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Digital Philosophy

Is VR Meaningful Escapism?

Amir Haj-Bolouri enquires into possible meaning through technology.

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) is considered the perfect technology for extending the experiences we have in the physical world. Through it, we can represent and simulate the past, the present and the future. And through the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, modern VR experiences are not only realistically convincing, but also smart. As such, IVR experiences can increasingly be a creative product of human imagination. Moreover, the IVR experience is ‘immersive’ in the way that it turns the user into a ‘being-in-the-virtual-world’ – that is, an embodied avatar, dynamically present, and capable of accomplishing ‘magic’ – teleportation across virtual worlds, walking through walls, hiding inside furniture, or generally, exercising the god-like power of being able to define the (virtual) reality around us. The immersive effect is arguably dependent on the sensory configuration of IVR technology, in that it provides an enclosed visual field for the user, headphones that cancel out the sound of the outside world, and haptic devices that can provide sensory feedback loops of touch, pain, heat or cold.

However, with the possibilities that IVR increasingly affords us also come existential questions, and thoughts about the distinction between what’s real and what is a layer of illusion. One might wonder where reality begins and ends, especially when IVR experiences will begin to extend the world we engage with on a daily basis. David Chalmers argues in Reality+ (2022) that virtual reality is genuine reality because we can live meaningful lives there; and increasingly, we will. Subsequently, Chalmers invokes questions such as: What is reality, anyway? How can we live a meaningful life? And how do we know there is an external world independent of human experience?

Of course, through the ages, philosophers have questioned our conceptions of reality. One famous example is provided by Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History (1981), of a ‘brain in a vat’. Here he raises the possibility that your world is a simulation created by some powerful technology controlled by a mad scientist. Other contemporary philosophers, such as Nick Bostrom, actively argue that we are living in a simulation – a hypothesis that, among other things, questions the tendency to rely upon a materialistic worldview that identifies ‘reality’ through its tangibility and perceivability.

I don’t think we’re living in a simulation. Nor do I buy into the idea that we should be concerned about what is real or not, since, at the end of the day, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it in his 1927 masterwork Being & Time, we are all ‘being-in-the-world’ – that is to say, we’re already engaged with what we perceive real enough, in order to live a meaningful life.

Something that reinforces this claim is the fleeting feeling we all have when we want to escape reality due to unwanted experiences, uncomfortable feelings, pain, anxiety, boredom etc. This desire is generally referred to as ‘escapism’ – it urges us to engage with a broader ‘imaginary’ world that allows our mind to travel beyond ‘reality’. This is arguably an inborn human need – to escape the world in order to search for meaning, or create meaning, in worlds that matter to our self-perceptions. IVR facilitates such fantasy worlds. But are IVR experiences truly meaningful or not; and if they are, how?

Meaningfulness in the ‘World’

Before addressing the question whether or not the IVR experience is meaningful escapism, first I intend to do what academics do best, that is, to provide definitions of the words central to their argument. I will start by defining the words ‘meaning’, ‘meaningfulness’, and ‘world’, all of which I frame within a phenomenological perspective.

Exploring the Universe in VR © NASA/Chris Gunn Creative Commons 2

Phenomenology, a philosophical approach invented by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), focuses on our lived experiences as a way of understanding the world. Husserl’s disciple and successor in the phenomenological tradition, Heidegger (1889–1976), coined the German term Dasein (‘being there’) to refer to people, in order to stress our immersion within our world. ‘World’, in turn, Heidegger claimed, refers not a singular place, but to many specific worlds – for instance, the world of practices, the world of family relations, the world of imagination, and so on. According to Heidegger, we create and find networks of meaning that are fit for the practices in which we engage. According to this perspective, meaning is an aspect of our practices, as that which makes our experience of our actions intelligible to us. In other words, ‘meaning’ is the intelligibility to Dasein of an experience situated within a given world.

Following the phenomenological tradition, I will agree that ‘meaningfulness’ is the subjective quality of experienced meaning. However, in order for it to be meaningful, the experience cannot simply be intelligible : the experience must also matter to us. The experience must be significant for the ‘lifeworld’ of the person. The lifeworld of a person consists of all those things about which they have feelings, emotions, and concerns – all of which comprise the person’s mood. According to Heidegger, ‘mood’ is the various ways in which Dasein (a person) can experience meaningfulness. As Heidegger points out, the starting points of inquiry into meaningful experience should be what Dasein cares about when worrying, and what Dasein celebrates when rejoicing. An experience becomes meaningful for a person when their mood and the experience are aligned with their lifeworld – with what they care about. In other words, a meaningful experience is something that is of specific concern for Dasein, something that someone cares about – for example, what matters to him/her personally, or to his/her practice. As such, both care (being concerned for something) and mood disclose how an experience is meaningful for a person within their world. However, how we experience meaningfulness across worlds or within different worlds is not totally clear. And now IVR offers new worlds, and new ways of escaping the world we’re situated in.

Escaping the World

Attempting to escape the world in which we find ourselves is a phenomenon witnessed across all media. For instance, in the sci fi action movie Escape from New York (1982), we follow Kurt Russell’s character, Snake Plissken, an ex-soldier and current federal convict who is given twenty-four hours to rescue the President of the USA from a New York now turned into a prison filled with violence and chaos. Plissken wants to redeem himself by rescuing the President, but he must escape NY to do so. As such, the movie provides an excellent illustration of how difficult yet simultaneously urgent and tempting it is to escape the world!

The urge for escapism is, as I say, arguably an intrinsic feature of Dasein. The word ‘escape’ has its origin in the Latin excappare, which literally means ‘to get out of one’s cape’ – in other words, leaving your pursuer holding just your cape. Escapism is often thought of as a mental diversion from unpleasant or boring aspects of life, typically conducted through imagination or entertainment.

According to a ‘negative’ view of escapism, people run away from the reality at hand due to low life satisfaction. In this vein the psychologist Andrew Evans (This Virtual Life: Escapism and Simulation in Our Media World, 2001) classifies escapism as a type of avoidance of real world problems in a way that may lead to procrastination, denial, addiction to what we escape to, a psychosis of confusion between what is real and what is not, and possibly even suicide. On the other hand, there’s also a ‘positive’ view of escapism, which sees how imagination and technology allow people to escape from a narrow world into a broader one, allowing their minds to travel to places their body cannot go.

The stereotypical view of the negative form of escapism is that it occurs when people escape into a safer world to avoid difficult decisions or actions but this isn’t the whole story. Sometimes it’s healthy to provide a safe non-real space to escape to. A good example of this is when people escape from the physical to the virtual world for training purposes – for instance, in learning how to pilot a plane, or a submarine, or to perform medical procedures.

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Escaping to the Virtual World

The success of a virtual world can be determined by the degree of the sense of being-there it allows. A good virtual world experience provides people with a sense of belonging, and activities that are worthwhile, while being in forms that transcend the constraints of the physical world. Here people find themselves free to explore and express themselves without being restricted by the laws of physics.

There are many examples of how IVR can enlarge a person’s experience, whether it’s in the freedom of falling from a building without any injuries, to forms of community that feel meaningful for people affected by loneliness in the physical world. IVR can also positively change human behaviour by enabling safe spaces to allow users to experiment with their identities, thoughts, and ideas without risking embarrassment or adverse consequences. This includes avatars for people with disabilities, or activities reducing prejudices and increased empathy towards others – such as intensifying compassion for homeless people by living as a homeless person in the virtual world. Moreover, IVR enables people to shift from mindlessness in the physical world to mindfulness in the virtual world, to calm down and momentarily forget about difficulties and unwanted feelings. It’s when users disconnect themselves entirely from the physical world that escape to the virtual world can have downsides, such as an unhealthy addiction to VR, or an alteration of one’s perception of what’s real. On the other hand, VR fascinates people because it means they can escape their physical world identities and experiment with alternatives. But what would characterize the IVR experience as meaningful escapism?

Virtual Dasein: Being-in-the-Virtual-World

One way of answering the question of what characterizes the IVR experience as meaningful escapism is by extending Heidegger’s notion of Dasein to the notion of ‘Virtual Dasein’, or ‘Being-in-the-virtual-world’.

Escaping to the virtual world does make it possible for us to extend our feelings, perception, and reality. As such, in a limited Heideggarian sense, we are ‘thrown into’ the virtual world of IVR. It’s a world that allows us to feel present, embodied and active, while being able to override some of the constraints of the physical world. The feeling of virtually ‘being-there’ is associated with being engaged with and familiar with the virtual world. In that mode of being, the IVR experience can be characterized as a meaningful escapism. More specifically, we can get close to meaningfulness through how we ‘sense’ the IVR experience as meaningful. If the user feels that the IVR experience is meaningful, , the user ‘senses’ and so experiences how it is meaningful for him or her.

I propose that the characteristics of a meaningful IVR experience are:

• A Sense of Content. This refers to the quality of meaning that’s attributed to the IVR experience through the exhilarating feeling of escaping a social world, and breaking free of some of the constraints of the physical world (such as walking through walls, teleportation, flying, not dying from impacts, etc). It also includes the feeling of flow that emerges through the abundance of power to affect the environment in IVR.

• A Sense of Familiarity. This refers to the network of meanings that extends our sense of familiarity to the IVR experience. New networks are discovered in a new world where we recognize new meanings, through re-orientation in the syntactic dimension (signs and symbols), the semantic dimension (language), and in the pragmatic dimension (IVR actions and practices).

• A Sense of Mood. This refers to meaning depending on the moods we have in the IVR experience. On the one hand, the enacting of meaning is through how we imagine the IVR world (here we bring a mood into the IVR experience). On the other hand, escaping a world into one in which we’re empowered stimulates our imagination (here we bring a sense of mood from the IVR experience).

• A Sense of Care. There is an actualization of meaning through the agency possibilities of a world (known as its affordances). But how agency possibilities can be actualized through IVR is interwoven with a sense of care for the IVR world, in terms of how that world matters to us, including how by escaping the physical world we can actualize meaning in ways that are not possible in the physical.

Escaping Virtual Reality?

In Escape from New York, Snake Plissken wanted to escape federal prison by entering a second prison, New York City, from which he had to escape in turn. We may one day find ourselves in a similar dilemma: we escaped one world just to enter another which we might wish to escape from in turn.

The idea of a life lived online, as being-in-the-virtual-world, outside of regular society, is seen by most as dangerous and unhealthy. Yet, as virtual reality becomes a part of peoples’ lived experiences, more and more people will prefer to spend a majority of their time in virtual worlds, and thus reinforce Virtual Dasein, until they’re unhealthily addicted to the escapism. As Evans points out, when escapism goes too far, it has negative effects on the essential fabric of real life, which effects make us want to escape the escapism. In other words, we might come to want to escape Immersive Virtual Reality. But where do we escape to? What are our options, when we might not want to become trapped in the physical world again either – the place we decided to escape from to begin with?

Perhaps this question cannot be answered through a scholarly inquiry, but instead through a Snake Plissken spin-off movie called Escape from Immersive Virtual Reality ?

Amir Haj-Bolouri is a Full Professor of Informatics with a specialization in work-integrated learning at University West, Sweden.