Some thinkers even believe that, for better or worse, constant to virtual exposure reality could completely transform human consciousness. Critics fear that large numbers of people might come to prefer virtual worlds to the real one. Like the philosopher Plato, they would feel that the everyday world is an imperfect reflection of an ideal, but, in opposition to the prisoners in Plato's imaginary cave, they would see the ideal world as the one shown on the screen and the imperfect world as the one outside. Why let others see a flawed real body when online interactions can be delivered through a beautiful, sexy avatar? Why bother with a boring real life when, in an online world, a person can fly through the air, have adventures in distant or imaginary lands, and build a house or even a city in any form he or she wants?
The idea that people might choose to ignore the actual world and withdraw into virtual reality began to concern writers and thinkers long before VR technology actually developed. In Summa Technologiae , a book of essays about the future published in 1964, Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem described an imaginary machine that he called a Phantomat. According to an essay by author John Gray, Lem pictured the dangers of permanent immersion in the Phantomat's virtual reality this way:
The more realistic the virtual world the machine creates, the more imprisoned we are in our imaginations. As our embodied selves, we interact with a world we know only in part, and which operates independently of our desire. In contrast, the virtual worlds we encounter in the Phantomat are human constructions. Fabricated from our dreams, they are worlds in which nothing can be hurt or destroyed because nothing really exists. In short, they are worlds in which nothing really matters.
Richard DeGrandpre, like Lem, believes that once people become used to virtual worlds, the real world will no longer satisfy them, and they will withdraw from it. This will happen, he thinks, not only because virtual reality will be so appealing, but because social, environmental, and other problems will have made the real world just the opposite. "The ultimate reason we're apt to be taking flight from material reality," he writes, "is to escape the expanding unpleasantness of our inner and outer lives—a melange of boredom, restlessness, . . . anxiety, and depression."
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Some other people have also reported readjustment problems after using virtual reality or doing other intensive work with computers. After researching on the Internet for some time, for example, reporter Chip Brown wrote that he
woke one night from a peculiar dream, disturbed . . . by . . . the way the scenes had changed; they had not unfolded in a horizontal flow, the movie-like montage of a typical dream presentation, but had scrolled past, rolling up vertically from bottom to top. And my focus had shifted, too, as if the inner observer were no longer located behind my eyes, but had been projected 24 inches forward, out of my body, a displacement roughly equal to the distance between my desk chair and the computer monitor. The conclusion was inescapable. I had become a mouse. Not even a mouse. A mouse indicator. A curso
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