VIRTUAL “REALITY”…REALLY? – How Nature Can Save Us From Ourselves

 “When I listened to developers talk about their eagerness to “immerse” audiences in multisensory experiences, I thought I detected a less savory desire 
to imprison them in programming — to leave them with no sensory exit.”
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN – Virtual Reality Fails Its Way to Success – New York Times Magazine, Nov. 14, 2014

PASSIVE, TENSE
A vacuous reality star has managed to sucker the American media and a bit less than half of voters into making him the most powerful man in the world. Twice. Vacuous "reality" shows continue to garner astounding ratings. 

Our kids and grandkids, exposed to advertising on every surface from those ubiquitous glowing screens, to supermarket floors, to people’s bodies, can identify hundreds of corporate logos, but not the trees and animals living on their own block.

In the last three decades, artificial intelligence has snowballed from an icon-toppling chess bot to an omnipresent menace whose potential for evil refuses to knuckle under to its merits.

We're being lulled, surely but not so slowly, into a kind of consumer torpor. We're allowing corporations—some would say machines—to not only decide what we see and how and when we see it, but dictate whether or not what we see is real.

Donald Trump—I like to call him the Fool's Gold President—has exploited artificiality so well that he's convinced his followers that their beliefs are truer than facts. 

This soulless "Big Brother" specter is already, with our acquiescence, compelling our comings and goings, controlling not just our notion of truth, but the very tempo of our lives.

     They lure us ever closer to the end-game…
     making us think it's all our idea.

One social scientist recently asserted that the sci-fi plot line of computers taking over the world isn't really so far beyond the realm of possibility. They lure us ever closer to the end-game, all the while making us think it's our idea.

A CLASSIC FAUSTIAN BARGAIN
Okay, so maybe that outcome’s a bit over the top, but the steps we’ve already taken in that direction are troublesome. In too many cases, something more or less tangible we once knew and loved has been stolen and stripped of at least one aspect of its reality, replaced, in a kind of Faustian bargain, with another quality the trend-makers would like us to think we asked for.

Among their cynical promises: convenience and other creature comforts; saving time and money; a competitive edge; safety; control; “connectedness.” And what are we left with? More time glued to screens and buying stuff we don’t need—a surrender we’re promised will make us happy, but which ends up doing just the opposite.

  It’s not reality; it’s entertainment. And we’re 
  raising a generation of kids who will no longer 
  be able to tell the difference.

Whether it’s information, entertainment, connection or inspiration, they’ve taken reality, with all its color, depth and imperfection, all its challenges to reflect and ponder, and repackaged it under a different definition of “reality.” Thing is, the new version was never meant to serve human needs, but those of the corporations and czars who control all that “content.”

Sped up, dumbed own, flattened, sterilized, lowest-common-denominator-ized, what remains is simply an illusion. From vapid sitcoms to grown women under contract to "fall in love" with a man chosen by TV producers, children’s programming that promotes consumption. It’s not reality; it’s entertainment. 

Not even the news is immune from the alternative-reality infection, with Fox News having paid $787,000,000 for lying, and admitting that what they do is more entertainment than journalism.

And I’m afraid we’re raising a generation of kids who will no longer be able to tell the difference.

What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, like pushers of other addictions, the trend-setting, faux-reality machine is no dummy. Start ‘em on a few seemingly harmless free samples; get ‘em hooked; they’ll come back.

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS
It’s not until you step back and look at the big picture that you see the scope of the deception. Everywhere you turn there are examples of things and experiences folks are passively choosing no longer to actually experience or control first-hand:

• Fantasy football
• Virtual reality headsets and games
• AI summaries now headlining Google search results 
• Political memes realistically putting words in people's mouths 
• Automatic bill-paying
• “Crowd-sourced” information and opinion
• The cloud
• Twitter-speak (communication reduced from something that once had tone and color—a heart and soul if you will—to the equivalent of primitive grunts.)
• Apps (For watching TV; ordering dinner—even when your waitperson is within eye- and earshot; for dealing with your plumber…I could go on.)

• On-line dating
• Virtual medicine
• Telecommuting
• “Friending”
• Twenty-four-seven “connectedness”
• Seven-and-a-half hours a day on-screen* 
• Self-driving cars (and a bourgeoning field of other robotics)

For these activities and many more, we are now completely at the mercy of our computers and their ability—or willingness—to continue operating at our beck and call. It would take only one thing for any of these pursuits to simply quit and leave us helpless: the corruption of the vehicle.

We’ve already seen, albeit on an as yet less-than-apocalyptic scale, the signs of such betrayal. Power outages, air traffic control breakdowns, stock market crashes, data security breaches, service denials and an untold number of other hacks & whacks happen all the time, yet somehow we fail to put two and two together. Are these just tests, one might ask, of how much we’re willing to give up for our end of that Faustian bargain?

       The more technology-driven our lives 
       become, the more vitamin N we need to 
       balance the virtual with the real.

A DOSE OF VITAMIN N
Who are we? Where are the patience, the reflection, the curiosity, the nuance, the character, the heart and soul that have defined honest, self-aware, hard-working cultures for so many great generations? Where is the healthy tension between risk and reward?

In this age of Belviq and Botox, of Simbalta and Cialis, of more cures than there are maladies, there must be something we can take for this atrophy of mind, body and spirit that threatens to brainwash us. Right?

Turns out the remedy already exists. Always has, right under our noses. It is Nature. Or as Richard Louv so famously calls it in his best-selling book, The Nature Principle, vitamin N.

Louv never says—nor do I—that we should simply quit technology like a bad habit. What he does say is that the more technology-driven our lives become, the more vitamin N we need to balance the virtual with the real.

Nature is hard-wired into us from birth. So we can never turn off the fundamental connections between us, the earth and other living things, our need for our senses take it all in and be nurtured, taught and inspired by it. But we can and do forget how vital those influences are to our physical, mental and spiritual well-being.

     By learning how little control we have, 
     we learn about letting go.

REAL, LIVE…LIFE  
For each excuse one might have for not turning off the incessant virtual-reality deceit and actually getting out there in Nature, the potential benefit outweighs manyfold our tendency—or should I say our conditioned response—not to. Because Nature does not exploit; Nature cares for and teaches human beings—especially little ones—in the most amazing ways:

• By facing risk, we learn caution, creativity, patience…
• By learning about our environment, we learn about ourselves.
• By facing new experiences, we get in touch with the timeless.
• By surrounding ourselves with the vast, the complex, we learn of our true place in it all, at the same time insignificant and scary-powerful.
• By tackling challenges we didn’t think we could overcome, we learn about our capacity.
• By learning how little control we have, we learn about letting go.
• By escaping our culture’s complex, hurried, embattled, often alienating influences, we discover the timeless, boundless, totally-authentic original community to which every living organism on earth shares an equal claim.

Before we willingly concede yet more of our own reality to this media-mad, “connected,” “content” culture, let’s stop, take a deep breath and think deeply about what remains in our lives that still is real, and decide—before it’s decided for us—where we draw the line.

“The sensory cacophony (of virtual reality experiences like the Oculus Rift headset) is so uncanny and extraterrestrial to suggest to the organism a deadly threat.”
VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

* Sources FamilyEducation.com   /  BBC
 

I SEE, SAID THE BLIND MAN – An A.I. Cautionary Tale

For those of you still not terrified of artificial intelligence (AI), I offer this perspective.

One of AI’s up and coming players, C3 ai, is advertising on National Public Radio using the slogan, “Turns the invisible into the obvious.”

Does anyone else, in a world where the very notion of truth is being challenged, find this overt statement of purpose just chilling? It’s brazen; it’s warped; it’s nothing less than an admission of guilt.

  One minute there’s no smoking gun; the next,
  oh duh, there it is.

Yes, folks, here’s what we do at our company. We take stuff that’s not there and make even those not gullible enough to buy a conventional hard sell believe it is. What could possibly go wrong with that mission?

It’s worse than the sleaziest shyster lawyer. He can do a lot with a shred of evidence. But with AI, no evidence? No problem; we just let a computer make it up. One minute there’s no smoking gun; the next, oh duh, there it is.

BABY WITH THE BATHWATER
Now I know AI’s being harnessed to do some real good. Stuff a real human brain might perhaps come up with…if it were just a bit smarter. In medicine, science, finance and many other fields it does seem these capabilities are being channeled to help people.

One inspiring example: Country music legend Randy Travis, effectively silenced by a stroke, is using AI to reclaim his own voice and make new recordings.

PHOTO: Larry McCormack, The Tennessean

But it’s when the technology is used to fool people that my blood pressure starts rising. Photographic sleights of hand, fake sound bites, cribbed term papers, facts disguised as “alternative facts.” *

The technology will soon be convincing enough
to sway just about anyone—even if there’s evidence to the contrary!

RANK AND VILE VOTERS
One of the great truisms of life, I’ve discovered, is that we see pretty much what we want to see, what we expect to see. So it’s really not that much of a stretch to get someone who believes in you to buy your lies, even if there’s not a shred of evidence.

In politics—not just in the U.S. but in other vulnerable democracies around the world—the perpetrators of AI deception are hard at work trying to get their oligarch and despot bosses elected, even if it means putting damning words into their opponents’ mouths.

PHOTO: TMZ / Getty

If it isn’t already, the technology will soon be convincing enough to sway just about anyone—incredibly, even if there’s evidence to the contrary! (Witness the staggering con job a certain orange-tainted charlatan has foisted on roughly 40 percent of our fellow Americans.)

PHOTO: Mikhail Svetlov

The fake news AI engenders doesn’t just feed the mass delusion of these rank and vile MAGA dimwits, it’s being weaponized by our country’s worst enemies, whose despotic rulers use it to exploit our every cyber—and, I would suggest, moral—weakness and influence our elections.

    It’s when artificial
    intelligence ends up in the hands of genuine
    ignorance that we begin to see its perils.

MESSIN’ WITH MOTHER NATURE
In my retired-life’s work noticing and celebrating Nature’s small wonders, I’m particularly aware of the impact of AI on my “realm.”

On Facebook, where the algorithm’s clearly typed me as a tree hugger and animal lover, it’s feeding me more and more posts depicting creatures or landscapes that are clearly manipulated—from simply pumping up the colors or sharpening the focus to totally making up some bird or butterfly that has never existed.

Hey fakers, if you want to create such an unnatural depiction of Nature, at least have the integrity to call it art. Nature didn’t make it; you did. And quit dumping it in my feed—even if you do so under the guise of a David Attenborough fan group—saying “look at this amazing thing.” It’s not a thing; it’s a fraud.

PHOTO: Foto IG:@axellmg

I should know better than to waste my time responding to such deceits. But I can’t help myself. On a recent post featuring a highly retouched, flashily color-enhanced “photo” of Guanajuato, Mexico, I commented “I love Guanajuato, and it’s beautiful enough without your garish AI ‘enhancement.’ Please don’t make visitors disappointed when they see its real, perfectly adequate colors.”

  We should all begin
  vetting our art as
  we vet our food.

THE DECEPTION OF ART
And don’t get me going on AI’s wholesale theft and exploitation of artists’ work. A mendacity mafia is stealing everything from movie stars’ likenesses, to singers’ voices, to artists’ paintings, to designers’ and inventors’ ideas, and using them for their own profit.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Steve McCurry

Students can now easily plagiarize their term papers and theses; ad agencies replace their human copy writers with ad bots; conventional fine art is appropriated to create NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

ILLUSTRATION: G2.com

No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, I suggest it can never capture the true soul of human-created art.

We should all begin vetting our art as we vet our food: with a concern for its origin, its unnatural modifications, and fair compensation for its original producers.

          Ultimately, we’re going to have to
          reign in this beast.

THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS
It’s when artificial intelligence ends up in the hands of genuine ignorance that we begin to see its perils. At its worst it can be far more than an affront to the truth; it poses a dire threat to our nation, nay all of humanity.

So far, the furthest top scientists have been willing to go in predicting AI’s potential harm is to say that the likelihood of the technology’s leading to the extinction of the human race is “unknown.” Good God, if you don’t know, who does?

So let’s not get sweet-talked into embracing a technology whose proponents swear is all soft and fuzzy when we know its potential for evil. I want to compare it with the NRA’s claiming the utter innocence of high-powered assault rifles and bump stocks. You’ve heard it: Oh, it’s not the guns killing those innocent school children; it’s bad people.

But, while blood on classroom floors is horrifying, a weapon that threatens the survival of every human being on earth makes that look pretty innocent.

 If we fail to control AI before it learns how to be sentient and wrest control from its creators, we should all redirect our “thoughts and prayers” from the grieving families of murdered young students toward ourselves.

CAPTURE: from the Twentieth Century Fox film iRobot

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race….It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
STEPHEN HAWKING

* "Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. ~ WIKIPEDIA

TELLING THE TRUTH – How to Outlast the Fake News Scourge

HOW TO TELL THE TRUTH (FROM THE B.S.)
If a person claiming to tell the truth includes any reference to either God, the Bible or patriotism, chances are their convictions come not from fact, nor from any rational thought process, but from belief. Same goes for Allah, the Koran or Sharia Law, or any other religious or nationalistic reference.

Though I’m a great believer in the power of positive thinking, beliefs are not 
facts. Without any impartial standard of veracity, anyone’s beliefs are as valid 
as anyone else’s.

      These folks are more interested in the cer- 
      tainty of knowing than in learning anything 
      they don't already think they know.

Beware the tellers. These are the people about whose ideas, after you spend a couple of hours with them, you know a great deal, but who’ve not thought to ask a single question of you. These folks are more interested in the certainty of knowing than in learning anything they don’t already think they know.       

Anyone who’s absolutely cock-sure about everything they say is not to be trusted. Tune them out. (If such a person is your friend, you’d be doing them a great favor by letting them know you’ve done so.)

Be suspicious of generalizations. When someone issues any kind of blanket statement, whether in support of or opposition to your own beliefs, your first reaction—after conspicuously rolling your eyes—should be “How do you know that? Show me the facts.”

Don’t even listen to absolutes. The truth is hardly ever black and white, but various shades of gray. Depending on your point of view, the very same facts can be seen to support differing truths. This is because folks rarely have open enough minds to explore any more than the angles that support their beliefs.

(If someone’s open to acknowledging the imperfection of his/her “truth”—which an ideologue or inveterate liar won’t be—this shades-of-gray notion may be a good place to start a balanced, respectful discussion.)

Pathological liars tend to be bullies. When their version of the truth is challenged, they’ll often double down on the lie, repeating it, amplifying it, perhaps discrediting you for being either stupid or smart—they might call you “elite.” Liars in positions of power will routinely try to intimidate you if your calling them on their falsehoods threatens their agenda.

    It’s like coughing uncovered in a crowded 
    elevator and claiming it’s everyone else’s fault 
    for making you sick in the first place.

They'll often attempt to preemptively discredit your pushback. This is why the current U.S. reality-star president, as cover for his routine, reckless dishonesty, throws his “fake news” accusation out there virtually daily. It’s kind of like coughing uncovered in a crowded elevator and claiming it’s everyone else’s fault for making you sick—and obnoxious—in the first place.

Try to look between and through a person’s assertions to see exactly how loosely they’ve played with the truth in the past. If she or he is in the public eye, have they conducted themselves with decency, credibility and class? Or have they, their lawyers and their public relations shills spent an inordinate amount of time and money trying to put out the fires of their deceit?

If any of these is true, chances are very good this person knows no other way of communicating. There is little if any truth here.

Finally, when you wonder about someone’s honesty, follow the money. Anyone—especially a politician—who advocates for a position or policy that benefits him/herself and small numbers of her/his wealthy patrons at the expense of most others is not very likely to be interested in the truth. 

LAST BASTIONS
So, with all these caveats, what is one to believe?

We have only a couple of ways of determining whether one person’s “truth” is any more true than another’s. (None has anything to do with whether or not one agrees with the other unless there is a discussion based on verifiable facts.)

One touchstone of truth is science, which, though far from incorruptible, has a long, mostly honorable history of observing and measuring not what someone hopes or prays will happen, not what bolsters one’s existing beliefs or serves one’s personal interests, but what actually happens. We would not have gotten as far as we have in understanding how the universe works if science were not worth its salt.

If some blowhard refutes scientific consensus, hold their feet to the fire. Ask what other discipline they rely on for their facts—and prepare to laugh and walk away.

The other way of finding out what really happened—or what someone really said—is through one of the very pillars of our great democracy, a free and independent press. 
        You might be tempted to say that the 
        ultimate guarantor of truth is having 
        actually witnessed the purported event 
        with your own eyes. But you’d be wrong.
 
Determining exactly what is free and independent is getting difficult these days. During the past couple of decades journalism’s fringe elements have mutated into monsters of misinformation, deliberately spewing whatever their political base wants to hear. In those circles there is no longer the slightest shred of journalistic integrity—no attempt to independently corroborate assertions or purported quotes, no impartial oversight by editors, no professional discipline, no accountability.

But there are ways to more or less verify what a reporter or news medium says happened. Google it; see if there are other sources—including some you know to be relatively unbiased—reporting the same thing.

Check out one of the reputable fact-checking sites like PolitiFact, Snopes or Fact Check.  These and a few others have proven they have no axe to grind.

You can also refer to this wonderful graphic mapping dozens of media by both their political leanings and the rigor of their reporting practices: MEDIA BIAS CHART.  I now temper my trust of most news reports with a glance at this chart.

BELIEVING IS SEEING
You might be tempted to say that the ultimate guarantor of truth is personal observation, having actually witnessed the purported event with your own eyes. But you’d be wrong.

Countless studies have shown that even direct real-life observation is fraught with errors—of both commission and omission. As much as we may think that seeing is believing, the fact is that quite often the opposite is true; human beings have a strong tendency to see what they want to see. In other words, what their beliefs suggest they should see.

And this takes us full circle, back to my initial suggestion that, if a person can’t convince you of their truth without referring to their higher power, some unassailable allegiance or other requisite of blind loyalty, that may be the only clue you’ll need to tell the difference between opinion and fact.

                   

OPPOSITE REALITIES – At Sea In a World of Duality

On my frequent trips to New England—more specifically, to the very maritime South Shore area south of Boston—I see nautical charts everywhere. They decorate the walls of bars, hang in peoples homes, plaster the sides of trucks.

These handsome maps—some are works of art, really—show everything a sailor needs to know about the waters he or she is navigating. Water depths, natural features of the seabed, the ins and outs of the coastline, navigational hazards, locations of natural and human-made aids to navigation, information on tides and currents, and local details of the Earth's magnetic field.

It’s not surprising that sailors would have a unique, rather self-centered way of looking at the world; naturally, they think of the sea as where everything that matters to them happens. And surrounding it, the land, all but void, inconsequential except for its ability to shape one’s course and the winds and currents that affect it.

We landlubbers, on the other hand, see our element as the center of our world. The sea surrounds us. Our maps show everything we need to navigate our element, but leave the oceans nearly devoid of detail. Of course we’re aware of the seas, but, again, they're like an afterthought, acknowledged only for what they can do for us…or to us.

DISH OR CONE?
What can this equivalency of opposites teach a curious person about life? Do opposites—like opinions, let’s say—always have equal value? Metaphysically, might they be just mirror images of the same thing?

With much of what happens in my life I strive for a sort of quasi-Buddhist view: that one outcome has no more relevance or value than another. That the only things that really matter are—to quote the Buddha himself—how much you love, how gently you live, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

Easier said than done.

  Could the radically differing truths people seem 
  to espouse these days be, like those maps, simply 
  two different, but equally valid, versions of the 
  same reality?

A old friend was once diagnosed with cocci meningitis, a disease which at that time had a very high mortality rate. He chose to fight the disease with an arsenal of non-traditional weapons, including Buddhist spiritual practice. I’ll never forget his heartfelt summation of his chances: “If surviving this is a decadent bowl of chocolate ice cream, then dying from it is vanilla. They’re both ice cream.” (He ended up with the chocolate.)

ALTERNATIVE FACTS
Sure, I know this kind of stuff intellectually; its truth resides somewhere deep in my soul. But what about in my nuts-and-bolts, emotion-tinged real life? Can I really live with such ambivalence?

After all, it might help me as I ponder the extraordinary political and cultural polarization eroding civility in the US—and other developed countries around the world. Could the radically differing truths people seem to espouse these days be, like those maps, simply two different, but equally valid, versions of the same reality?

Or is it just a matter of which slices of the unfathomable totality of reality we choose to see, leaving the rest, like the land to a mariner, as one enormous blind spot?

I must say I’m having a hell of a time achieving the degree of inner peace that would allow me to see some of my countrymen’s utter denial of my reality—think “alternative facts”—as the vanilla ice cream to my chocolate.

What about you? What truths do you find in this notion of opposing voids and their relative validities? Can you stand on the solid ground of your own reason and values, and still accept the contrasting reality of those who seem so at sea?