After listening to 3 hours interview or lecture from Terrence McKenna — who died because of brain cancer at the age of 53, which I found pretty strange but not unlikely — I was led to a subject of physics which has somehow made its way to popular culture more than any other subjects, that is quantum mechanics.
The internet (e.g. YouTube) sure does have a way to recommend what kind of videos that I would like to watch. It started with this public discussion of reality with a famous physicist Sean Carroll and a Buddhist scholar Allan Wallace. I didn't find this to be surprising, but it's surprising that somehow I was led to a subject that is not a form of entertainment or an addictive content. Though, it's probably addictive to a certain degree if you like the narrative that great physicists tend to convey (e.g. Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein). Physicists tend to have these narratives of the beginning of life, what is matter, space, time, gravity, black hole, what happens beyond the black hole, because it's in their best interest to understand the most basic element of reality.
As one topic could be linked to another, quantum mechanics became popular and somewhat controversial because it questions all of the previous assumption of classical Newtonian mechanics. Simply said, in quantum mechanics the behavior of matter in its smallest scale is not the same as how it behaves at a scale that has been observed with Newtonian classical mechanics. Observations of particles (e.g. photons, electrons) at this scale couldn't be explained satisfactorily as observations at a larger scale (e.g. an apple falling from a tree). The most well-known one is the description of light as a wave or particle.
That is one of the limitations of human perception, we could only infer a characteristic of something (a light) from our ideas of something else (wave, particles, matter). We tend to find a unifying pattern from a phenomena that we couldn't understand. We tend to disregard irrelevant noises, or perceptions that don't provide a contributing factor to the pattern which we habitually seek. This awareness of limitations in our perception is the foundation of our philosophical assumption of reality.
I won't discuss the myriad of ideas from Descartes, Immanuel Kant, David Hume. etc. As I don't have the expertise on philosophy. Neither do I have knowledge in biochemistry or neuroscience. But, to take this idea of limited perception further, today I've just discovered one of the breakthrough in computer graphics. It's a research collaboration between MIT and NVIDIA on Video to Video synthesis. I would imagine the implication of this technology to the emerging VR / AR technology.
As we could see in the video above, what if in the future, perception of reality can be copied and reproduced as good as what our eyes are able to perceive our surroundings.
What if smell, sound, pressure, touches, stimulus can be delivered to human body as good as what we can directly experience in our current environment?
In this hypothetical scenario, a future human who had never been living outside of such simulated reality would not know beyond what their senses could perceive and experience. This is also a similar case with our reality. On psychedelic drugs, a human could witness and sense something that is different from an immediate and familiar reality. Without it, everything is what it seems to be. It's only if we change our habits, thinking patterns, and train ourselves to experience the world differently, then we can perceive or at least to sense that there is something more than what it seems.
In other words, if the future human is smart enough, they will figure it out that something is really strange with the simulated environment. A simple question we often have in our classical world, why is the speed of light constant?
To hypothesize further, what if thoughts are re-programmable? Not only in a pure computing sense, but also in a biochemical, neurological sense. What we feel as arousal, comfort, sadness, pain, or love in our classic non-simulated reality could be experienced as similar kind of signals in the simulated reality. These future human would never know why they have these sensations, or feelings at all!
In a progressive, hygienic, and a well-maintained simulation, humans are programmed to follow the best rules, lifestyle habits, that our classical civilization could think of. Life is efficient, productive, everyone is beautiful, handsome, and healthy. There are no more social inequality problems, as everyone has the capability of everyone else. Sex which has troubled the minds of our classical humans so much in various social settings, is abundant, an activity as normal as we can possibly imagine, and no longer a subject of taboo. Because everyone is beautiful and handsome, everyone would like to have sex with everyone. Everyone would have an enjoyable conversation and interaction with everyone because they all have the same potential and capabilities.
All of these advantages without the sheer effort of will power, and discipline that classical humans would need to have in order to achieve it. The only requirement that these future humans would need to follow is the pre-programmed rules in their mind. Would they rather be living in these simulated reality?
For most humans I would predict the answer is yes. Would they experience occasional glitches where this perfect world seem to be very depressing and boring? Probably yes. But, on average they will get by and accept that these depression is a sign of mental illness. Would their minds be wandering and trying to imagine a higher dimension where the world is really different? Probably yes, just as classical humans do.
But for most of them, they would be happy with their programmed reality, because it's a challenge to step outside of that, re-wiring all of the programmed neurons, and thinking that there is an alternate reality. Because, after all of that extra effort that might even kill them in the process, again they will be confronted with the question, what's the point of this external reality? Is there more reality out there?