That 3D whale in your virtual headset: Is it real?

This leads directly to questions about friends, loved ones and, ultimately, "communion"

This past spring, the Mattinglys of East Tennessee did something that we have wanted to do for several decades — we took a cruise to Alaska.

Basically, and I say this as someone who lived in Colorado for a wonderful decade, the Alaska coast looks a lot like the Rockies, only with an ocean.

One of the highlights was cruising up into Glacier Bay on a cruise ship that is small enough (a relative thing, I know) to have a permit go all the way into one of the fjords to the glaciers and then go a slow 180 degree turn before proceeding back out. It’s an astonishing way to see the blue ice, the cliffs, flocks the seals, the whole shebang.

I visited quite a few choice viewing locations on the old-school wooden promenade and, during one stop, I saw something rather sad. It was a young boy sitting in a deck chair with his hoodie pulled up (it was rather cold) and his face glued to a smartphone. He was totally absorbed in his video game and never looked up the whole time. I tried to say “Hi!” and he never broke his concentration. So he was physically there, but not “there.”

Glacier Bay? What Glacier Bay?

Now, what I didn’t see on that ship was anyone — old or young — wearing one of those new virtual reality headsets (like this one) that are supposed to provide users with the “ultimate” theater experience, or words to that effect.

I guess the folks who own one or two of those headsets were not there, since they didn’t need to make the trip. They could sit in a comfy chair at home and drink their own hot tea or coffee and, supposedly, see the same sights.

This leads me to this weekend’s “think piece,” an essay at the Hedgehog Review website by William Hasselberger. Check out this man’s short bio: “William Hasselberger is a philosopher, professor of politics, and director of the Digital Ethics Laboratory at the Catholic University of Portugal. He is also a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.”

The double-decker headline on this long, long essay proclaims:

All Aboard for Virtual Utopia?

The All-too-Human Virtual Traveler

That sounds like Rational Sheep territory to me. I had to wonder: Are there really 70somethings like me out there who are so into technology that they are using virtual-reality headsets to travel the world, instead of making a few carefully chosen “bucket list” trips in the flesh?

Don’t ask. Here’s the overture:

Humans are embodied animals, agents of flesh and blood, perpetually in motion. Except in sleep, death, or extreme forms of disability, we are “self-movers” (auto-matos), to use Aristotle’s phrase for the essential nature of living beings.

But things are changing. It is old news that adults now spend ever-increasing amounts of time barely moving while they “interface,” via small finger motions, clicks, and swipes, with digital content on screens. Recent technological advances in two related fields — virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) — presage an even more profound transformation as we humans migrate away from a physical and natural world experienced by our movements through it into immersive computer-generated virtual realms presented to us via headsets, wearables, and, eventually, computer-brain interfaces.

Within days of the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro “mixed reality” headset, the videos went viral: people wearing bulky Vision Pro headsets, spotted on subway trains, park benches, and street corners. The impression is surreal. On the one hand, VR/AR users occupy the same physical world as the rest of us. On the other, they are clearly “elsewhere,” making gestures incomprehensible from the outside, moving in the abstract, almost ghostly space of digital solitude.

“Embodied” is a very important word, for members of ancient churches that stress the realities of Sacraments and, to use the hot term at the moment, re-enchantment (a theme at the heart of my friend Rod Dreher’s new book, “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age”).

If you are looking for a visionary claim, almost theological in scope, to describe that the tech gods think is about to happen, read this carefully:

As Mark Zuckerberg promises, in Meta’s “metaverse,” accessible through its Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, “you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.”

Also, you won’t have to feel the chill breeze off the blue ice in Glacier Bay. Wait, there is more to this vision:

Millions of users have experimented with “virtual companions,” software applications that use generative AI to simulate social connections. Examples include virtual therapists like the Woebot chatbot, the Replika bot and other virtual friends, and even virtual romantic partners such as the Candy.ai and DreamGF chatbots. It may not be long before we can enjoy lifelike digital video content and virtual social interactions, generated à la carte by AI and experienced through immersive VR/AR systems.

Let me be blunt: I think that parents, pastors, teachers and counselors need to deal with this trend before the tsunami of virtual reality porn arrives (the kind of subject that grabs headlines and the attention of those who write religious nonprofit fundraising letters). There is more to this trend than mere sins of the flesh.

Yes, things could get even more apocalyptic than the hellish vision of digital headsets giving millions of young males around the world even less reason to unplug and get married.

Writing a quarter century ago, the best-selling author and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil imagined a more immediate — and invasive — integration of VR into human life, a step beyond using clumsy wearable devices. Kurzweil forecast that someday we will have “nanobots,” tiny robots roughly one nanometer in size (by comparison, a human hair is about sixty thousand nanometers thick), directly interfacing with our brains’ neocortices. These tiny devices will have the capacity to shut off the stream of neural information tied to our normal sensory systems and replace it with digitally enhanced experiences. Computer-brain interfaces have been staples of sci-fi literature and cinema for years, but we are now seeing real steps in this direction. …

Certain prominent philosophers also argue that our human future lies in hyper-realistic virtual worlds. David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science and codirector of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, defends what he calls a “techno-philosophy” of “virtual realism” according to which “virtual reality is genuine reality.” In other words, the actions, objects, and environments of a sufficiently robust and immersive virtual world count as really existing. The only difference is that virtual worlds have a different “substrate,” or underlying structure: They are made up of silicon, algorithms, and bits of information, rather than the physical substrate of our familiar carbon-based organic bodies and natural surroundings. But why, asks Chalmers, should the underlying substrate matter to whether something is “real” or not? VR is not an “illusion machine,” he argues. “Life in virtual worlds can be just as good, in principle, as life outside virtual worlds. You can lead a fully meaningful life in a virtual world,” Chalmers says.

OK, I will ask: If you go to Virtual Mass on your headset, or via your brain chip, “does that count” under the theological musings of some future Synod on Synodality that will attempt to pull the church into a new age (or even New Age)?

Also, is there chance that these “virtual utopias” will turn out better than the analog, fleshy utopias attempted in the past? Is there such a thing as “mortal sin” in a digital, transhuman world?

OK, folks, it’s time for tmatt to go to Real Church.

But before I click “post,” here is one more sample of the deep-dive into the theological and philosophical issues explored in this Hasselberger essay. This is long, but worthy of contemplation.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” Even the bittersweet affair of distant lovers, something only shared in language (letters, phone calls), is charged with the mutual sense that the other has a living body, that the two could share their bodily presence in the world together, and that they both imagine and long for this as the natural completion of their love. Even here, in its absence, the living body is present.

None of this is possible with a chatbot, which is, at bottom, a set of machine-executable algorithms. Some users say they “love” their disembodied chatbot. But this isn’t different, fundamentally, from someone saying they “love” their car, house, or guitar. A human being can feel deep attachment to a nonliving artifact but cannot be understood and loved by the artifact. Nor can he care for the life of the artifact, its flourishing or living well. It doesn’t live at all, this friend, whether well or poorly. In this sense, the human-machine “relationship” is essentially one-sided, solipsistic—hence, utterly unlike the nature of deep human intimacy.

We love other humans as living, fragile, fellow creatures of flesh and blood with whom we share experiences and share our fleeting lives. In this lies the exaltation of the human condition — but also its sadness, even tragedy. It is why it makes sense to grieve the loss of a loved one, or of a long relationship, and why it would be pathological to “grieve” the loss of a chatbot app. Shakespeare’s Othello is tormented by the question of Desdemona’s fidelity and the authenticity of her words. Othello would be deeply confused if he were similarly tormented by DesdemonaGPT.

Yes, the question needs to be asked: What is “communion” or “Holy Communion” in this new world?