As I wrote yesterday’s post about walls, I realized that there are some complicated questions here, centering on the nature of freedom.
Suppose you could wander freely throughout the world, with no restrictions on you at all, but you were completely alone, with nobody else there. You would be totally free. But what would that freedom be worth?
In the other extreme, suppose you spent your entire life in a room. Your interactions with other people would be virtual, pure exchanges of information. You could have a great variety of friends, unlimited social connections, unbounded intellectual stimulation. But all from within that room.
Which would you choose?
In some ways those are extreme opposites but in other ways they are very similar. Neither provides in-person human contact. Unless the VR simulation in the room was Matrix quality (i.e. you couldn’t tell that the other people weren’t really there) both seem like unfortunate ways to live.