The (sort of) protean brain

Mark Bolas gave a brilliant and very provocative opening keynote today at the UIST 2014 conference. He posited that we may all end up in virtual reality in the long run, because, as the technology advances, VR will eventually subsume the capabilities of literal reality, and will eventually allow us to move far beyond it.

Obviously this is a high controversial statement. People who have spent their entire lives in relatively unmediated physical reality might be understandably unnerved by the prospect of such a radical shift in the perceptual paradigm. I’m pretty sure he was saying it precisely to be provocative — to get people talking and debating about the many issues surrounding such a possible future.

Mark is certainly qualified to fling down that particular gauntlet. Over the last several decades he has done far more than anyone else to advance the field of virtual reality, and he doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Yet even if we posit, for the sake of argument, that his prediction is correct, there remains an interesting question: As we start to shift the apparent reality around us, freed from the constraints of the real world, what other constraints will still remain, imposed by our own brains?

There are many sorts of things that seem baked in to our otherwise highly protean human brain. For example, it is well established now that our brains have built in rules that constrain the possible grammars of natural languages.

It is also well known that human babies, quite soon after birth, will seek out two dots that are side by side, but will ignore two dots one above the other. This suggests an innate instinct to seek out a mother’s eyes.

How many other such constraints are built into our human brains? These constraints, whatever they may be, will create hard limits around the reality we may collectively experience in any shared future — even one that reality is entirely virtual.

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