Virtualization – A side note
The idea of artificial reality is nothing new. It is nothing more than our imagination, our body’s way of safely simulating events and predicting outcomes. Quite a bit of work has been done in linking our ability to simulate and the phenomenon of our consciousness together. The philosopher Daniel Dennett, has suggested that our brain acts as a parallel processor that keeps our bodies working. On top of this, it has built a virtual serial processor, which is our consciousness. Richard Dawkins likens this consciousness to a virtual Operating System.
I would like to expand on this idea a little. According to Dawkins (although its purely speculative, its nonetheless very probable) consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself also. Thus, from the analogy above, our consciousness, or the simulation of the world, acts as an operating system. Now this idea works very well when we think of day to day happenings and the possible outcomes to a given situation. For example, if its cloudy outside, you can imagine that it might rain. This is because our operating system’s resources are the various phenomena of the world, and since our consciousness can simulate the world, we can make a valid prediction by running a program that uses these resources.
However I feel that the scope of this simulation is too limited. Our consciousness is far more flexible. This is why I prefer to use the word virtualization instead of simulation when speaking of what our mind really accomplishes when it imagines something. This is in deference to a software known as VMware (or Virtual Machine ware), which really exemplifies imagination. This is because the brain can simulate things that do not hold true in the world. In terms of operating systems, a program that runs on Windows will most probably not run on Linux. In terms of structures, they are almost like two different worlds. However VMware can virtualize another operating system, and run both operating systems concurrently. On top of that, compatible information can imported from the host to the virtual operating system and vice-versa. This is very much what happens when you read a science-fiction story. We make sense of situations that involve faster than light travel, aliens etc and use our own logic to predict the outcome of the story. Thus the artificial reality we virtualize is mounted on top of our own and can be unmounted at will. I’ve already discussed the significance of such an ability.
In my next philosophy article, I shall discuss imagination’s relative, emotion.
