Full-Dive Virtual Reality: 1. Danger
The start of an in-depth exploration of an FDVR 'Solved World', to see what we can see
This is the start of a treatise of ignorance, hallucinated visions of a possible world, and done primarily to help me better know my present self and present humanity. I don't claim anything as original as I have been unable to keep a full record. I don't claim any of it rises above vague plausibility either, and much of it probably doesn't even approach that.
See it as an opening invitation for a series of discussions. If it helps, you can imagine this all as a set of early notes for a manifesto book series that will never be written - a bad one that would fail in its ambition to be somewhat like the Culture series, as written by Kurt Vonnegut, telling the story of a Hitchhiker’s Guide ensemble of wandering fools.
I apologise for the inevitable length, I'll do my best to keep things as concentrated as I can. No, no tldrs I'm afraid.
Don't take anything very seriously.
[2024-12-27], with later edits.
Contents (WIP)
Danger - Introduction and an exploration of dangers within FDVR
Future shock - How technology has fried present culture, and the unknowability of where we will finally settle
Sketching Self - With all non-physical limitations on conscious existence removed, where do we actually want to go?
Cultures - What does 'culture' mean in a long term FDVR reality?
Children - Just how precisely do we intend to raise children here?
Friends - How should we approach AI assistants, NPCs, conscious friends, and conscious romance over centuries and beyond?
Philosophy Forks - God is dead, long live 'The Supervisor' (or, does my artificial religion club sound like fun?)
Game Design - Optimisation problems, exploration vs exploitation, and other interesting questions and techniques.
Patterns - A cheat sheet for advanced FDVR ramblers.
Finding Tea: How to enjoy your first million years - Concluding advice on how to get the most out of life on a larger timescale.
Assumptions
ASI arrives, and the only way to reach even a fraction of its intelligence involves transforming your mind's architecture radically, optimising purely for understanding and problem solving, with an even lower capacity for richness of life than the biological human brain provides.
The ASI is perfectly aligned with whatever ideals we specify during our exploration of the subject
God-like ASI control over matter and energy means there are no more interesting adventures to be had in the material world
Humanity as a whole migrates to FDVR, delicately passing their consciousness from their meat brain to an artificial brain, with identical operation, but offering infinite lifespan and the capacity to be expanded and manipulated freely if desired
An interface to a shared 'supervisor' ASI is provided to each 'citizen' (all conscious beings within the system are equal citizens)
The system is able to produce provably non-conscious entities of nearly any capacity. There are generally two kinds:
AI assistants/companions - these have full awareness of the system, and have direct interfaces, of one kind or another, with the supervisor ASI
Characters - NPCs that may be vastly more intelligent than your average citizen, but who operate within a lower context - they don't get the supervisor interface, and only a few are aware they are running within the system
The sole rules of the system, with no possibility of negotiation, are:
You may do as you wish without restriction, but will not be able to non-consensually harm any other conscious being at any time. To clarify: different social contexts will exclude anyone who does not consent (at a given instant) to an agreed risk of harm of a certain level, anything from accepting a small risk of being called something unflattering down to unspeakable torture for the extremophiles
Each citizen gets a fixed allowance of maximum compute they can use in a given time period (it's an awful lot, and generally considered poor manners to always be using your full allowance)
There are a set of strict rules around the creation of new conscious entity citizens (wait for part 5)
Even the supervisor ASI is not allowed to directly read the mind of a citizen, and is not allowed even to maintain an accurate model of the mind of a citizen, except under conditions defined by that citizen
Citizens have unbreakable rights of privacy when it comes to shared memory/communication between AIs, including the supervisor
Every citizen has the right to choose to die, although they are allowed to restrict their own ability to make this choice - but only for a period, in time a lived duration will likely be found above which the risks of unreasonable and severe harm become too great
There is a maximum lived experience speed a citizen can live at, but no minimum.
Citizens can freely change both the perceived speed of time relative to their consciousness, and also the speed of their conscious experience relative to the material world
So you can live in slow motion, or with the world around you speeding past impossibly quickly
And then you can control how fast time in the real world is passing for each moment of your lived experience
Limits vary based on the compute allowance and physics
I'm accepting a presently plausible, but very possibly not probable, assumption here that the conscious human mind has only a minor immediate control over the present consciousness vector. Even a minor force in each instant still allows fine control in the long term, but only through consistent and skilful effort. So we have free will, but only a very little in the moment, more only as we learn to look further out and extend our horizon.
Preface
This series is fundamentally a single long guided thought experiment exploration and I encourage you to explore it freely by yourself if you find anything interesting.
If you find the idea of living permanently within FDVR boring or purposeless you may find value in reading Nick Bostrom's 'Deep Utopia'. The FDVR system in this exploration is focused on being a maximally 'solved world'.
To give us a shared entry experience imagine this:
You find somewhere comfortable and quiet to sit
You settle yourself and close your eyes
You say out loud, "I would like to be switched to an introductory FDVR environment now. When I open my eyes I want to find myself and this chair in this new environment, I want to be totally alone, and I want full access to my FDVR controls."
You open your eyes
You find yourself, and your chair, on an apparently infinite and empty flat plane
You ask for your preferred drink, and instantly a suitable table appears with that drink sat on it
You ask for the instruction manual, and instantly a large book appears on the table next to your drink (the table expanding conveniently), it is sat on top of a few supplementary pamphlets
You pick up the instruction manual and immediately dispose of it over your shoulder onto the floor behind your chair
You pick up the first pamphlet and see that it is titled: Danger
1. Danger
Introduction:
You are in a dangerous space. This FDVR system is capable of producing incomprehensible nightmares just as easily as bliss, all you have to do is ask. You can think of it as a more extreme expression of the feeling of driving at high speed along a non-divided road; opposing cars and stationary objects just a small movement of your hands separated from a catastrophic collision.
In FDVR those dangers can be both immediate and distant, with the distant ones being the equivalents of some classic dangers, like finding cigarettes too enjoyable. The good news is that old issues like those troublesome cigarettes have been swept away. Now you can have all the upsides and none of the downsides. One of the big risks is that this is true for essentially everything.
If you like video games or adventure stories, just think of this: have you ever actually seen a real somebody hit with a sword? Or shot in the head? How realistic do you want your adventures to be? What you will see during adventures is important, and it will have an effect on you, perhaps mostly on unconscious models in your brain. This is a very new context for you, more extreme than any other you may have navigated before. Think back through your life to where a change in context fundamentally changed your behaviour and sense of self.
It's a world where all monsters are real, and where it's fun and easy to become a monster yourself. It can be fun and easy to become anything, from obsessive and boring, to your most radiant self.
You don't just get to control the environment around you, here you have the ability to simply ask the supervisor to edit your brain in to any configuration you want. Would you like to really love trains to an extreme degree? You only need to ask. You may need therapy right now, but if you ask the supervisor it will happily re-arrange your neural system the minimum required to make it so you don't. Does that idea scare you a bit? Then you see that you need to be careful.
However, this extreme danger doesn't mean retreating and dropping out of FDVR until you've been to meat therapy. It does mean you've finally reached the frontline though, you're on the happy side, all you have to do is not climb out of the trench and walk to the other side. You can observe what is over that line quite satisfactorily from here.
So, you need to wake yourself up, look around you, and expect hidden dangers. Your worry now is opening yourself to vulnerabilities faster than your understanding of the dangers advances. The most dangerous thing here is falsely trusting you are safe while the unconscious ground beneath your consciousness is not firm.
This doesn't mean all fun is verboten, far from it. Recklessly fucking your mental state and then repairing in an unusually satisfying way could quite easily become a pastime in itself. But doing that is a kind of game, and you may find it is most fun when you have a reliable model of understanding of exactly what dangers you are playing with.
You're faced with a choice now, with three obvious options:
Go all in with no limits, asking for no advice from the supervisor, and with no safety nets
Let the supervisor or some AI companion act as a guide for you, being careful to keep you in stable and safe condition
Compromise and work with the supervisor to set some safety nets that balance fun and risk, and then head off knowing you still risk making big mistakes, but that you are safe from catastrophe
I'll focus on exploring option 3, I think the other two are too boring to consider.
Here maybe it is best to invent an AI companion that's a bit more fun to talk to than the supervisor, but who has almost all of the same powers and intelligence. If you wish, it may be good to see this companion as you would a climbing rope - you will be forced to trust it. If you don't, then you will need to test it until you do. To continue the metaphor - a perfectly dependable rope is worth nothing during a fall if it is not anchored to something equally secure. You have to be careful with how you handle even AIs as well intentioned as this.
There may be pre-existing principles of best practice for handling that, ask the supervisor if you like. You shouldn't be squeamish or insecure about asking for help, you're not going to be impressing anyone with your choices, after all, anyone can just ask the supervisor to make them a step better than you if they wish. Anyone can be anyone here, there is no competition possible, only preferences that allow each person to optimise their experience for their own enjoyment.
[There's a really great line from "The state of the Art" by Banks that perfectly captures how I would like to see myself relative to the ASI allowing me to make requests:
The companion took a careful, dainty sip of wine, then twisted the stopper firmly back into the gut and placed it behind his neck as he lay back. Mc9 belched, yawned.
'Yes,' his companion said earnestly. 'Tell I a story. Me would love to hear a story. Tell I a story of love and hate and death and tragedy and comedy and horror and joy and sarcasm, tell I about great deeds and tiny deeds and valiant people and hill people and huge giants and dwarfs, tell I about brave women and beautiful men and great sorcerorcerors . . . and about unenchanted swords and strange, archaic powers and horrible, sort of ghastly . . . things that, uhm . . . shouldn't be living, and . . . ahm, funny diseases and general mishaps. Yeah, me like. Tell I. Me want.'
Mc9 was falling asleep again, having had not the slightest intention of telling his companion a story in the first place.
The idea is to be aware of how shallow any request we could think of would be to the ASI, and to appreciate what a great gift it is for it to in fact have an endless patience for fulfilling our demands.]
Personally I would want to start slow, avoiding radically changing my day to day experience for a little while. Not from a fear of the deep water, but because I fear that I do not yet fear it enough.
Remember that the human brain on default settings is able to normalise just about anything, given time to adjust. This means that extreme luxury will become mundane in time, and it means that enduring self-imposed constraints as the act of steering yourself in a righteous direction will also become perfectly natural if you choose to do it.
The big benefit you can gain from your brain's ability to normalise extreme experiences, is that it allows you to gain the ability to remain normal under extreme circumstances in general.
If the idea of being so well adjusted makes you uncomfortable, remember that the change probably doesn't have to be as dramatic as you think. And remember too that you are in control, you don't have to be vulnerable to being changed in ways you don't enjoy if you don't want to be. You are exploring an infinite ocean, you have the freedom to steer as hard as you like in any direction you vaguely like the look of.
[My Way]
Navigation
[The Best Way To Travel]
This nearly boundless FDVR then is a landscape to explore; it has its dangers, but you are a human, your entire ancestral heritage has evolved you for navigating through dangerous landscapes, both genetically and culturally.
We'll explore the idea of becoming something beyond human in part 3, but for now we will see that there are two primary paths you can choose between:
Ask the supervisor to directly expand your brain and mind beyond what could be broadly called 'human' dimensions
Make changes to your brain and mind only incrementally or not at all
The problem with number 1 is that there's likely more than one popular arrangement beyond the standard human dimensions, it's not a single dimension you can just dial up to 11. There's choice here, and by definition you must begin making that choice from your present human dimensioned mind. If you seek to ascend to a level beyond human comprehension you will either need to gamble, or you will need to rely on the supervisor's advice to direct your path. Neither of these are very fertile ground for this pamphlet/exploration exercise.
We'll settle on option 2 then as we prepare to take our first steps into the FDVR wilderness ahead of us. We'll decide to take our time, to choose unhurried exploration.
This really is a landscape to explore. At the fundamental level, each of our consciousnesses is a point that travels through the infinite and vastly multidimensional mathematical space of possible conscious states. It is only possible to be in one state at a time, and (unless you artificially 'teleport' your conscious state) you must travel by one path or another between distant points. Some conscious states will only be possible to reach from your present position by crossing and navigating through regions of this landscape that cannot be avoided.
The best way to navigate wild spaces like this is to maintain two things:
Some form of distant goal or plan that gives you a general direction to move in to allow navigation at large scales
An ability to identify and use landmarks or anchors in the landscape to allow navigation at smaller scales
What goal or plan you form is up to you, and it's a good thing if it changes over time as your circumstances change. For this series we'll have to settle on something in order to progress, but keep your own in mind throughout if you have one.
Landmarks are tricky in a space like this, we can't actually see ahead very well. In a way we are nearly blind as it is very hard to reliably know the consequences of any given experience we will go through. Experiences are chaotic too, even if we could see ahead perfectly we could end up off course if events do not cooperate with our plan.
So let's define a couple of things that will act as a foundation for our navigation - and remember that we are doing this because we want to maximise fun and fulfilment; we want tools that let us increase our ambition:
Righteousness - The more righteous path is the one that moves us closer to our very longest term ultimate goal for ourselves. To get an idea of this you can think about what version of yourself you would be happiest to be in 100 years, or 1000, or as far beyond as you'd be happy to live right now. Righteousness is something you are willing to make short term sacrifices for if they will generally steer you towards it.
Home - An FDVR environment that at any given instant you would settle well within. A context/environment that would change you the least over some reasonable period. A place that you can keep in a fixed state, that you can leave and spend a period in a more unstable environment, and then return to and have it naturally attract your state back to a desired baseline, or perhaps to a subtly more righteous baseline.
Your definition of righteousness will shift in time, and that's exactly what you want. You should maintain a commitment to righteousness, but allow your eventual righteous goals to grow as you grow. Don't drift, steer yourself. The danger within righteousness is in picking one that will do you harm, either from bad luck, lack of care, or from self-delusion for one reason or another.
So much of the experience and culture of biological consciousness in the old physical world is defined by the long term consequences of chosen behaviours. The fact that a price must be paid for every choice. Without this limitation a whole new philosophy of life is likely to be needed. As you step in to a limitless FDVR world, while carrying the legacy of your upbringing within a severely limited physical and social world, by maintaining a commitment to righteousness you gain a kind of self-sufficient system for long term consequence that can substitute for the one you have lost.
Exactly how aggressively you make those short term sacrifices in service of steering to righteousness is up to you. You can come up with self-imposed rules that make it fun to fight along the righteous path if you want, or you can take a harder road; just don't wallow in the lowlands. If you desire to experience something in opposition to your righteous destination then do it with the goal of fighting to get out and back on track in time.
Your home is a tool you will need to craft yourself (or with help from the supervisor or your AI buddy). The purpose of home as a tool is to have an environment that you can return to, one that in turn will naturally return you to a desired baseline territory simply by spending time within it.
To explain the concept of a 'home' more explicitly: you can start by imagining your favourite physical house structure and local environment from before you transitioned to FDVR. If you ask the supervisor to re-create a perfect copy of that specific building, and all that it contained, and then much of the local environment it sat within, including your neighbours, then you have a start. But an FDVR environment is more than just the place, it also defines the rules it operates under. For example, living in this old home environment with dramatic new powers, such as the ability to freely float and fly, will not attract you towards the same baseline as it did when you lived in the physical original. To get the same baseline you would need to live with the same old limits and rules.
In time I wouldn't be surprised if you developed multiple distinct home environments, each pulling you towards a distinct favourite state, and all together providing you a territory in this landscape that you could trace delightful arcing orbits through - in a sense a grand home region made from multiple individual homes - and yes, this can form even larger structures as you connect regions. We'll cover this area in more depth in part 3.
Hazards
Here we’ll go through a few of the top general hazards you probably want to keep in mind. Hazards don’t need to be avoided, they likely shouldn’t be - all of them can be used as valuable tools if you want them. To turn them in to tools you just need to understand them and their consequences, then develop the techniques for using them that work best for you.
Addiction holes
Addiction in FDVR is quite different to what it was in the old world. For example, you can, if you like, ask the supervisor to make it so that you only feel a nicotine craving while you are sat in a particular chair. You can consume totally non-addictive versions of any drug you can think of. Make consuming absolutely anything immediately disgusting or delightful.
You don’t even have to ever need food or drink again if you don’t want to, you can forever live free from hunger and thirst. Remove all bathroom necessities from your life. You can remove your need to sleep, remove all pain, tiredness, all dependence of every kind.
If you’re burning straight for your ideal post-human state then this could well all be exactly what you want, but for those of us who wish to remain in human space a while longer, we have to take on a curator role. This curation of ‘inconveniences’ will become a common pattern for us, you’ll often see it as the first option for navigating around distasteful ground.
The danger in addiction is now primarily that you end up in a position where you enjoy an addiction to something so much that it blocks you from progressing closer to your righteous goal. I suspect most people will find it easier to ask the supervisor for help removing a craving they dislike completely than one they enjoy.
The foundation of safe navigation is actively maintaining your righteous goal, but you prove your ultimate strength by having the discipline to ensure that no enjoyable ‘attractors’ grow in to a pattern of compulsive consumption that trap you in a place you don’t really want to be trapped.
The greatest danger is immersing yourself in a way that makes you vulnerable to these harmful attractors without you realising they are even there. This is why ensuring you make regular returns to a reliable baseline is important, even if you do it by agreeing to let the supervisor sometimes pull you out of an immersion by force. You may choose to see becoming permanently trapped in a hole as the closest equivalent to a death by misadventure that you can get in FDVR.
Obsessions
A related hazard are more general obsessions. See a harmful obsession as like an addiction hole, but instead of trapping you in a kind of experience space it instead traps you in a repeating pattern of behaviour.
You may enjoy each moment this behaviour brings you, but it’s a harmful obsession if you see that this pattern is holding you back from where you actually want to go. You should periodically look at the larger structure and direction of your life as you would do a parasite check in the wilderness.
The better you understand your righteousness the better you can detect harmful obsessions. As usual the supervisor can correct them easily, it is up to you how much discipline and difficulty you wish to be charged.
Saturation
Pick anything you have a strong but unsatisfied desire for today, then imagine asking the supervisor to just keep feeding it to you until you can’t stand any more. Imagine your life with that, and all other desires, fully satisfied. Do you like the sound of a life free from all craving?
There’s two kinds of desire saturation: transient and stable/'permanent'.
If you keep a natural human desire for food, then you will be able to happily saturate that every day, and the desire will soon desaturate until you become hungry once again.
Different desires will saturate at different rates, and that saturation will decay at different rates too. Some will never naturally desaturate though, and for some things this will only happen under certain conditions. You can probably remember a novel experience in your past that turned out to not feel anywhere near as good as you were expecting it to.
For a simple example imagine you are eyeing at a tasty looking new fruit, only to discover it tastes like concentrated garbage the moment you put it in your mouth, your desire to eat it has now likely permanently saturated. Saturating to the point of disgust is probably the most common cause of permanent saturation.
Desires and our relationships with them are extremely complex, and they’re interwoven with so many different things. They form one of the essential elements of a conscious human life though, so you must be careful not to checkmate yourself if you go making changes away from a stable baseline.
If you really love something, and want to keep loving it in the long term, then you may wish to place some restriction rules that prevent harmful saturation.
Curated Misery
In this FDVR utopia you may find some parts of your life have inverted in surprising ways. In a world of perfect comfort and perfect therapy, true misery may become a luxury.
If you find that the indirect consequences of deep misery are essential ingredients to things you treasure, then misery itself is likely to become a treasure.
A tricky position to be in, and one of the most personal questions we can face. Do you wish to intentionally curate and artificially engineer your miseries?
Perhaps you will find a harmful addiction or obsession at the root of all of your treasured miseries, or perhaps not. But if the root of the misery is something clearly harmful, how certain are you that it outweighs the benefits of the produced misery? What if you find that you’d actually be better off swapping to an all new harmful addiction or obsession? Something that produces equivalent misery treasure for a lower or more manageable cost?
Crucibles
What to do if you find your only path towards righteousness blocked by some thoroughly unpleasant ground that must be crossed? What if the only way to become the person you are convinced you wish to become is to undergo some form of ordeal?
This is likely to be one of the great fears of utopia - the fear that one day you will find yourself faced with a deep and firm conviction that you must inflict great suffering upon yourself.
You have a few choices if you find yourself standing on this harrowing shore, and you can take comfort in knowing you are not the first person to find themselves here. The great privilege you have as an FDVR citizen is something that few of your physically confined ancestors had access to; it is that you have the ability to commit yourself absolutely by simply asking the supervisor for the ability to do so.
All you need to do is point to the other shore and tell the supervisor the sort of journey, and suffering, that you plan to go through to get there. You can then say: "I want you to give me a big button to press in front of me, I want it to be a substantial and beautiful button, and I want it to make a satisfying 'beep' when I press it. I want pressing this button to absolutely commit me to making this journey in an instant. After this button is pressed I want no possibility of changing my mind, no possibility that I can escape the journey even if I am overwhelmed by fear or pain. I want you to ensure that circumstances will force me to move in a righteous direction, that my only possible escape is to cross this terrible sea to that other shore."
The details entirely depend upon what journey you intend to make, and the wider context of your life at that moment, but the supervisor can handle all of that for you if needed. All you have to do now is find the courage to press the button.
[To provide an example of this situation I’ll tell you about one I anticipate in my future: my strictly personal conviction is that it is distasteful to revel in playful combat that is inspired by real and awful past human experiences unless I have previously experienced an equivalent horror myself. I very much intend to revel in playful FDVR combat, and I have been fortunate enough that it is now very unlikely that I will have experienced life on the frontline of a bad war before my physical life ends.
And so I know that, should I find myself with access to an FDVR utopia in future, it is a near certainty that one of the first long term experiences I will commit myself to is a highly realistic war, and it will have to be a bad one. Something that after I enter I will be forced to suffer through until the end. From an external perspective it could be seen as a form of self harm, even self torture, but it would be done for a righteous purpose, and done only if no acceptable alternative could be found.]
Some people will stand on the shore of this suffering sea that separates them from their goal and take it as a sign that their goal maybe isn’t as desirable as they thought it was, and they’ll then go searching for a new one. Some will camp by that shore, hoping that in time they will grow enough to be able to attempt the crossing one day in future. Others will immediately commit themselves, ignoring their fear for just long enough to cross a point of no return. I expect another group will be those who insist on training themselves to cross this gulf without any commitment, to be able to maintain their conviction to move righteously through the whole journey, even if they kept the ability to return the comfort of the earlier shore in an instant.
Ideas on Mastery
Mastering this utopia of curated danger, misery, and suffering is a large and uncertain topic, one that we will only attempt to look at in detail in part 8, but I think it’s worth talking a bit about it here now, if only to remind ourselves that mastery of all of this is possible.
The clearest place we can look for hints is in video games, here there are many patterns that have been established to make an experience more enjoyable. One of the key ones is that games must walk a line of challenge, neither too difficult, nor too easy. As players gain strength and skill the challenges must change to keep the experience engaging. Maintaining challenging novelty or satisfying flow is the goal.
"Convenience is the enemy of fun" is likely to be one of the key game design lessons to bring with us [apologies, I cannot find or remember the original source]. It may be unintuitive, but anyone who has cheated in a game to get infinite resources with no effort will have seen how shallow things become when all difficulty is removed. Most fun can only come through interesting and enjoyable inconvenience. The more inconveniences you are able to find enjoyable and interesting the more varieties of fun you will discover.
Here's some other loose introductory ideas on mastery:
Everything can be practiced until it loses all the previous meaning. It may be that after a while in FDVR a whole new way of being arrives as you have practiced all of the hard stuff so much that it becomes routine.
The realism - or the lack of it - in an experience can be used to give your respect to the subject, to honour your ancestors.
You can engineer automated systems for manipulating your brain that are entirely within your control. This is like adding unconscious brain systems that only indirectly influence your conscious experience, like a hybrid of mind expansion with human baseline.
Mastering deep obsessions to get the most fun out of them without being reckless could well be prime living. However, to play with such a dangerous thing without robust precautions is to invite degeneracy.
Instead of having to find a way to maintain a life of regular dramatic novelty, maybe you can just train yourself not to need so much novelty. Just don't worry about it. Maybe it's not a hard problem to solve.
Remember the difference between one who can pretend to be the villain well to increase fun in a game, and one who truly is a villain and uses a game only as cover.
How you handle 'death' within FDVR experiences is likely to be a key question. Perhaps you will choose to enforce a permadeath mechanic inconvenience for yourself? Maybe you'll create post-death transition environments as an incentive to live righteously in the primary experience - a personal Valhalla, etc.?
Or maybe you say that if you do something unrighteous within an experience you must re-pay your debt when you finish - perhaps within a tediously realistic environment where you must return to working a pointless 9-5 for a while?
Conclusion
In FDVR danger is a luxury, and our freedom to harm ourselves our greatest privilege. To lose this freedom would imprison us within the confined space of perfectly wholesome and happy consciousness. It would still be an infinite world, but one where the landscape is an endless ocean of comfortable rolling hills; no mountains, canyons, or caves to explore; oppressively pleasant unchanging sunshine, with neither rain nor storm to revel in.
But this danger is not a toy, at the least it must be seen as the kind of toy that is likely to put your eye out if it is not respected. You may no longer have any burden of responsibility to others, but that means all attention turns to the responsibility you have to your future self. To turn inward towards self-obsession would be a mistake though, so do not take this responsibility so seriously that you get in your own way.
I advise you to embrace danger, embrace inconvenience and chaos too. Steer yourself through the rich and interesting land of exciting fear and struggle. Don't be afraid to inconvenience yourself, you have all the time you need to take things slowly - consider not rushing straight to the top of every mountain, there's an awful lot of life to be lived as you journey through the grounds in between.
[Where My Heart Will Take Me]
Supplemental
As a supplemental I stumbled upon a fantastic and coincidentally perfect section within Richard Jefferies' The Story of My Heart (1883) last night:
… I desire to advance further, and to wrest a fourth, and even still more than a fourth, from the darkness of thought. I want more ideas of soul-life. I am certain that there are more yet to be found. A great life—an entire civilisation—lies just outside the pale of common thought. Cities and countries, inhabitants, intelligences, culture— an entire civilisation. Except by illustrations drawn from familiar things, there is no way of indicating a new idea. I do not mean actual cities, actual civilisation. Such life is different from any yet imagined. A nexus of ideas exists of which nothing is known—a vast system of ideas—a cosmos of thought. There is an Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised. These, rudely expressed, constitute my Fourth Idea. It is beyond, or beside, the three discovered by the Cavemen; it is in addition to the existence of the soul; in addition to immortality; and beyond the idea of the deity. I think there is something more than existence.
There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched. I hope to launch it. The mind of so many thousand years has worked round and round inside the circle of these three ideas as a boat on an inland lake. Let us haul it over the belt of land, launch on the ocean, and sail outwards.
There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined. As I write these words, in the very moment, I feel that the whole air, the sunshine out yonder lighting up the ploughed earth, the distant sky, the circumambient ether, and that far space, is full of soul-secrets, soul-life, things outside the experience of all the ages. The fact of my own existence as I write, as I exist at this second, is so marvellous, so miracle-like, strange, and supernatural to me, that I unhesitatingly conclude I am always on the margin of life illimitable, and that there are higher conditions than existence. Everything around is supernatural; everything so full of unexplained meaning.
Twelve thousand years since the Caveman stood at the mouth of his cavern and gazed out at the night and the stars. He looked again and saw the sun rise beyond the sea. He reposed in the noontide heat under the shade of the trees, he closed his eyes and looked into himself. He was face to face with the earth, the sun, the night; face to face with himself. There was nothing between; no wall of written tradition; no built-up system of culture—his naked mind was confronted by naked earth. He made three idea-discoveries, wresting them from the unknown: the existence of his soul, immortality, the deity. Now, to-day, as I write, I stand in exactly the same position as the Caveman. Written tradition, systems of culture, modes of thought, have for me no existence. If ever they took any hold of my mind it must have been very slight; they have long ago been erased.
From earth and sea and sun, from night, the stars, from day, the trees, the hills, from my own soul—from these I think. I stand this moment at the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with nature, face to face with the supernatural, with myself. My naked mind confronts the unknown. I see as clearly as the noonday that this is not all; I see other and higher conditions than existence; I see not only the existence of the soul, immortality, but, in addition, I realise a soul-life illimitable; I realise the existence of a cosmos of thought; I realise the existence of an inexpressible entity infinitely higher than deity. I strive to give utterance to a Fourth Idea. The very idea that there is another idea is something gained. The three found by the Cavemen are but stepping-stones: first links of an endless chain. At the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with the unknown, they prayed. Prone in heart to-day I pray, Give me the deepest soul-life.
Full Dive Virtual Reality: 2. Future Shock
Here is part 2 of my FDVR series. This bit is a distillation of a way I am presently enjoying learning to see the world. I am hesitant to publish it, and while I must grasp it firmly to write about it with any sense, I cannot provide any assurance that it is fundamentally correct.