Total Artificial Reality

There are already beginnings of crude attempts of “virtual reality”. With the advent of more and more powerful computing machines and video and sound technology very basic virtual reality already exists as these virtual environment things and programs and video games like flight simulators or as cruel savage violence.

Present instances

There are also games like chess or gambling or being a driver in a motor race etc. Each within its own environment instances of realities. There already exists things too like satellite navigation and self driven cars. Well that's how I see it virtual reality can be based just as well on some “true” outside higher cause and effect. Of course your environment has to be interactive if not you would be passive like watching a movie listening to music and on the radio you in effect being non-existent.

My contribution here would be to theorise on how and what might actually be possible in the not too  terrible distant future.

Machine interface

All these examples are for now from external bodily stimuli, to do it properly you must directly interface intimately with the nervous system itself, sensory so well as motor neurons. Anything conceivable could then be imitated and experienced.

A brute force approach is suggested where the device is connected directly to all the human's the nerve endings and how it could really be experienced as reality and indiscernible in the outside physical universe material world. It might be possible in the extreme to have a “matrix” situation. Scary.

Each nerve ending save those in the brain itself must be physically connected to a gigantic of a monster of a computer. Indeed it is predicted that soon there will be infinitely superior light (laser) and quantum computers.

Some possibilities

Speculating as in the movies of not only a possible feasible method of creating an alternative reality but perhaps even to induce and experiment with higher levels of consciousness.

Ultimately indistinguishable even enhanced you can live in great bliss in paradise unknowing or in heaven in the clouds. Criminals could be punished with hell and that hopefully not for eternity! In this case it could be possible.

Manipulating memories

In this kind of way to also change a person's memories I think you will have to physically interact even to the core, to the physical organic material and the brain tissue itself.

Although I don't really believe it can be done to erase and implant actually change memories like this. Maybe if the person is placed in such a machine at birth what a horrible prospect.

With time

In the distant future perhaps almost on a molecular level, already laser micro-surgery could physically bond each nerve. Already there are medical operations with nearing such kind of precision.

One would eventually then be unable to discern or differentiate “real” reality in the end it has to be a matter of faith. The concept of living within dreams without even knowing it adds new dimension and many unheard of possibilities.

At last,

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
– Edgar Allen Poe