The Reality Illusion: Why Evolution Didn’t Prepare Us For VR
VR as a hallucination of a hallucination
How do you know what’s real?
It seems like a pretty easy question to answer. You might know that the phone in your pocket is real because you can reach down and feel the rounded edges protruding through the fabric of your trousers, or that a friend exists because you can hear their voice speaking through your phone. When you put on a virtual reality (VR) headset like the Meta Quest 3 or Apple Vision Pro, you might know that the environment you are transported to isn’t real because you remember putting on the headset, or because the visual fidelity of your surroundings suddenly becomes much lower. You are able to exist in the virtual environment without confusion since your perception is constantly modulated by the fact that you know that you are in a virtual environment.
However, we argue that this common-sense distinction is nothing more than an illusion.
In our most recent paper, Presence is Reality: Rethinking Virtual and Real-world Consciousness, we argue that the way you perceive simulated environments, such as VR environments, is exactly the same way you perceive the real world.
The Illusion of Virtual Reality
At first glance, it sounds unintuitive. Surely, if we perceive virtual environments in the same way we perceive real environments, then people would be constantly confused about whether they were in VR or not?
No. At least, we don’t think so. People aren’t confused about whether they are in VR or not primarily because they remember putting on a VR headset. Think of Morpheus’ words in the first Matrix film:
“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?”
When it comes to dreams, we are constantly confused. Sometimes we are able to identify them as such, leading to so-called ‘lucid dreams’. But, more often than not, we are not able to understand that our dreams are entirely virtual. They take place within our own heads and yet we think, at the moment we are dreaming them, that they are real. The only difference between a dream and putting on a VR headset is that you don’t remember falling asleep.
We argue that, like dreams, at the moment of perception in VR - so the very instance you see or feel or interact with something - your brain treats that interaction as absolutely real.
The Clinical Proof
You don’t need to take my word for it. VR has been tested extensively as a treatment for anxiety disorders by allowing people to expose themselves to anxiety-inducing situations in a completely controlled environment. Studies have found that the therapeutic effects of this kind of exposure therapy are identical to the benefits of actual, real-life exposure therapy where a patient is exposed to an anxiety-inducing situation in the real world.
VR use has even been shown to treat PTSD. In trials treating combat veterans, VR exposure therapy showed the same effectiveness in treating PTSD as physically placing veterans in triggering environments.
So here’s the kicker: how can exposure to environments and situations in VR treat psychological disorders just as well as real-life exposure therapy if we know that VR environments are not real?
Because, at the moment of perception, the brain treats them as real.
Evolution Didn’t Prepare Us for VR
Maybe it makes more sense to explain this concept evolutionarily. From unicellular organisms to fish to early mammals, the brain’s primary function has been survival, not truth. Across billions of years of development, at what point would the brain have evolved a unique mechanism to distinguish between “virtual” photons and “real” photons? What evolutionary pressure would’ve caused this? The simple answer is: there wasn’t one.
But what implications does this have? What does this lack of ability mean for science, or for humanity in general? Well, a few things:
The first and, probably, most important use is clinical. VR can and should be taken seriously as a tool to treat and diagnose reality disorders such as depersonalization and derealization - debilitating and surprisingly common psychological conditions in which a subject doesn’t see either themselves or their environments (or both) as real.
The second is that our experience of reality, how we view the everyday world, is not an absolute, objective truth. It is a subjective construct, shaped by a brain evolved not for precision, but for survival. Our ‘real worlds’ are already a hallucination, and VR is simply a hallucination on top of that hallucination.
So, how do you know what’s real? The answer is, you don’t. Or, more specifically, you can never really be sure. If the brain treats the simulation as reality, then for all intents and purposes, the simulation is reality.
Read the full paper here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916251414030