It was an odd room, a sort of shapeless, plastic-lined cocoon without furnishings. The thing had floated submerged in the fluid. It lay on the floor now, limbs twitching spasmodically.

It was male: the long, white beard was proof of that. It was a pitiful thing, a kind of caricature of humanity, a fantastically hairy gnome curled blindly into a fetal position. It was naked: its skin, where it showed through the matted hair, was grub-white and wrinkled from the long immersion.

It had floated in this room in its gently moving nest of hair, nourished by the thick, fleshlike cord trailing from a tap protruding through the wall to where it had been grafted to the navel, dreaming the long, slow, happy, fetal dreams.

… This was where everybody was. This was the end man had reached.

(James Gunn, The Joy Makers, 1963)

In case you weren’t being clear enough for everyone, I’d just like to second how interesting the implications of this potential form for the Great Filter is.

One could argue that the aliens are all around us but we can’t see them. I’ve seen no good arguments disproving the notion that cognitive processes are inextricably tied to biological materials, nor that they can’t be done with much less material..

There could be alien starships orbiting earth, each inhabited by whole civilizations..
Anyone capable of crossing interstellar distances would probably have the technology for very good invisibility all across the el-mag spectrum.

The universe could be full of intelligent life, and the absence of conspicuous, high energy signalling doesn’t really mean anything.

What does he think he’s going to do
A pied piper without a song
Oh, oh he’ll just be all so blue
When they decide not to go along!
But wait – our words have been rescinded
For now the fife has just been winded!

My thought is that the filter, the real filter, is not something the world so much does to us, as we do to ourselves. This is consistent in pattern with the problems man tends to face – “I came not to condemn the world, for the world already stood condemned…” – such as the NSA constructing a panopticon of a size the socialists could only dream of, just by hacking the surveillance devices people willingly brought into their homes.

The logic may be simple that the virtual worlds are better than the real one, and so people incapable of meta-thinking will be trapped and lost. Or, if you will, people who believe this world to already be a simulation may also be lost, choosing the better (more enjoyable) simulation over the worse.

Anyone play Fallout 3? There was a great – and quite horroristic – part that dealt with the idea of ‘perfect’ virtual simulations.

Will some future civilization use “SNAP and VR” as its byword for dole and distraction?

http://youtu.be/vzOFSSvKfqU

Not sure how to embed videos here.

But this O.R. — well, thatt picture of the kid with darkness consuming his primary sensory organs couldn’t be more apt. All that’s missing is a human-sized vat of gelatin.