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.
—Roberto Calasso, The Unnamable Present
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.
Traditional VR aims to replace the user’s sensory experience (for now, mainly visual and auditory) with computer-generated content, ideally to achieve full conscious “immersion” in the digital environment. Apple claims that the Vision Pro not only does VR but also “seamlessly blends digital content with your physical space,” thereby enabling AR “spatial computing.” The headset combines internal cameras to track the micromovements of our eyes and external cameras to record and reproduce the visual scene around us, now “augmented” by superimposed digital content. The point of VR/AR, says Apple, is to enable you to “do the things you love in ways never before possible.” These include controlling software with motions of the eyes and hands, meeting with others virtually, watching movies and sports, and reliving digitally recorded memories.11x“Vision Pro: Watch the Guided Tour,” Apple, accessed March 26, 2024, https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Apple CEO Tim Cook predicts that “a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day, it will become that much a part of you.”22xQuoted in Oscar Raymundo, “Tim Cook: Augmented Reality Will Be an Essential Part of Your Daily Life, Like the iPhone,” Macworld, October 3, 2016, https://www.macworld.com/article/228893/tim-cook-augmented-reality-will-be-an-essential-part-of-your-daily-life-like-the-iphone.html. The “thought leaders” seem to agree: Scores of tech analysts, futurists, and TED Talks presenters confidently affirm that VR/AR will “shape the human future” and “reform the human experience.”33xSee, e.g., Tiffany Lam, “How Immersive Technologies (AR/VR) Will Reform the Human Experience” [video], TEDxQueensU, April 23, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi97-DAcGMk.
Meta Platforms, the tech conglomerate that emerged from Facebook, envisions a future in which humans spend long hours in an immersive VR environment, “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” 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.”44xMark Zuckerberg, “Founder’s Letter, 2021,” Meta, October 28, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/.
A Slow Start
In its early days, the metaverse was a dud. Meta’s metaverse division, Reality Labs, reported operational losses in the billions and earned the derision of analysts and shareholders. A November 2022 metaverse “rave” funded by the European Union and costing nearly 400,000 euros reportedly attracted only five attendees.55xTristan Fiedler, “EU Throws Party in €387K Metaverse—and Hardly Anyone Turns Up,” Politico, November 30, 2022, https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-threw-e387k-meta-gala-nobody-came-big-tech/.
But the early woes of the metaverse may reflect nothing more than humankind’s brief hesitation before its headlong migration into virtual realms. Of the world’s ten largest “mega-capitalization” companies, five are developing hardware and software for VR and AR experiences—Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia (maker of advanced graphics processing chips and the “omniverse” platform, which brings the metaverse into industrial applications). Another two “mega-caps”—Amazon and Tesla—are developing related AI systems and cloud computing infrastructure. Many of the world’s most innovative firms are racing to find the next platform in which we can lead our digital lives: one that will be just as addictive and necessary for work and daily life as our current smartphones, but more “immersive,” absorbing our attention and presence more completely.
AI is making the physics engines underpinning VR/AR more powerful and more realistic. OpenAI, builder of the GPT series of language models, has demonstrated the power of generative AI to produce realistic video content from simple text prompts. Generative AI is also yielding chatbots—virtual conversational agents, sometimes with realistic avatars—capable of increasingly humanlike interactions. 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.
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.66xRay Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York, NY: Viking, 1999). Computer-brain interfaces have been staples of sci-fi literature and cinema for years, but we are now seeing real steps in this direction. Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is conducting human trials of brain-computer interfaces. The ultimate goal is to enable people to control devices such as smartphones, computers, robotics, and VR/AR systems with neuronal impulses from the parts of their brains related to movement.77xLiam Drew, “Elon Musk’s Neuralink Brain Chip: What Scientists Think of the First Human Trial,” Nature, February 2, 2024, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00304-4. Musk also imagines that brain-computer interfaces could one day preserve our memories and allow us to “merge” ourselves with digital technology, so we could better “compete” with AI and extend our lifetimes in digital form.
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.88xDavid J. Chalmers, Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2022), xvii.
Current-generation VR, while a massive improvement over the blocky graphics of the 1990s, remains limited. It is strongest in visual and auditory dimensions, weaker in proprioceptive and haptic (touch) dimensions, and largely nonexistent in the dimensions of smell and taste. In phenomenological terms, however, all of those perceptual dimensions are interwoven aspects of our unified sense of embodied presence and action in the world. Chalmers concedes that VR has a long way to go, but he remains confident of its eventual consummation:
The physics engines that underpin VR are improving. In years to come, the headsets will get smaller, and we will transition to glasses, contact lenses, and eventually retinal or brain implants. The resolution will get better, until a virtual world looks exactly like a nonvirtual world. We will figure out how to handle touch, smell, and taste.99xIbid., xiii.
Current limitations, in other words, are not fundamental, but merely technical engineering matters, soon to be solved. Chalmers claims that “once a mature VR technology is developed, it should be able to support lives that are on par with or even surpass life in physical reality.”1010xIbid., xviii, emphasis added.
The term “virtual utopias” best names those futurist dreams in which human beings spend large stretches of their lifetimes in immersive VR/AR environments, manipulating and consuming digital content such as games and movies (often generated by AI) and interacting with other people and virtual AI companions through avatars. For some, virtual utopia will be the bittersweet fruit of the progress of AI in automating away human work and decision-making. As the popular historian Yuval Noah Harari speculates, “The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be: What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?”1111xYuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, England: Vintage, 2015), 370. What meaningful sphere of activity will be left to us? Harari imagines that, in the wake of rampant AI automation, “unnecessary people,” that is, those rendered economically redundant by AI, “might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than drab reality outside.”1212xIbid., 381. Harari notes that this condition also raises political problems: “Such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences in La La Land?”
For transhumanists such as Kurzweil, our future in AI-powered virtual worlds is seen in a glowing, even salvific, light—as offering a kind of techno-transcendence beyond the constraints and frailties of the human body and the physical world. Admittedly, virtual realism and transhumanism are contentious, highly speculative, often ill-defined philosophies. But they have influential and deep-pocketed champions in industry and academia, and are underwritten, to an extent, by real technological trends. They also tap into ancient human longings.
Imagine that we migrate, en masse, from the physical and natural world to immersive virtual utopias. We begin to lead our lives not through the flesh-and-blood agency of our organic bodies, but by controlling avatars with our microexpressions or neural activity, unencumbered by the constraints of the physical world. Would this new mode of life enable human beings to flourish and find greater freedom and fulfillment, as proponents claim? Or does the very ideal of virtual utopias rest on faulty philosophical and anthropological assumptions, including distorted conceptions of human selfhood and shrunken views of the significance of the human body and the natural world in our experience? In addressing these questions, we cannot escape wrestling with topics lying at the very root of philosophy: What defines the nature of a human being, and what goods contribute to a flourishing human life?
Although philosophical, such questions are not simply academic. Powerful new technologies do not give humans tools just to better perform the same old tasks. New technologies can change their human users, reshaping their character traits and habits of attention, thought, feeling, and action.1313xSee, e.g., Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2014), and Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2019). If schemes for remaking the social order with VR/AR and AI are themselves based on superficial or reductive philosophies of human nature, virtual utopias will prove not just misguided but damaging. We must avoid both alarmism and naive optimism. What is called for is an exercise in philosophical and moral imagination.
The Advantages of Life in Virtual Worlds
What might it mean to say, with Chalmers, that living in immersive virtual worlds will “surpass” life in the physical world? What goods do these imagined virtual worlds provide, and what human interests do they fulfill?
One frequently cited good is safety. You can virtually “climb” Mount Everest in the metaverse without the risk of falling off or freezing to death. Chalmers writes that “during a pandemic, when physical contact is dangerous, we can hang out in VR instead.”1414xChalmers, Reality+, 333. We can race cars without crashing or, as one report in The Guardian suggests, attend a drug-fueled illegal rave in 1980s England and enjoy engaging with the crowd and fleeing from the police without risking real physical harm.1515xGiselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, “‘The Night Is Literally in My Hands’: What It’s Like to Attend an Acid House Rave—in Virtual Reality,” The Guardian, August 12, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/13/in-pursuit-of-repetitive-beats-vr-acmi-melbourne-international-film-festival.
Consider what Kurzweil says about sexual intimacy in virtual worlds:
Virtual sex will be better in some ways and certainly safer. Virtual sex will provide sensations that are more intense and pleasurable than conventional sex, as well as physical experiences that currently do not exist. Virtual sex is also the ultimate in safe sex, as there is no risk of pregnancy or transmission of disease.1616xKurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 21.
But the appeal of virtual experiences goes beyond being safer alternatives to “conventional” activities, as Kurzweil’s statement makes clear. Virtual worlds and virtual partners may afford us more intense pleasures, and pleasures directly under our technical control, as well as wholly new experiences unavailable in the nonvirtual world—whether flying like a bird, diving like a dolphin, inhabiting new bodies, or climbing mountains on fantastical planets. We will experience “new forms of perception,” according to Chalmers, who claims that “as our minds speed up in the technological future, physical reality may come to seem unbearably slow. Virtual reality can speed up along with our minds.”1717xChalmers, Reality+, 321.
Importantly, virtual worlds and experiences also have universalist and democratic appeal. The technology promises to make certain valuable experiences open to anyone and everyone, provided, of course, that they have the requisite headsets and wearables (or implants and nanobots). It is not just the privileged or physically able who will climb Mount Everest, for example, or view the earth from space. With virtual embodiment in avatars, all humans can climb craggy mountains or go deep-sea diving.
Virtual utopias are also dreams of a future human condition in which the given, unchosen reality of our bodies and our world—what some call our “finitude”—no longer governs and constrains us. Chalmers writes that “whereas space on Earth is a limited resource, space in VR is almost unlimited…everyone can have a virtual mansion or even a virtual planet.”1818xIbid., 321. Our shift to a virtual existence ultimately unlocks truly promethean possibilities for humanity, since, as Chalmers put it in a 2022 interview with The Financial Times, “we are the gods of the virtual worlds we create.”1919xQuoted in John Thornhill, “David Chalmers: ‘We Are the Gods of the Virtual Worlds We Create,’” Financial Times, February 11, 2022, https://www.ft.com/content/1acecec4-e157-47c5-921e-e2c727f1c53d.
Life in a new realm, full of excitement, but without risk. Unimaginable pleasures and forms of perception. New bodies. Freedom from physical limitations and frailties. Underneath more familiar desires for convenience and entertainment, the techno-utopian dream of moving our lives into virtual worlds taps into yearnings that are deep and primeval, even transcendent.2020xKurzweil is clear about this in The Age of Spiritual Machines. On the religious longings underlying techno-utopianism and transhumanism, see the excellent discussion in Mark O’Connell, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2017).
The Unbearable Lightness of Disconnection
Imagine living almost entirely in an immersive virtual world, by means of what Chalmers calls “mature” VR/AR technology, with all its benefits. Would something valuable, something significant in human life, be missing?
For some, this kind of life would immediately seem to lack valuable connection to what we still stubbornly call “reality,” or the “real world,” not in the sense of the world of practicality and busy-ness, but the world beyond, and beneath, everyday entertainment and concerns. An immersive VR system, by its very nature, severs human users from their immediate nonvirtual surroundings. The VR/AR user, seen from the outside, seems to inhabit an insubstantial, liminal space—physically present with us but also closed off from “here” and “us.” VR users can find themselves stumbling straight into their furniture or diving headfirst into their television (as one viral video shows).2121xManny G. Forever, “Man Crashes Into TV Using VR” [video], YouTube, March 13, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5LxaUQ7ZfY.
Even AR (or so-called mixed reality) systems, in layering digital content onto our perceptual field, effectively occlude parts of reality, things normally present in our embodied perception of our surroundings. The safety instructions on the website for the AR game Pokémon GO offer a telling warning:
When you’re out and about playing Pokémon GO, stay aware of your surroundings at all times—especially when traveling alone or in areas you’re not familiar with…. To make sure you and those around you are safe, do not play Pokémon GO while riding a bike, driving a vehicle, operating heavy machinery, or doing anything else that requires your full attention.2222x“Safety FAQs—Pokémon GO Help Center,” Niantic, accessed April 23, 2024, https://niantic.helpshift.com/hc/en/6-pokemon-go/faq/114-safety-faqs/. See also the discussion in Nolen Gertz, Nihilism and Technology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 80ff.
Not only adding things to our perceptual experience, AR also redirects our attention, and significant features of the world (such as that rapidly approaching car) may disappear into the background.
It is clear that both VR and AR systems disconnect users, to varying degrees, from aspects of the concrete world. And to the extent that virtual companions come to take the place of some of our human relationships, this, too, diminishes valuable connections to (nonvirtual) human companions (not to mention other living creatures) in our world. A person fascinated by a virtual companion is, at least in that moment, not engaging with a living companion, whether human or animal. But, we may ask, so what? If the virtual worlds and virtual companions are hyper-realistic and engaging, why does it matter if these technologies further “disconnect” humans from the nonvirtual world?
In his “experience machine” thought experiment, described in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick asked readers whether, given the opportunity, they would opt to live a life, a whole life, in “a machine that would give you any experience you desired”:
Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?2323xRobert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1974), 42.
Nozick held that we should not. And at the time he wrote, he assumed that most of his readers would agree. The machine would offer us the experience of doing things, but in reality, we would not actually write novels, make friends, take risks for good causes, go hiking, or do most of the things we value in life. Nozick explained that the experience machine could not really satisfy certain basic human desires for achievement, self-realization, or authentic contact with deeper reality. Writing sixteen years later, in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, he concluded that “we want to be importantly connected to reality, not to live in a delusion.”2424xRobert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 106.
The dream of life in a virtual utopia would seem to have the same limitations as Nozick’s experience machine. But Chalmers disagrees, asserting that in “mature” VR, unlike the experience machine, we can interact both with virtual agents and with human agents, via their avatars. For the virtual realist, the things we do in a “mature” virtual world—the actions we perform, the people we become, the bodies we inhabit, the relations we form—will be as real as their counterparts in our familiar, physical reality.
Chalmers admits that some people may have an “optional preference” for living in physical reality. However, he writes, “it’s equally possible to prefer an artificial environment, and there’s nothing irrational in doing so.” In fact, valuing the “sheer physicality” of the nonvirtual world we know is, to him, simply a matter of taste. Proponents of virtual utopias hold that what matters most in life—the full range of human goods and attainments—can be preserved, even enhanced and surpassed, with new, virtualized modes of living.
But beyond the hype, dreams of a human future of high-tech fulfilment in virtual worlds are based on a deeply flawed view of human agency. Promoters of virtual utopias ignore the true significance of the human body in our actions, in intimacy with others, and in communion within a wider world of nature.
Living Bodies and Virtual Avatars
Start with the Aristotelian claim that we humans are, by nature, agents of flesh and blood, moving, acting, feeling, suffering, and loving through our living bodies. Is our biological embodiment essential to who and what we are, or is it a dispensable skin we can shed to enjoy a better life in VR?
Those who think humans will (and could beneficially) migrate to virtual worlds, including Zuckerberg, Kurzweil, and Chalmers, describe a condition of “virtual embodiment,” the complete sense of personal presence as a digital avatar within a computer-generated environment. Chalmers writes that a “virtual body is different from a physical body, but it is real all the same. It is possible for a virtual body to be my virtual body. More generally, people can ‘own,’ or inhabit, their virtual bodies.”2525xChalmers, Reality+, 219. He gives examples of people who experience their virtual bodies as equally real, or even as supplanting their physical bodies. For Chalmers, my “body” is what I identify with as the primary locus of my existence or self. Hence, my body could be a biological (human) body or a nonbiological (virtual) avatar, depending on my attitudes. If virtual worlds are equally real, and if I identify primarily with my virtual avatar, then, argues Chalmers, the avatar is “my body,” the center of my personhood and agency within my (virtual) lifeworld.
The idea of “virtual embodiment” depends, ultimately, on a Cartesian view of the human mind or self. As this perspective would have it, a person’s mind or self consists in the subjective perceptions, feelings, and thoughts in her private mental space, somehow produced by her brain. And her living body is merely an external instrument, a robotic tool or dummy providing sensory inputs to, and executing the commands from, her mind or self. Hence, a self could conceivably identify with a new body—a digital one—as the instrument of its perception and agency in the world. But as everyone knows, the Cartesian views of mind give rise to insoluble problems in metaphysics and epistemology. If minds are private mental states and bodies are externally observable objects, how are the two related? How can I even know if any other person in the world has any mind or self at all “behind” their observable, mechanical body?
The Cartesian view of mind and body is not how we primarily experience living bodies, whether our own or those of other people. The great phenomenologist of embodiment, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, pointed out that one can think of one’s body in two very different ways. On the one hand, one can think of it as merely a physical object, “a bundle of bones and muscles,” with properties shared by inanimate things. This is the body seen from the outside, so to speak. On the other hand, there is what Merleau-Ponty called the “living body,” “flesh,” or “phenomenal body,” which is the body as it is experienced in the first person, on the inside, by a particular person, as he perceives, feels, moves, touches, and explores the world, expresses himself in action, and relates to other living bodies. This is the body experienced by an acting, feeling, expressive, conscious person.
Merleau-Ponty famously declared, “The body is our general medium for having a world.”2626xMaurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013), 146. First published 1945. Our living bodies provide us with our most basic sense of the world as a field of possibilities: what is up or down, in front or behind, close or far, what objects are graspable, what surfaces are walkable or climbable, what is an obstacle to our agency, or a pathway for it, what is a threat and what is alluring. Put differently, we human beings are partly defined by our embodied skills for moving, feeling, and understanding things, and other people, with our living bodies. We learn to stand upright, walk and navigate through space, grasp, touch, explore, gesture, caress, and act together with other embodied humans—and these bodily skills are essential to our form of life. They structure and orient our consciousness and reveal meaningful opportunities for action and interaction in our environment.2727xTheorists of embodied cognition in cognitive science draw upon these ideas to argue that mental phenomena like perception, cognition, affect, and intention are processes that emerge from the sensorimotor activities of the embodied and living human organism in ongoing interaction with its worldly environment. The various aspects of human mindedness arise from the interplay of brain, body, and the wider physical and social settings which we are embedded as living organisms. See, e.g., Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2010). In this sense, the living body is a person’s perspective, her most basic point of view on the world. As Merleau-Ponty lyrically observed, “The flesh is at the heart of the world.”2828xMaurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 138.
At a fundamental level, our ideas and claims about what is good or meaningful or worth doing in life only make sense against this background of our embodied nature—our living being—as human animals. In the case of VR experiences, the appeal of the activities in question—say, virtual surfing or virtual sex—derives from our prior understanding of the appeal of the real things: actual surfing, or genuine sexual intimacy with another human being, with our living bodies, in the world.
For virtual experiences of surfing or sexual intimacy to equal or (in Chalmers’s word) “surpass” the authentic activity, it is not enough that the virtual cases be pleasurable, fun, or enthralling. The simulations must capture the full meaning or significance of the real, incarnate activities in a human life. And herein lies the problem.
Virtual Companions and Human Lovers
Built by the software development company Luka, the Replika chatbot is marketed as “an AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes. Replika is always ready to chat when you need an empathetic friend.” The generative AI chatbot is powered by a neural network language model, combined with scripted conversational dialogue, and can flexibly adapt to inputs from the user and learn the user’s patterns of interaction and likes and dislikes. The intention is to foster the (virtual) experience of connection with a “companion who cares.” The chatbot is so effective not just because of technical advances in AI natural language processing but because of human beings’ strong tendency, rooted in our evolutionary history, to anthropomorphize artifacts and other features of the environment, to see them as lifelike and possessed of some kind of inner subjectivity. And the bot is presented to consumers in highly anthropomorphic terms: “Replika,” its website informs visitors, is “always here to listen and talk” and is “always on your side.”2929x“The AI Companion Who Cares,” Replika, accessed April 24, 2024, https://replika.com/.
More than ten million people use Replika, and CEO Eugenia Kuyda has claimed that many users find it easier and more comfortable to tell the chatbot things they find hard to say to other people.3030xB. Maples et al., “Loneliness and Suicide Mitigation for Students Using GPT3-Enabled Chatbots,” Mental Health Research 3, no. 4 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1038/s44184-023-00047-6. Parmy Olson, “This Chatbot Has Sparked a Budding Friendship With 2.5 Million People,” Forbes, March 8, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2018/03/08/replika-chatbot-google-machine-learning/. Users of a paid-subscription version of the service, Replika PRO, can change their Replika status to “Romantic Partner,” and use gamified rewards of “coins” and “gems” to personalize their virtual companion. The company is one of many developing chatbots for virtual romantic and sexual relationships.
Kurzweil imagines virtual sex as a kind of digital upgrade to ordinary human sexual intercourse, arguing that lines between simulated partners and real lovers will disappear and that “once the simulated partner is as capable, sensual, and responsive as a real human virtual partner, who’s to say that the simulated virtual partner isn’t a real, albeit virtual, person?”3131xKurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 21.
The attraction of a having disembodied virtual companion or lover, however, borrows its force from our deeper sense of the nature and value of a having an embodied human relationship of friendship, sexual intimacy, or romantic love. The chatbot friend or lover appeals, if it does, only because it taps into our profound longing for an authentic connection with another living, embodied human being—in all the depth, wonder, and fragility of true human connection.
Intersubjective states of care, understanding, pleasure, and love are expressed and shared through the living bodies of the beloveds: the subtleties of their gestures, their posture, their eyes, their facial expressions, their touch (where the body is both touching and touched at the same time), their caresses and kisses, the rhythm of their breath and heartbeat, even the comfortable stillness and silence shared together, when each feels that, here and now, nothing is lacking, and that the other feels the same. As Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”3232xLudwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), section 173. First published 1953. 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.
Virtual companions can provide lifelike simulacra of some aspects of human companionship. But the simulation only “works” if we allow ourselves to forget, or to simply not care about, the underlying meaning and value—including all the beauty, poignancy, vulnerability, and sadness—of genuine human relationships. To believe that I am “in love” with a virtual companion, I must forget the fact that the machine-lover, despite its behavioral outputs, is not a living, embodied, mortal creature, as I am.
Picture, as vividly as you can, the phenomenology of swimming in the sea: plunging through the salty, surging waters; the sun glinting at countless points on the ever-changing surface of the swelling waves; the constantly shifting smells and tastes; the effervescent tingle of the wind on wet flesh when you surface; the grains of sand clinging to your skin; the rhythm of the breath and pulse; and the dynamic and proprioceptive awareness of your bodily action in ongoing responsiveness to the world in which you are immersed—literally!
Two features jump out here. First, it is part of the meaning of our experience of bodily agency in nonvirtual reality that we—our living bodies—are entangled, in communion, with the wider concrete world. Our embodied agency is a form of ongoing coupling and responsiveness of the living body and material reality, including the reality of other living bodies with whom we share experience. Second, no matter how many descriptions we might collect about this experience, we know that there is always something more we could see, feel, focus on, perceive, savor. Through active, expressive, exploratory self-movement, our bodies intertwine with and, at the same time, reveal the concrete world—a world that is boundless, overflowing, in perceptible qualities and nuances.
Could we completely replicate the lush subjective detail of an experience of swimming in the ocean using virtual avatars in a computer-generated seascape fed to us by headsets, brain chips, or nanobots? Perhaps. But even if we could do this, the virtual experience wouldn’t have the same significance.
Virtual experience will likely one day provide hyper-realistic multisensory experiences of natural environments (among other things). But every representation within the VR world has been engineered, precisely, for human use. That is why those representations exist: Every granular detail is there for us to consume. But this is not how we understand our deepest encounters with the natural world, encounters that involve at least as much resistance or indifference to our desires as fulfillment of them. Consider the following passage from the farmer-philosopher-poet Wendell Berry:
To walk in the woods, mindful only of the physical extent of it, is to go perhaps as owner, or as knower, confident of one’s own history and of one’s own importance. But to go there, mindful as well of its temporal extent, of the age of it, and of all that led up to the present life of it, and of all that may follow it, is to feel oneself a flea in the pelt of a great living thing, the discrepancy between its life and one’s own so great that it cannot be imagined. One has come into the presence of mystery. After all the trouble one has taken to be a modern man, one has come back under the spell of a primitive awe, wordless and humble.3333xWendell Berry, “A Native Hill,” in World-Ending Fire (London, England: Penguin Press, 2018), 29.
What Berry is describing is sometimes called an experience of nature’s sublime aspect. This isn’t just a feeling triggered by certain stimuli. Rather, the experience of the natural world as sublime is an emotionally charged way of seeing or understanding the true relation of self and nature: We are small, finite, vulnerable creatures in the presence of something vast, ancient, powerful beyond human measure.
Our experience of many of the things of greatest value and meaning in human life has this underlying or tacit assumption: They have not been simply engineered by others—put there—wholly for our subjective gratification. Instead, these experiences involve contact with something that transcends human making and understanding, that resists exhaustive representation in words or models or data, and that calls for a certain attitude of awe, wonder, humility, even reverence: The awestruck amazement of holding your infant child for the first time. The pregnant silence at the side of the body of a loved one who, just months before, shared a life with you, but now has passed away. The unimaginable vastness of the night sky or the power of ferocious waves upon the coastline.
In my own case, I remember the strangely haunting experience of looking out of the window of a small propeller plane in Montana and seeing countless stars splashed across the arch of the night sky and the faint, almost spectral pulse of the Aurora Borealis. Suddenly, I, and everything human, felt so small, fragile, transitory, and utterly surrounded by mystery.
In these experiences of wonder, we sense that we are witnessing, participating in, and intertwining with something immense, strange, measureless—a dimension of reality that outruns our human attempts to achieve complete mastery and control, total clarity and explanation. The experience of wonder extends to the very fact of nature’s existence, and the existence and particularity of our own bodies, as William James observed:
One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the fact of one’s being there, of one’s queer bodily shape in the darkness (a thing to make children scream at, as Stevenson says), of one’s fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.3434xWilliam James, “Some Problems of Philosophy,” in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce Wilshire (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984), 6.
Human beings are the creatures who can come to a self-conscious awareness of their being—their embodiment and rootedness in a concrete world—and can try to understand it, and give it expression in poetry, literature, and philosophy.
An ancient line of spiritual and philosophical thinking, running from the book of Job to German and English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and modern naturalist writings, holds that the proper human posture toward our own living being and the being of nature is not a thirst for control or mastery but a receptivity to what is sublime, mysterious, majestic, terrifying, transcendent, elusive, beyond and larger than us. Virtual worlds, however, are attractive precisely because they promise us a safer reality of more easily controllable and consumable digital experience, a world without limitations, where we can finally be “gods,” as Chalmers says. This is the antithesis of reverence.
Of course, virtual experiences of awe, wonder, reverence, and the sublime can, in theory, be artificially produced in users, given the right technology. Some VR researchers are attempting to do just this. We would then be “gods” who fabricate the “wonder” of our own digital pseudocosmos. But the virtualized awe, wonder, reverence, and sense of sublimity would not arise from the individual’s connection to a reality transcending human purposes. Like the simulated care and love of a virtual companion, VR can only give us ersatz awe, sublimity, and reverence, triggered by sophisticated technology. In the end, there is nothing within the world of VR that cannot be quantified, computed, and run on machine-executable algorithms.
Any perceptive, thoughtful, well-lived human life involves at least some sense of wonder, awe, and reverence in the face of an immense cosmos and the mystery of our vulnerable, fleeting embodied presence therein. Without this sense, life would be impoverished. A life of virtualized human experience in which we can be “gods” will always miss something essential to human fulfillment.
Virtual Reality or the Virtue of Receptivity
Virtual utopias offer to replace our connection to an open-ended, risky, and profoundly mysterious world with something artificial, convenient, efficient, safer, and more immediately thrilling and engaging. These futuristic visions presuppose a certain view of what it is to be human, to experience things, and to flourish and find fulfillment. Although that picture is deeply flawed, it is, sadly, thoroughly in tune with wider cultural assumptions about the self and value. Proponents of a virtualized future, though they present themselves as radical and visionary, are actually legitimating a way of life into which we are already sinking: a disturbingly Huxleyan existence of comfortable, safe, entertaining, and often solitary consumption of digital content. To hazard reckless sociological speculation, it seems that many of us are susceptible to the appeal of virtualized experiences because, for complex cultural and social reasons, we are already painfully disengaged from one another, anxious and uncertain about what has intrinsic significance in human life, and disconnected from nonhuman nature.
Yet we intuitively sense that something is lacking. The engineered experiences of a virtual world, do not really “augment” lives that are already full of meaningful connection. The person in a fulfilling relationship is unlikely to “date” Candy.ai, and the Himalayan mountain climber is unlikely to be tempted by the safer VR substitute. Rather, virtual experiences are attractive because they promise to fill the place of missing, meaningful connections to other people and the wider world. As Yuval Noah Harari notes in Homo Deus, VR provides a compensation to those whose agency has diminished and whose sense of reality has lost its depth and color—showing up as “drab reality.”
To be properly receptive to the fleeting beauty of other people and the strange majesty of the natural world is an achievement—indeed, a kind of virtue. It is something we can fail at, and whose absence can diminish our lives. We should not retreat into the purported safety, convenience, and insulation of virtual relationships and virtual worlds. Instead, we should use advanced technologies selectively, where they make good sense in light of the kind of creatures we are, while at the same time developing a greater openness and attunement to what James called the “teeming and dramatic richness of the concrete world.”3535xWilliam James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in William James: The Essential Writings, 26.
James himself held that many of us live in a kind of distracted, somnambulistic state, sleepwalking through important parts of our lives and neglecting that “teeming and dramatic richness.” Many of us—myself certainly included—struggle to be fully alive to the other people and to the concrete world into which we are born, and from which we inevitably depart. Conscious attention and attunement to this vibrant reality is not just a nice feeling. It is a kind of moral clarity or vision, the opposite of a life of distraction, entertainment, somnambulism. Indeed, it is a kind of wisdom.
Perhaps the most important, and most disturbing, aspect of utopian dreams of virtual worlds is the way they encourage us to reimagine ourselves, our possibilities, and our world in the image and likeness of our machines. And perhaps the most important thing they can teach us is that life in a virtual world, however convenient, safe, and entertaining, would lack something essential to simply being human.