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📘 Why We Are Here: The Ultimate Answer for Individuals, Civilizations, and the Future
Chapter 5: The Inevitability of Virtual Worlds
Let us begin with the simplest—and most often overlooked—question: why do we need resources?
You might answer, “For survival.”
Then let us ask one more question: survival for what?
Survival itself is not the goal; it is merely the prerequisite for all experience. Food, shelter, money, and even work itself—these concrete elements of daily life ultimately point to one simple objective: they give us the conditions to experience.
A person who cannot survive has no experience. A person without resources can only experience a small, coarse slice of life. This was the original limitation of civilization: experience was expensive—so expensive that it had to be supported by resources, which themselves required immense effort to obtain. In other words, early humans were forced to labor because experience itself was costly.
Yet nearly all technological progress in civilization has pointed in the same direction: making experience cheaper and cheaper.
The Cost of Experience Has Been Continuously Declining
If we view civilization as a kind of “experience factory,” we may be surprised to discover that thousands of years of history have quietly been lowering the price of experience.
In the earliest days, experience depended directly on nature itself: to witness a thunderstorm, you had to wait for the sky to actually break; to hear a story, you had to wait for an elder of the tribe to speak.
Then theater emerged. For the first time, humans realized that experience could be artificially produced.
Later, novels made experience replicable;
film compressed experience;
games made experience interactive;
and the internet allowed experience to circulate without limit.
The purpose of these inventions was never to “imitate reality.” Their true aim was singular: to make experience denser, cheaper, and more accessible. The cheaper experience becomes, the freer humanity grows. And when we look back at the entirety of civilization from this perspective, one nearly indisputable fact emerges:
Humanity has always been moving toward virtualization. Virtual experience is not a deviation from reality; it is the primary trajectory of civilization.
Humanity’s Long History of Experiential Virtualization
Many people treat “virtual” as a suddenly emerging concept, as if it were solely a product of modern technology. But if we are honest, we must admit that humans have been actively constructing virtual experiences from a very early point.
Oral storytelling was the earliest form of “virtual reality,” allowing listeners to experience events they could never personally live through. Theater extended virtual experience from language into visuals. Novels packaged experience so that readers could access it at any time. Film compressed experience even further, enabling people to traverse an entire lifetime in two hours. Games went one step further, turning experience into something interactive.
Each iteration produced the same result: experience became cheaper, faster, denser, and safer.
Civilization is not moving toward falseness; it is converging on the structural needs of consciousness itself: more experience, higher density, and lower cost.
Brain–Computer Interfaces: Not Science Fiction, but the Terminal Station
When people hear “brain–computer interface,” they often imagine scenes from science fiction films. But if we follow the main axis of “declining experience cost,” we find that BCIs are not a rupture at all—they are the next logical step.
At its core, a brain–computer interface is not the fantasy of techno-enthusiasts, but a natural demand of consciousness: to compress the cost of experience to its absolute minimum.
In a future where BCIs are mature, you could:
- Experience a journey in seconds instead of spending five hours traveling
- Experience fear, adventure, and love without real danger
- Experience creation, conquest, and exploration without resource constraints
- Experience extreme sports without damaging your body
- Experience failure safely, and learn from it
This is the essence of brain–computer interfaces: the ultimate compression technology for experience—not merely a new form of entertainment.
It fulfills the three ultimate directions of civilizational development:
- Maximum density (maximized experience)
- Minimal resource consumption
- Maximum safety (near-zero risk to the entity itself)
We cannot prevent its development, because consciousness itself will propel it forward.
Why Virtual Experience Does Not Undermine Reality
This is the greatest concern many people hold: “Will virtual things pull us away from reality?” But once you understand the structure of consciousness, this question dissolves. Consciousness is not a “recorder of the external world.” It does not judge whether the world is real or fake—it processes inputs. The joy, sorrow, love, and fear you feel are, at their core, the outputs of neural computation.
In other words:
- Your happiness does not depend on whether the external world is real
- Your suffering does not require an “objectively existing” trigger
- Your sense of being moved arises from the neural network’s computation, not from an actor’s genuine emotions on a stage
Put differently: reality is not a property of the external world, but a property of consciousness. What consciousness accepts is reality.
A film that makes you cry, a game that makes you tense, a novel that leaves you reflective—are these experiences not real? We experience the “non-real” every day, yet experience itself is the most real thing of all.
The Inevitability of Virtual Worlds
When we connect everything discussed so far, a simple yet unavoidable conclusion emerges: civilization’s migration toward virtual worlds is inevitable.
Not because virtual worlds are fun. Not because humans are indulgent. Not because of technological obsession. But because virtual worlds perfectly satisfy the structural needs of consciousness:
- Lower energy consumption
- Lower cost
- Lower risk
- Higher density
- Infinite scalability
- Safety for the entity itself
- Independence from physical constraints such as resource scarcity
In the physical world, you might need a year of experience to achieve a small change; in a virtual world, a lifetime of experience could be completed within a single week.
Virtual worlds are not an escape from reality; they are the natural result of civilization optimizing itself.
What If the World Itself Is Virtual?
At this point, a thought may cross your mind: “Then could reality itself also be virtual?” Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not. But it changes nothing.
Because experience itself is meaning—and meaning does not depend on whether the world is virtual.
Everything you live through—your pain, your love, your choices, your failures, your growth—matters because it is experienced by your consciousness.
Not because of what the world is, but because of what you are.
We discuss virtual worlds not to make you doubt reality, but to help you understand this:
No matter the true nature of the world, as long as experience is real, your life is real.