Chapter 69 13.3 A god who visits the world he created out of polygons

A few years ago, right under my nose, a man with tousled hair created an artificial world.It was actually a simulated scene, in which a dome of fern rose above an arabesque floor of maroon tiles, accompanied by a towering red chimney.This world has no physical form.Two hours ago, it had been nothing more than a hellish world imagined in the man's mind.Now, it's a fantasy wonderland looping on two Silicon Graphics computers. The man put on a pair of magical eyepieces, and then climbed into his imaginary world.I followed behind and climbed in. As far as I know, this visit to one's dream in the summer of 1989 was the first time someone created an instant fantasy and invited others to share it.

The man is Jalen Lanier, a chubby guy with a Jamaican Rastafarian dreadlocks and a funny giggle that always reminds me of the big bird from Sesame Street gentlemen.He doesn't care about coming in and out of the dream world, and talks about the trip like someone who's studied "the other" for years.The magic goggles and gloves used in experiments in the past are displayed on the four walls of Jay's office, which are already fossil-grade antiques.The rest of the lab is filled with the usual computer hardware and software gear, including soldering irons, floppy disks, soda cans, and tights tangled with various cables and plugs that are riddled with holes.

Agencies such as NASA have been developing this technique for generating accessible worlds for several years.Many people have entered imaginary worlds without a physical body.These are some worlds that exist for research.However, Jay invented a low-cost system by doing and exploring, and its operation effect was even better than those of the academy devices, and what he built was an extremely unscientific "wild world".Jalen gave his research results a famous name: virtual reality. To enter virtual reality, visitors don a suit with numerous cables that monitor major body movements.The outfit also includes a mask that communicates head movement signals.Inside the mask are two small color monitors, through which the participant is able to gain the perception of a three-dimensional reality.Seen from behind the mask, the visitor appears to be in a three-dimensional virtual reality.

Most readers are familiar with the concept of "computer-generated reality".Because in the years since Jaylen's demo, the everyday promise of virtual reality has become regular fodder for magazine and TV news features.This surreality was repeatedly emphasized, and eventually the Wall Street Journal used the headline "electronic hallucinogens" to describe virtual reality. I must admit that the word "psychedelic" was exactly how I felt when I first saw Jaylen disappear into his world.A few friends and I stood on the sidelines as the 29-year-old company founder, wearing an electrified respirator mask, staggered slowly across the floor, his mouth gaping open.He twisted his body into a new position, pushing the air with one hand but catching nothing.Like someone familiar with slow motion, he shifts his body from one contortion to another as he explores his new-forged world.He crawled cautiously across the carpet, pausing now and then to examine some unseen spectacle in the air before him.It's kind of weird watching him do it.His actions follow some distant inner logic, a completely different reality.Meanwhile, Jaylen would let out a cheer from time to time, breaking the peace around him.

"Hey! This limestone base is empty! You can climb in and see the bottom of the ruby!" he exclaimed excitedly.The base was created by Jay himself, and the top is decorated with red gems, but Jay didn't pay much attention to what the bottom of these rubies would look like when he designed it.A complete world is too complex for the human brain.The simulated world can demonstrate these complexities.Jaylen kept reporting various details that his "god" hadn't foreseen in the world he created.Jaylen's virtual world is like any other simulation: the only way to predict what's going to happen is to run it.

Simulation is nothing new.The same goes for being in it.The toy world was created by humans so long ago that it can even be seen as a symbolic sign of the emergence of humans, because archaeologists often regard toys and games in burials as evidence of human culture.There is no doubt that the strong desire to make toys emerges very early in individual development.Children are immersed in their own miniature artificial world.Strictly speaking, dolls and trains belong to the microcosm of simulation.The same is true of many of the great works of art in our culture: Persian miniature art, realistic polychrome landscapes, Japanese tea gardens, and perhaps all the novels and plays.These tiny worlds.

However, in the computer age -- or rather, in the simulation age, we're creating these tiny worlds on a much larger bandwidth, and making them more interactive and more in-depth.We've evolved from static figurines to dynamic "SimCity".Some simulations, such as Disneyland, are not so small anymore. In fact, anything can be a simulation if you give it energy, possible behavior, and room to grow.We live in a culture where millions of objects can be simulated, all it takes is a little intelligence and electricity.The voice of the operator heard in the telephone exchange is simulated. In the commercial, the car turns into a tiger, and the artificial tree and the moving robot crocodile together become a simulated jungle in the leisure park.We have turned a blind eye to this.

In the early 1970s, the Italian novelist Umberto Eco was driving around the United States, doing his best to observe the low-brow attractions on the roadside.Eco is a semiotician who specializes in interpreting those inconspicuous symbols.He finds a subtle message floating around America somewhere between a simulation and a sort of reality.For example, Coca-Cola, a national icon, advertises itself as "the real thing" in its ads.The Wax Museum is Eco's favorite textbook.The more vulgar they are, the better, against the temple-like velvet drapes and soft voices of commentary.Eco discovers that the wax museum is full of beautiful replicas of real people (Brigitte Bardot in a bikini) and fictional characters (Ben-Hur in a chariot).Whether it is history or legend, it has been exquisitely portrayed by realists.In this way, there is no boundary between truth and fiction.Plastic artists spared no effort to render characters that do not really exist with extreme realism.Mirrors also project figures from one room onto another, further blurring the distinction between reality and fiction.Traveling between San Francisco and Los Angeles, Eco saw seven wax versions of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece "The Last Supper".And every version, every wax figure that "makes people feel reborn after watching it", has tried its best to surpass other versions in faithfully restoring this fictional oil painting.

Eco wrote that he had embarked on a "hyperreal journey to find instances in which the American imagination needed a vehicle of real existence, and for that it had to forge absolute fiction." Eco Call this absolutely fictional reality hyperreal.In hyperreality, as Eco writes, "absolute fiction is presented as real." In fact, the world of perfect simulations and computer toys is hyper-real.They are so thoroughly fictional that in the end they take on a certain truth as a whole. The French pop-culture philosopher Jean Baudrillard begins his little book, Emulation, with these two tightly wound passages:

If we can take the story of Borges as the most wonderful allegory for simulation (in this story, the imperial cartographers draw up a map with great detail, which is exactly the same as the empire's territory. But then The decline of the empire also witnessed that this map gradually became damaged, and finally completely destroyed, leaving only a few strands of remnants faintly discernible in the desert...), so for us today, this fable has just gone one step further. Complete reincarnation. Today, the so-called abstraction is no longer limited to maps, twins, mirror images or concepts.The so-called simulation is no longer limited to territories, reference objects or entities.This is an age modeled on the real without origin or real existence: an age of hyperreality.Territory no longer pre-existed the map, nor could it outlive the map.From now on, it is the map that precedes the territory—the simulacra comes first, and the map generates the territory.If we want to revisit the previous fable today, it will be that the fragments of the territory are gradually broken along with the map.The real, not the map, the remnants of which survive here and there—in a desert no longer of imperial territory but of our own—a real desert.

In this real desert, we're busy building hyper-real paradises.What we are referring to is the model (that map). Artificial Life is a book that celebrates an era in which simulations are so plentiful that we have to see them as alive.Author Stephen Levy reformulates Busiar's point of view in the book: "The map is not the territory; the map is the territory." However, this simulative territory is actually blank.This absolute fiction is so obvious that it remains invisible to us.We don't yet have a taxonomy to distinguish the subtle but important differences between simulations. The word "simulacra" is often accompanied by a long list of synonyms with similar meanings: imitation, counterfeit, counterfeit, imitation, artificial, defective, simulated illusion, mirror image, replica, illusion, disguise, affectation, imitation , illusion, pretense, impersonation, role-playing, phantom, shadow, sham, mask, disguise, substitute, substitute, fabrication, parody, imitation, falsehood, liar, lie.The word simulacrum carries a heavy fate. The ancient Greek Epicurean school of radical philosophers deduced the existence of atoms and had an unusual theory of vision.They believe that every object emits some kind of "phantom".The same concept is called "simulacra" in Latin.According to Luke Laishi, the Roman Epicurean, you can think of simulacrum as "the mirror image of a thing, some kind of skin permanently peeled off from the surface of the object, flying around in the air. go". These simulacra are tangible yet ethereal things.An invisible simulacrum emanates from an object and impinges on the eye to produce vision.The reflection of an object in a mirror proves the existence of a simulacra: how else could there be two (identical) objects, one of which is transparent?The Epicureans firmly believed that simulacra can enter the senses of people through the pores of their bodies when they are asleep, and thus produce phantoms (mirrors) in dreams.Art and painting capture the phantoms emanating from the original objects as flypaper captures gnats. So, in this sense, a simulacra is really a derived entity, secondary to the original origin, a kind of mirror image that exists parallel to the original — or, in modern terms, a virtual reality. In Roman, "simulacrum" is used to refer to a statue or image animated by ghosts or spirits. In 1382, when the first English-language Bible appeared, a word was needed to describe the living and sometimes whispering statues we deify, and the Greek ancestor of "simulacrum," the word "idol," borrowed machine into English. Some of the robots of these ancient temples were also quite ingeniously designed.They have movable heads and limbs, and pipes that carry sound from behind to in front.The ancients were much more mature than we give them credit for.No one regards these idols as the real gods they represent.But on the other hand, no one ignores the existence of these gods.The idol is really moving, talking; it has its own behavior.In this sense, the idols are neither real nor fake—they are illusions of reality.In Eco's terms, they are hyperreal, like Murphy Brown, a fictional character on television, treated as a kind of reality. In fact, postmodern urbanites like us spend a lot of time immersed in this hyper-reality every day: talking on the phone, watching TV, using computers, and listening to the radio.We attach great importance to them.Do not believe?You can try not mentioning the news you learned from TV or other media while eating!The simulacrum has become the territory in which we live.Overwhelmingly, this hyper-reality is real to us.We can move in and out of hyperreality with ease. A few months after finishing the first real-time world, Jalen Lanier built another hyper-real set.I entered this world of idols and simulacrums shortly after his completion.This artificial reality consists of a circular railroad track approximately one city block in diameter and a chest-high locomotive.The ground is pink and the train is light gray.There were other things, here and there, like countless scattered toys.The whining little train and the other toys were built of polyhedrons, with no graceful curves to speak of.The color is single and bright.When I turned my head, the screen transitions became jerky.The shadows are very sharp.The sky is an empty dark blue, without the slightest sense of distance and space.I had the feeling of being turned into a cartoon character in Toontown. A gloved hand outlined in tiny polygonal patches of color floats before my eyes.That's my hand.I moved the incorporeal thing.When I mentally visualize the hand as a point, I start flying in the direction my finger is pointing.I flew towards the little train engine, sat on it or floated on it, I couldn't tell.I reached out my floating hand and yanked a lever on the train.The train started to circle and I could see the pink landscape passing me by.At some point, I jumped off the train on the brim of an upside-down top hat.I stood there watching the little train creak itself on the circular track.I bent down to grab the top hat, and as soon as my hand touched it, it turned into a white rabbit. I heard someone laughing out of the world, like a snicker from heaven.This is a little joke of God. The disappearance of this top hat is real, in a hyper-real way.The thing that looked like a train really started, and finally stopped for real.It literally drives in circles.When I'm flying, I'm also literally crossing a certain distance.To someone looking at me from out of this world, I'm a person circling stiffly in a carpeted office, acting as weird as Jaylen.But within this world, these surreal events actually happened.Whoever goes in can prove this point, and there is evidence recognized by both parties.In the parallel world of simulacra, they are reality.