Would you like to experience your fondest memories in virtual reality?

[Anung Un Rama]

Inception

 

[ralphc1]

A lot of that nuance is us, ourselves, though. When I first saw my favourite movie, decades ago now, it was a younger, more idealistic person watching and the memory is the memory of a different person watching it. You add some twenty five years of experience, cynicism, and growth onto that person and suddenly, while the movie is the same, the person themselves is the same - that being the phenomenal character of experience. My memories are wonderful because they capture a moment in time where I was different and reliving the experience, however much of the moment it captures or even improves, the person experiencing it is long gone.

There's a lovely A.E. Housman poem which, I think captures the point I'm making. I'll post it here.


XXXV
When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.

Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here's the fair,
But where's the lost young man?

--- To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three
The heart of man has long been sore
And long 'tis like to be.



It's a long way of saying "you can never go home again." I think however perfectly we recapture a moment, the part of the moment that we ourselves represent will never come back - and the phenomenal character of the moment is lost.

The way I see it you would see it not as it really is but as you saw it at the time. A memory of a 5 year old would have people bigger than life. Even a memory of your first girlfriend would have her looking much better than she actually did.

The reason "you can't go home again" is because nothing is the same as you remember it. When you go home via your memories, everything would be exactly as you remembered it because it's taken directly from your memories.

 

[TankAbbott4Eva]

I'd like to have a VR headset that would transport me back to a rave I was at, along with the state of mind i was experiencing at the time.

 

[KhabibTheBeagle]

No, because they'll never be as good as we remember them to be, and we'll only be left disappointed.

 

[Chesten_Hesten]

 

[Cojopi Extomino]

The show's only gonna get interesting when a bad guy exploits the tech to give people false memories, wake them up and do his bidding. An actual way to reprogram people and he could unknowingly have the lead herself do his bidding by bringing these people back.

Until then sounds like Haven but with less mystery.

 

[Zer]

I was reading through that infamous reddit series by Mother Horse Eyes or whatever and one thing it touches on is a future where people just hook up to virtual reality for years and years at a time, to the point where their bodies decay and rot and they can't be reintegrated back into society once they're disconnected. Anyway I was thinking I'd be totally down for that. Living in an imaginary world instead of harsh reality

Strange Days is an underrated 90's film that kind of deals with this. It's a future where you can mentally relive recorded experiences through some tech. So if some sherbro recorded himself banging 5 10's at one time on a bed of million dollar bills you could experience it as if you were him. Similarly though traumatic events could be experienced in the same way. Again, if that tech was around I'd be hitting it 24/7

 

[BB in Crazy!!!!]

Honestly it depends on the memory. I would like to see them, but expect to be disappointed in many of them. But some would be a nice surprise. For example, skydiving. I at least know how it turns out and it was amazing. I think that memory would hold up because I only ever did it once. Losing my virginity though, lol I would pass on that memory, very underwhelming even as a memory hehe.

 

[BoogerDawson]

Combination of this + Holodeck on Star Trek.

 

[no fat chicks]

like most I would re live all the past female conquests

 

[That209]

I would seriously just re-live certain sexual experiences over and over til I died.

The firsts would be the most exciting.

First time I had sex
First time a girl swallowed
First time in a public place
First time getting caught
First time fisting a chick

Actually scratch that last one. It was fun once but no desire to do that again.

You haven’t done any of those things.

 

[Zookeeper Gabe]

I saw that episode of Black Mirror. Fuck no

 

[Mmaprovost]

I feel like it seems like something that would be wonderful but would actually strip a lot of the wonder out of the memories. Kind of like when they remake your favourite show or video game, or adapt a lot of books to movies, and they're just wanting in some way... What we expect when we have something like this happen is to relive the experience of the thing, with all of those nuances and textures of the phenomenal moment which made it wonderful. What we get is the shell of the experience without that phenomenal character again, and it just seems hollow.

I'm going to go with no, however tempting it would be.

You're killin the vibe

 

[marioh]

Have to go with no.
Good/bad.....it's done and in the past. Live for today and be prepared for tomorrow.

 

[Mike]

That sounds really unhealthy and depressing to me. No thanks.

 

[HunterAcosta]

Shitty thing about this is that goes both ways. They(evil individual, corp, govt, all of the above) could implant sadistic memories into you or make you relive your most terrible memories. That would be hell.

 

[ralphc1]

Shitty thing about this is that goes both ways. They(evil individual, corp, govt, all of the above) could implant sadistic memories into you or make you relive your most terrible memories. That would be hell.

I re-live my worst memories almost daily.

 

[James T. Kirk]

There's nothing in my life I wanna experience again.

 

[bushman505]

I would seriously just re-live certain sexual experiences over and over til I died.

The firsts would be the most exciting.

First time I had sex
First time a girl swallowed
First time in a public place
First time getting caught
First time fisting a chick

Actually scratch that last one. It was fun once but no desire to do that again.

....the first time you were fisted.

 

[Not A Theist]

The way I see it you would see it not as it really is but as you saw it at the time. A memory of a 5 year old would have people bigger than life. Even a memory of your first girlfriend would have her looking much better than she actually did.

The reason "you can't go home again" is because nothing is the same as you remember it. When you go home via your memories, everything would be exactly as you remembered it because it's taken directly from your memories.

You're kind of touching on my point here, but not taking it far enough. You're perfectly right that at five years old you would be shorter, and VR would be able to emulate that shortness - but would it be able to emulate childish wonder? The "first time" effect? A general difference in demeanor between you and your five year old self? These are a tremendous part of what makes the memory - not just the physical characteristics, but the mental make up and the character of experience that leads to. That is the phenomenal character of experience and it is the substratum of how we experience the world, and VR can't really emulate that. It can emulate the environment, but it can't emulate a lot of what is importantly us - especially with memory.

Consider this thought experiment. Take a given experience - going on a roller coaster or something. Now consider two distinct ways in which you might have that experience. First, you have that experience on a day where you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, you're in a foul mood, you don't want to be out, you resent going to the theme park, etc. Second, you wake up in a great mood, everything seems wonderful, the theme park seems like an awesome idea. Pretend your experience with the theme park was one or the other - how would that affect your memory of the event? The externally same experience would be either a wonderful memory or a terrible one. What do we take from this? In even a simple, day to day way, the difference between the same event can be massive.

Now take that further - take a wide eyed, optimistic youth and add decades of cynicism, responsibility, paying taxes, heavy drinking, whatever, self doubt, etc, onto the person. The person experiencing is different so even if you could literally warp that 30 something year old person back a few decades and stick them in their old body, they would not be able to re-live that experience. The experience could be same, but they wouldn’t be different.

This is why I think that, however good it sounds, VR recreations of old memories would be empty, and even strip old memories of their wonder. Experiencing the events over would leave the person realizing that it was only that particular moment in time that made the event wonderful, and that that moment is lost – and it would strip the memory of its wonder. VR can create the outside trappings of the experience but, much like Housman’s poem asks, “where’s the lost young man?” He is long gone – and a VR recreation can’t bring him back.