L.M. Sacasas (responding to an article about David Chalmers news book on the future of VR technology):
. . . I want to read Chalmers against the grain, which is to say as the unwitting emissary of a fantastical cautionary tale, which invites us not to fear some uncertain future but to reflect more critically on existing trends and patterns.
For example, I wonder for how many of us the experience of the world is already so attenuated or impoverished that we might be tempted to believe that a virtual simulation could prove richer and more enticing? And how many of us already live as if this were in fact the case? How much of my time do I already devote to digitally mediated images and experiences? How often am I lured away from the world before my eyes by the one present through the screen?
The claim that, even now, virtual realities can outstrip my experience of the world is increasingly plausible when I have lost the capacity to wonder at and delight in the gratuity and beauty of the world. And there may be many reasons why such capacities may have diminished, ranging from the ever-more complete enclosure of our experience within a frame of human artifice to the loss of the arts of perception and the power of social structures that eliminate the gift of leisure in principle and in practice for so many. In other words, I mean for us to consider how we might have already begun to sever our relation to our common world long before the virtual worlds Chalmers envisioned are, if ever, realized.