Douglas Coupland is the most insufferable, cocky man I’ve ever came across in an academic article. His opinions on VR and what good can be made of it reveals just how basic, shallow and crude a human being can be towards new technologies. It is as well as he has never evolved and kept using only the “reptile cortex” – to use his own words – since he soul was a gorilla. It is not as if VR was particularly a solipsistic medium – but no, for a narcissist like him any medium would be equally solipsistic, in fact, the conversation they were having on the piece of paper I was reading sound sufficiently solipsistic to me. A man that prioritize virtual stimulation over beauty and bounds in reality, a man that finds the greatest potential in such a potent technology to be creating porns and “fight or flight scenarios”, a man that values such pornographic and senseless stimulation to be as essential to our world as “electricity” – that such a man should receive any formal respect is out of my mind. Let the world be fooled by his achievement in whatsoever field and let his followers applaud him for whatever he says – but not for me. I detest such arrogant, distasteful person and I regret having to consider his filthy opinions to write a proper response – this is my response to his words, truthfully and honestly.
Can the world not see through his words that he is a completely narcissistic being? He said, and I quote:
”That’s the future of solipsism: in VR, you inhabit a world that was created solely to test and tinker with you, the only person or thing in the universe that actually matters.”
If that is the “solipsism” that you have asked us to ponder upon, dear professor, I see no argument here. It is clear that people like DC would always strive to create solipsistic porno and violent VR content, to fulfill their own “reptile desire”, since they consider themselves to be the only one that matters in the whole universe. And people that are open to connections of the world and other living beings will create content that reinforces the connections that they enjoy. VR is in the end merely a medium with the ability to create 3D environment and permits real time interaction of sound and image. The way people make of it depends on their intention.
To me VR is about sharing – sharing an experience, a realization or something of beauty. It has the advantage of allowing a more immersive content than what we now have on social media, but as it is often the same content that is provided to many different users – it is at its core a sharing of experiences even if it was aim to create a “solipsistic experience “.
About derealization and empathy:
I do not agree that VR is the ultimate “empathy machine”. In fact, as Yier pointed out some classes ago, there are two layers of empathy, one is emotional empathy, as in “I feel sad when I see a person cry”; the other is cognitive empathy, as in “I think in the way that the crying person thinks and I feel sad also”. It is apparent that the former would be shallower and less meaningful than the later, but that is all VR would be able to achieve through its “immersiveness”. VR experiences create the illusion of closeness and immersion, but it is crucial for us to know that seeing the homeless lives inside a tent is different from knowing what it feels to be homeless and the only place to go is the tent. It does not reach down to the psychological pattern the lifestyle may foster. It does not tell us why this person ends up there, and what should we do about it. It offers merely the empathy for entertainment, like when people go to the movies or play a homeless video game. It comes, then it goes.
I also do not think that an immersive experience has to evoke empathy somehow. It could be a magical environment, a rainforest, a meadow, the sea before sunrise, or the Jurassic world where prehistoric giant creatures are flying around – those make great immersive experience that evokes emotions, but not necessarily empathetic ones. It is only the human-centered perspective that places much attention on creating empathy.