Mental Health, Illusion, and Living Life in the Metaverse ($)

You can't live a stable life in an illusion, yet most of us wish to.

“[The Metaverse is] going to accelerate the good things about social connection
and potentially the harmful things.”
—Nick Allen, psychologist

Because I practice both hard and soft science, Modern Professional Magazine asked me to write an article that addressed questions about how the metaverse will affect mental health. This piece is adapted from my answers.

The Metaverse

According to the marketing firm ICUC.Social (2022), the metaverse consists of virtual reality, augmented reality, virtual worlds, digital economies, digital personas, and virtual meeting rooms. A more succinct definition of the metaverse is a virtual forum for communication and collaboration that transcends distance and extends imagination.

This is similar to existing alternate realities such as cinema, radio, television, live performance, and literature. What's new about the metaverse is the potential for greater immersion, a support for dialog rather than monolog, direct connection over any distance, automatic translation across languages, and the opportunity to participate and change the narrative, rather than simply following along.

Stories to be told

The metaverse is a new venue for storytelling, perhaps as revolutionary as the printing press, and more revolutionary than television or cinema. Its first attraction is for its entertainment value. It's second attraction, which depends on the first, is as a means of advertising. But its most important effect, to see it from a Biblical angle, is to reassemble the Tower of Babel, which was destroyed by an offended God for its attempt to reach the heavens.

“This technology opens an entirely new approach to the treatment of mental illness and to the maintenance of mental well-being which affects everyone. When connected to VR equipment, a person becomes immersed in an illusory experience (skydiving, walking a tight rope, climbing Mt. Everest) that feels real.”
— Deepak Chopra et al. (2022)

This telling quote reveals the truth of the metaverse: it's fake. I have skydove, walked a tight rope, and climbed Himilayan-sized mountains and Deepak is wrong. Nothing that one can do in the metaverse comes anywhere close to the reality of these experiences.

Only inert, comfortable, visual experience can be reproduced with the present state of the art virtual reality. Only the imagination has the power to fully reproduce any illusion, and imagination can only do that when it has memories to refer to. This may change in the future, but getting farther will be difficult, expensive, and more limited in its appeal.

The metaverse currently offers an emasculated version of reality. Only where cyberspace offers interactions with real people does it have the potential to offer something beyond what we're capable of without it.

The metaverse is largely seen as a new advertising opportunity because its novelty is engaging large numbers of viewers. These viewers do not aspire to a more intense experience of reality, they're looking for more fun with less work. When it comes down to it, the metaverse is just a graphical user interface.

“Nobody knows what metaverse really means, save for it being a next step in all things digital. What happens next to the metaverse—and even if it ever becomes a recognizable thing—is anyone’s guess.”
— Jamie Carter (2022)