realities. People that say "nah, fuck this". If we didn't enjoy that shit, we wouldn't use it. I personally wouldn't mind a surrogate like situation where I can give up on this and go to multi-realities at my leisure. Its what I'm hoping/praying to do in my lifetime. Sure, they'll be people that give up on this world and do that but not everyone.

Basically, there is nothing wrong with trying and succeeding in escaping a reality you disagree with.

This image comes to mind:

Yeah, I can see myself becoming pretty addicted for the first year, so long as I train myself away from the nausea buildup I experienced on the DK2