Is it even remotely possible to trap one's conciousness within a Virtual World?

Question

I have been talking to a few people who think it would be "fun" to do so, and I would like to know as to weither or not it is, in fact, possible, and I am NOT asking if it is ethical OR smart, I just want to know if it is possible.

Answer 1

Well, the matrix suggests this may all ready be so. Fiction, yes, but how would you know one way or the other.

Its also been argued that consciousness and self awareness are illusions - our bodies are such complex biological machines that our brains delude us into believing we are conscious.

Its been calculated that an entire human life's experience along with all the information you would need to recreate the body (assuming the knowledge to collect and store and duplicate it all) would be about 10^15 bytes of information. That's not all that much really.

That is one proposal for how advanced aliens would travel in space. They send out Von Neumann probes (the monolith from 2001 is a Von Neumann probe) that find habitable worlds or civilizations. These probes then use nano-tech to build receiving stations and then all that information is sent at the speed of light from the home world where the nano-bots put it all back together.

It would be far more efficient and fast as far as the travel time for said alien, if not the probe.

We assume that because we can't conceive how something might be possible that it is in fact impossible.

They said that about the theory of relativity, yet it has withstood every experimental test put forth. Much daily technology in use relies on it - GPS satellites for example.

Answer 2

Starting right out with life and death...OK? One of them has no meaning without the other. This is duality du jour. It's just the way it is otherwise you would be a stone..or less than that even. Metaphysically speaking, there is neither.... And so then if a person lives entirely in a world of choosing, fearing, grasping and avoiding one or the other, it is really a miserable experience because whatever is gained will be lost without fail, one way or another. For example, the only way to know I am alive is to fear, tempt, consider, conceptualize or avoid my death. Exhausting!! Our days are filled with nothing other than this - honestly. This is the way mind works....until it no longer does so. Every pair of all those completely necessary and naturally arising opposites contains an "I thought". Someday when the ho-hum everyday opposites, such as birth and death, float through the sky as naturally as birds or clouds, without a trace; we will be free and very much alive. Everything is dual in nature so long as there is an "I" involved. Just now find mind where there is not I. Best wishes

Answer 3

Absolutely yes. The enticements are more subliminal. You are more likely to be lured into a Virtual World, very much the same way as you play video games and can't leave them. Something happens where you become so attached to it, it becomes your reality. The matrix was a taste of what's possible.

Your consciousness can be trained to do anything, that's what your parents jobs are. And if they put you in front of a computer when you were one year old and said that is life, you would believe it cause that's what you are taught to believe. But is it life? You would think yes because that's all you know. Truth is, it is not living but you don't know any different.

You can be enticed to believe. Unless of course you are aware enough to know the difference.

Would you really really really know the difference?

Answer 4

The question as to what consciousness IS, exactly, is still open. Still, I think no method or machine yet exists that could do something like "trap" consciousness.

You could say that the brain creates a "virtual reality" that consciousness is trapped in... After all, the brain gets all it's info from our various sensory organs – eyes, ears, etc. Those organs take in stimuli from the world around us and constructs out of that a virtual reality that is our reality.

The universe is FAR stranger than we'd ever dare to imagine...

Answer 5

No, total fantasy.
A first step would be to transfer one's conciousness within the real world, from ome being to another, or one being to a machine.

The movie Vanilla Sky is one of many based on that fantasy, but that assumes that the human mind can be transferred to a machine, or into another living brain.

If you did it, it would be a one way trip. extract the brain from the body, and feed all inputs from an artificial virtual source and accept feed back. at this point they couldn't even get Christopher Reeve walk, much less seemless two way input from the millions of nerve endings in all the senses.

Better to work that imagination to a productive use.

Sorry.

Answer 6

You can definitely reverse the process and hypnosis is a testament to that. But could you trap someone? is a good question.
I suppose schizophrenia is a good example of someone being in a virtual world, but are they trapped and could you put someone in that state? I doubt if you could give someone schizophrenia.
Another virtual world is our dreamworld when we sleep.
One way you could trap someone is to keep them in a state of disturbed sleep, such that they continually experienced their dreams. This could be done is some lab. I m also sure there are many other ways you could trap someone.

Answer 7

I think so in a way that you can neither predict or control. Visit an Alzheimer's unit at your local nursing home. Many people who have this in the later stages are living life in their heads. They are seeing things that are very real to them but not us, they are places that we are not, and even doing activities that we can neither see nor understand. To a person with Alzheimer's, these "hallucinations" are very real. It is both extremely interesting and frightening at the same time. Not to mention the stress on the family, but it does exist in this form.

Answer 8

I took a load of bad mushrooms once and lost my mind somewhere I cannot remember where - so if anyone sees it when they're in a virtual world, could you put it in a matchbox and keep it safe until the bad blue blobs stop following me to the clinic I have to attend since my problem arose.

Answer 9

It is not yet possible, however in the next 20 or 30 years that could change.

Answer 10

When I was addicted to the Necromium MUD game that world became my reality while the physical world became a dream. This may not be exactly what you mean but I think it's pretty close.