NationStates Jolt Archive

Ok, what if...

A team of scientists developed a machine which would essentially keep your body alive and in fine health while it allowed you to live out your favorite fantasies as reality in your own mind.

Everything was real about it, all of your senses worked; the food tasted the same, sex felt the same, or better, you could even have special powers, after all, this is your fantasy and your mind. You could have perfect relationships with friends and family, date and marry the man or woman of your dreams, have the career you always wanted, or dream up a huge inheritance for yourself and never have to work at all. You could be loved by all who met you, or feared by everyone on the planet. You could live an Indiana Jones type of lifestyle, or spend your days on your own private tropical island. Everything would be painstakingly realistic down to the last grain of sand.

The rub is, this is a one way trip. Once you hook yourself up to this machine, it bores it's way into your brain, the only way it can attache it's self to the sensory receptors in your brain to create the true sensation of reality. To be unplugged is to suffer enormous brain damage and most likely, death. As you lie hooked up to this machine for the rest of your life, the world will of course, carry on around you. Family and friends will pass milestones in their lives, and pass away, all without you there. You will never again have any knowledge of real world events or even of the true condition and appearance of your own body, but in your own mind, you will live a lifetime of unrivaled perfection.

So which one would you chose? The cumbersome real world with all of it's faults and potential lifecrushing failures, or a perfect world, that was real only to you within your own mind?

<snip>
I'd stay in the real world. Just because all the time I was in the unreal-reality I'd be entirely aware that none of it was true and all of it was meaningless.

This isn't really hypothetical; there is already a prototype for what you're describing out on the market. It's called Everquest...

So which one would you chose? The cumbersome real world with all of it's faults and potential lifecrushing failures, or a perfect world, that was real only to you within your own mind?

The real one. Aside from the obvious issues of never seeing anyone real again, I'd probably end up daydreaming about a horrible death or something, causing it to happen to me in the fantasy world.


Anyway, they're pretty shitty scientists if they can't invent an unpluggable version. I think I'd rather wait 18 months or so until some bright spark invents Fantasy Brain Machine version 2.0 (with USB port).

The real one. Aside from the obvious issues of never seeing anyone real again, I'd probably end up daydreaming about a horrible death or something, causing it to happen to me in the fantasy world.
You mean a little like Vanilla Sky, that one with Tom Cruise.

You mean a little like Vanilla Sky, that one with Tom Cruise.

I don't know, I've never seen it.

I'd stay in the here and now.

Reminds me of this little choise a lot!!!

http://www.arrod.co.uk/images/blue-pill.jpghttp://www.arrod.co.uk/images/red-pill.jpg

I'd totally go for the fantasy world.

Reminds me of this little choise a lot!!!

http://www.arrod.co.uk/images/blue-pill.jpghttp://www.arrod.co.uk/images/red-pill.jpg

Pill or suppository?

Depends:

Do I get to live forever, or signifigantly longer? Then I will go in it.

If I live the same general amount, then I pick the real world.

Pill or suppository?
It's a reference to the movie "The Matrix". One pill to remove oneself from the machine-controlled virtual reality, the other to remain inside it.

...

The real one. Aside from the obvious issues of never seeing anyone real again, I'd probably end up daydreaming about a horrible death or something, causing it to happen to me in the fantasy world.

Anyway, they're pretty shitty scientists if they can't invent an unpluggable version. I think I'd rather wait 18 months or so until some bright spark invents Fantasy Brain Machine version 2.0 (with USB port).Given the scenario as stated by "Great Beer and Food", I would remain in the real world, with real people to interact with (as frustrating as they are).

That said, I concur with the mathematical poultry; the technology needed to implement this could be easily adapted to making this technology a buffer between the mind and the real world. The subject could choose to live a fantasy or could suspend the fantasy to reestablish contact with reality. This I would be more likely to choose.

...except that I want Firewire, not USB 2.0.

--The Democratic States of Cogitation
"Think about it for a moment."

It's a reference to the movie "The Matrix". One pill to remove oneself from the machine-controlled virtual reality, the other to remain inside it.

Yeah, it was a slightly lame attempt at humour on my part.


...except that I want Firewire, not USB 2.0.

Or a wireless connection, possibly?

*looks up suppository*

PILL!!!

Fuck the real world. Hook me up now!!!!

*looks up suppository*

PILL!!!

Suit yourself.

*takes the red and blue suppositories*

*watches Chicken pi squirm, go :mad: first, then :eek: and silently smiles when Chicken pi heads off to the loo, trainspotting-style*

;)

This machine would keep my body alive and in fine health?

I'd hook up to it. When I'm 85.

I'd want a suicide option built into it however, just in case it crashes and I keep getting the same error message over and over again. Or it all palls. I suppose paranoid rich people would make theirs with self contained power sources. The cannibal gangs after the fall of civilisation might reguard these self contained dream machines as canned food.

The problem with the fantasy world was really well soliloquied in The Matrix. The Hugo Weaving character (forgot the agent's name) basically said that the first Matrix they created didn't work very well because nobody that was hooked to it bought a world that was so perfect, clean and happy.

There's also a bit of Rod Serling at work here, too. There was an episode where a 30s gangster gets shot and killed, Capone-style and winds up in an afterlife. He's in a casino hotel and he's a hit with the ladies and wins every bet he places, so he thinks it's Heaven. However, after a while, he realizes that it isn't that he "can't lose", it's that he can never lose. There's no sense of chance or risk if all you ever do is win. As he comes to this realization, he tells the man who guided him to the afterlife casino hotel that if this is Heaven, he wants to go to "the other place." To which this Jeeves-like curator replies: "Ah, but this is 'the other place'."

I know, I know, it isn't scary anymore, but as a kid, episodes like that spooked me good. And that's what I'd miss. The thrill of risk. The sense that an accomplishment is great at least in part because it had a chance to fail. Beating the odds, underdogs, and the like, are a part of life's satisfactions. If I'm giving that up, then no thanks. I'll stay in reality...









...and pick your mind-tripping pockets. :cool:

Pill or suppository?

I can't swallow that.

Good news! It's a suppository!

I can't swallow that.

Good news! It's a suppository!


Suppositories, I see? I bet you enjoy those very much.

;)

*runs*

Welcome to the matrix...

There are two people in this world I am devoted to, so unless they die before I don't plug me in. If they do then plug away!

Suppositories, I see? I bet you enjoy those very much.

;)

*runs*

Bah, Futurama quotes are wasted on the likes of you. :D

Bah, Futurama quotes are wasted on the likes of you. :D

Oh yeah......well...... *sticks out tongue*

Fry: Just don't point that smelloscope at Uranus *laughs*

Prof. Farnsworth: Oh, we changed the name of that planet centuries ago to avoid such juvenile humor.

Fry: What's it called now?

Prof. Farnsworth: Urectum!

Badly paraphrased, but still damn funny.

Futurama rules!