Artificial Reality

Little remains of the Zen picture of how our experience relates to "reality", and how that experience is an "illusion'.

Along with most of the human race I live in the city. I travel by car or jet plane to other cities. Wherever I stay, I am in an environment created by other human beings. My "world is created by other human beings. 

This even applies to my thoughts. When I "talk" to myself, I use language, which weaves concepts and relationships invented by others throughout millenia. When I think "in pictures", my ability to visualize depends, for the most part, on my experience in a man-made world. In my own case, this includes the creative patterns and habits of engineering, mathematics and systems analysis - experience totally alien to the vast majority of the human race.

In the "Eastern" traditions, "experience" is regarded as an illusion, where there is an underlying reality - vaguely sketched by a system ofs art and tradition called a "religion". Zen inherits its tradition of regarding experience as illusion, along with its vague methods of reaching "true" reality. 

In our totally manufactured world, this approach needs to be reconsidered. I would add that this is a matter of degree. The worlds of Jesus and Buddha were also "manufactured", but it was easier to imagine stepping out of these worlds into "reality".

We see that "experience" is a personal thing. The experience of others is unreachable, even though we are obsessed with the attempt to share it. We know that experience is an "interface" to reality, conditioned by evolution to present a useful experience while filtering out almost all there is to know about the real world. Together, these inform us of the nature of the illusion so often described by the ancient philosophies.

It is one thing to point out that experience doesn't reflect "reality". It is quite another to understand why and how our experience is limited. This understanding points to ways to overcome the limits of the "interface" to peer further into the "real" world. But still we peer through human instruments, made for the purpose, to "see" what we want and need to see.

Part of our modern experience is the mild shock when we experience  a slightly different man-made world. Our language no longer works. Fundamental aspects of our expected reality (such as toilets) are no longer available. This teaches us that what we regard as a "normal" man-made world is arbitrary. We could have built it in all kinds of different ways. And we do.

Lately, we have been presented with the ultimate version of this experience with completely different "virtual" worlds, such as Second Life, where the "world" is not built out of atoms, molecules and energy but lines of computer code.

Astonishingly, for many of us, the transition to these artificial worlds comes as easily as learning to drive on the "wrong" side of the road.

In all of these situations, experience is primary. We always move in a man-made world, designed to isolate us from the nasty details of the real one. There is no particular reason to regard one kind of experience as "real" and the other as "artificial".

As we experience all of this, we are more and more comfortable with our made-for-purpose world and more skeptical of "masters" who offer a path to "true" reality. At most, what they offer is another experience.