[ Friday, May 09, 2003 ]
The 13th Floor
In this movie, men living in the early 21st century have designed a virtual reality computer program peopled by artificial intelligences who think they and the 1930s-era city they in-habit is real. Then one of the virtual people gets in a car and drives until he reaches the edge of his world — just outside the city limits, the program ends and nothing more exists.
Later, one of the men who created this virtual city finds out that he, too, is merely a sophisticated program in a virtual world created by humans living in the late 21st century.
Similar layers of perception and reality were the stuff of
The Matrix and its upcoming sequels. It’s a head game, but how many people have been confused by the line between make-believe and the real world? The guys who think rap videos are a template for living, for instance, or the ones William Shatner told to “get a life.”
The experience of moving between these virtual worlds is the same as waking from a dream, an everyday experience that contradicts our shared sense of reality — except for Australian aborigines, who once believed “dreamtime” was more real than the waking world.
“In dreams, we defy the normal constraints of gravity, time and space, not to mention social con-ventions,” said Dr. J. A. Cheyne, an instructor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
“Why are these experiences so very different from our waking experiences? Are these experiences of a different reality and, if so, what sort of reality does the dream world present to us?”
**
“Just a dream, just an ordinary dream
… Was it all in my head?”
—Vanessa Carlton,
‘Ordinary Day’**
Unknown [9:54 AM]
