Beyond Teleportation

Your screen in any place

All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.

— H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

Everybody talks about the simulation hypothesis, but nobody does anything about it. Sometimes, it seems like the discussion never ends: How do we know all the world isn’t just images beamed into our eyes, or representations wholly internal to our brains (if we even really have those), or something else that doesn’t involve real physical objects? Well, there’s one way to get enough certainty to end the discussion, and that’s by making sure, in the sense of “make sure he’s dead” in the joke about the hunters.

That’s why, last year, I decided to become my own Matrix lord, experimenting with infrastructure to subjectively work in arbitrary real and imaginary places, while in a mundane and exoteric sense I remained in my apartment. Concretely, I used a Quest 3 with Immersed VR and mostly custom backgrounds from various sources. The basic functionality was provided by these tools, but getting it working in a smooth and wide-ranging way involved surprisingly many annoying implementation details, which I’ll leave for a future post. That post will also explain why I’ve lost the habit, and why I don’t overall recommend it.

Still, despite many limitations, “type a description of a physical environment into a computer and then be inside that environment while working on monitors” is now something that can be done at all, and I want to give some reflections on that.

I find that my sense of where I am in the world deeply affects my mindset. (I think that’s true of people generally, though maybe not to the same extent.) On the most basic level, being in a place that’s ugly, or too familiar, creates a sense of unease that feels like it interferes with focus, and maybe just conditions you to not do what you’re doing in that place. Locations like libraries can also have implied social expectations embedded that affect what kind of thinking it’s natural to do there. So the prospect of getting this kind of value from having freedom of surroundings made it seem worth trying.

You can get some of that freedom in real life, by traveling and rearranging your surroundings, but it comes with serious costs. And there’s limits to where you can go at all, like having to stay on Earth.

The virtual world, in contrast, has a built-in promise of teleportation. I believe that the primal urge to teleport is fundamental to the human psyche, though overlooked by most who have tried to analyze that horrid labyrinth. Man is essentially the teleporting animal, but can’t teleport, and this paradox constantly cuts at our hearts. Most other drives can be seen as expressions of the teleportation drive — for example, the desire to escape suffering is experienced as a kind of wanting to teleport one’s mind away from the suffering and its source. And beyond teleportation, which is the ability to visit places where you are not, is a higher power that you might call “turboportation,” which is the ability to visit places that are not.

For one who seeks to practice such teleportation, there are several sources of places to subjectively inhabit. To get the necessary panoramic imagery, I tried the following, roughly ordered from grass-touching to galaxy-brained.

The first, trivial source is “passthrough,” which allows one to see one’s physical surroundings, but overlaid with virtual screens. While that’s very sci-fi, and builds useful intuitions about the brain’s own workings, I also believe it to be a vulgar violation of the spirit of this post.

Next, there are a few collections of existing panoramic images on the web. Wikimedia Commons has some good stuff — many churches and cathedrals, for example — though editing docs in them feels strange. You might end up seeing a lot of Dortmund and its industrial ruins, just because someone there provided a lot of panorama photos.

Then, with a little more use of tools, there’s Google’s collection of Street View and Photo Sphere images. This gives you access to a large category of real places. Mostly, it doesn’t let you get away from roads, but it’s great for drone photos.

Finally, there’s the terrifying possibility of dwelling in AI slop. Regular image generators don’t get 360 degree panoramas right, so you have to either accept there being a reality seam at the back of your head that you’re always vaguely aware of, so that what’s there depends on which way you turn your head, or you have to use a specialized panorama generation tool. The results are often dreamlike — you can prompt for types of places that don’t exist, and the details often won’t make sense, especially on close inspection. But dreaming can be good, and the range of possibilities becomes vast.

Even though the results were never quite convincing at the time, I’m surprised by how much my memories of them feel like real places I spent time in — minimalist temples with alien sculptures, terraced gardens with glowing foliage, enormous utopian parks, artificial oceanic cities inhabited by… half-assed blob people… and… no, best not mention…

There’s a 19th-century French novel that’s on my mind sometimes, called “À rebours,” sometimes translated “Against Nature.” It’s about a neurotic aristocrat, named Jean des Esseintes, who tires of the world and retreats into a mansion he outfits with the best aesthetic “experience machines” the technology of his time is capable of, spending time with an undersea simulation room, a scent organ to play symphonies on, and unreasonably specific opinions on Latin prose style. I found it a lot better than most relatable introvert content.

The author, Joris-Karl Huysmans, invented Des Esseintes as a cautionary tale. But at long last, we’ve made it possible to become Des Esseintes, secede from physical reality, and flip the bird to Green. (Not even the real bird.) I’m not sure how to feel about that, but for some instructions, see the next post in this series!