The mind starts bleeding into the world

Tourists, terrorists: ubiquitous, magnetic categories. They attract through their own force. But there are also those, as a light counterbalance, who are restive and refractory. And there always have been: a certain number—not many—of beings who can find their way through the strictures of class, of the professions, of social barriers. Who become stateless and extraterritorial by vocation. And this through no ill-will toward their fellow beings, but by trusting in a certain thrill of anonymity and the inability to feel tied to predefined roles. They are the hidden and unrecognized contemplators who have always lived in the nooks and crannies of society. In Vedic India, people would talk about the vānaprastha, those who go “into the forest.” When the forest is no longer there, they wander in everyone’s streets, but from a certain glint in their eyes it can be seen they do not belong.

If tourists are viewed with a certain embarrassment and a hint of disapproval, it is humanity that looks at itself and suspects it has lost something. It doesn’t know exactly what, but knows it is irretrievable. Someone has suggested that democracy has extended to everyone the privilege of access to things that are no longer there.
Tourism has now skidded out of control and doesn’t necessarily seem to have any more to do with travel. Rather, it looks like a second reality, which happens to be the model for virtual reality. Depleted precisely because it is augmented, like every virtual reality. If David Chalmers’s statement is true that “we are not far away from a time when a virtual reality may be indistinguishable from the real thing,” it must also be recognized that tourism is no longer a flourishing sector of the world, but the whole world has become a sector of tourism that has still to be brought up-to-date. This reflects on all that is not tourism. And which now turns out to be something depleted, as well as augmented.

Some fateful phrases say much more than they intend to say. And so, in the epilogue of the synopsis of his forthcoming book, David Chalmers announces the near future with a fanfare: “The mind starts bleeding into the world.” Which can be interpreted as the mind seeping into the world, or the mind bleeding over the world. Chalmers means the first. The second is what is happening.

For theorists of virtual reality, the constant concern is to establish what difference there is between virtual reality and ordinary reality. John Searle observed that a virtual hurricane doesn’t get anyone wet—and this might at first seem a conclusive observation. In response it was suggested to him that, since words can have many meanings, virtual hurricanes can be different from ordinary ones while still being hurricanes in the experience of those who suffer them.

But these are modest satisfactions. The true watershed is another. Virtual reality is focused on fighting a single enemy: Ananke, Necessity. Its aim is to elude it, thwarting it. Until one day … On that day, perhaps not too far off, even a virtual attack will be able to bleed the mind over the world.

With his protruding visor, destined to become miniaturized, like everything else, and replaced in the end by brain implants, the frequenter of virtual reality (also called augmented reality) is a direct descendant of the tourist who goes looking for extreme experiences. Both temporarily suspend the irreversible. The first knows he can remove his visor at any moment, the other that on a certain day he will return home. Suspending the irreversible means escaping entropy. The young Buddha followed the path in the opposite direction. He left his father’s house, which seemed untouched by change, in order to encounter the irreversible in its threefold aspect of sickness, old age, and death. That, for him, was augmented reality. But the Buddha said only that it was reality tathā, “so.” And he taught how to see the tathatā, “being so,” of everything that is.

Roberto Calasso
Unnameable Present