u/CipherGarden

This is FDVR related of course

DM me if you're interested

Self-actualisation and self-understanding are born through increasing experiences. By learning what you like and what you do not like, your tastes and predilections, you come to know yourself more.

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Current society, however, often rewards things such as discipline and grinding, wearing yourself away through repetition until a given task is achieved. This often boring form of improvement will almost always be the most successful in the completion of the given task; however, it does not come without a cost. Due to the necessity of creation for others (this is the main tenet of any economy), the output deemed most worthy of praise is always external rather than internal.

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In other words, society values us by what we make rather than by what we are: human doings rather than human beings. Because of this, we are often praised for creating "better things" and are therefore incentivised to do so, whereas the same praise is not present when we build upon ourselves, when we learn more about ourselves and become more self-actualised.

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Within FDVR, however, we will be able to experience an almost infinite number of experiences (depending on time dilation), and through that we will be able to become more self-actualised within FDVR than we would ever be able to without it. Along with this, in FDVR one need not create for others, meaning that creation, both of and for the self, can increase dramatically.

People often say that you get out what you put in, that if you try your hardest and give it your best you will achieve what you want to achieve. However, the longer we live, the more we realise that that's not true. We've all had dreams that we tried our best to achieve but failed all the same. As we've gotten older, we've realised that hard work or smart work alone isn't enough for us to receive what we want from the world.

Hard work is (almost always) necessary, but not sufficient for us to achieve what we want to achieve. The most accurate way to phrase this would be that success and hard work are correlated with one another. Infinitely less sexy of a phrase but also significantly more accurate. Hard work can always bring you closer to achieving your goals, but it can never bring you close enough to achieve them with certainty.

This certainty, however, can be found within immediate gratification. Most people believe that people who seek immediate gratification over delayed gratification are just lazy, slobs that mooch off the system that they've been born into, consuming without producing. However, my experience tells me that these kinds of people simply value the certainty of immediacy over the uncertainty of delay.

Both immediate and delayed gratification can be seen as logical depending on one's past experiences. If the correlation between hard work and success was strong enough for one to attain what they wanted, it's only logical for them to do the same again and again, building resistance to anything that bucks the trend, by establishing that trend of success in the first place. Similarly, if the correlation between hard work and success is not strong enough, it is only logical for one to quit the game and go to another table, where victory is more certain.

It should be noted here that in this example the amount of effort input is the same between both parties.

Within FDVR however, this does not have to be the case. Within FDVR we can turn correlation into causation, and make it so that our efforts can match up to our outcomes one to one. By doing this we take away the uncertainty of delayed gratification and the transience of immediate gratification, producing a perfectly just system.

I want to complete fulldive, but I don't know how to do that. Please give me some tips for finding some research partners. Is there any community to find partners?

The more I read and write about FDVR, the more I realise just how easy it is to make good arguments for it. I have a long history of watching politics and philosophy YouTubers/debaters, and the more I listen to these people, the more I think that, despite how good their arguments actually are, they pale in comparison to even some of the weakest arguments in favour of FDVR.

It makes me think about how good it would be for this movement to have a prominent FDVR YouTuber. I would do it myself, but my skill has always been in writing arguments rather than actually debating. If anyone is interested, drop me a DM. From what I understand of YouTube, it could also be quite lucrative.

View Poll

Any ideas on what the unofficial "first" fulldive experience will be when released to the general public? Something basic? Attending a funeral? Walking into an airport?

It doesn't matter what kind of experiences you want, or what kind of things you desire, anything and everything will be better in FDVR than it can possibly be here.

People often talk about how there needs to be a certain amount of negativity in any positive occurrence: a certain amount of arguments in every relationship, a certain amount of disagreement in any friendship, a certain amount of disappointment, etc, etc. However, I wonder to what extent this is true.

I am not saying here that this is not true. I think it is true that something being perfect does not mean that it needs to be pure. However, I think that for a lot of these sayings, what was originally a cope has turned into a justification.

I wonder, when FDVR comes around, what level of negativity we can purge from our lives while still keeping them interesting.

Who knows.

In modern society, when we think of what the perfect life is, most of us will think of a checklist of certain external criteria: being married, having a house, having kids, having a fulfilling job, paying off debts, and then we might tack on a sense of happiness or fulfilment at the end. However, in my opinion, the quality of one's life is dictated entirely by the extent to which one's life has been spent in the flow state.

The flow state is a psychological condition that occurs when a person is performing an activity that is demanding enough to require complete involvement, but not so demanding that it overwhelms their ability to respond effectively. This is, in my opinion, the best state that one can be in, completely engrossed in a given activity for the activity itself, and not because of the outcome that might be achieved by the completion of the action.

Ironically, this mode of existence is the exact opposite of delayed gratification, with the gratification occurring instantly and the end result being completely disregarded. However, the society that we live in is prescriptively based almost completely on that opposing idea of delayed gratification. From this first acknowledgement, we find that society at large can be described as one massive unintentional attempt to pull us out of the flow state, focusing on results instead of the state experienced whilst the activity that will produce those results is taking place.

Think: what is more valuable to society, the ever-anxious person that always produces results, or the person in a constant flow state that disregards results entirely?

This is a problem afflicting all societies across time; you might even argue that it's biological. The solution to this problem then becomes a dissolution of society and the implementation of FDVR. Within FDVR, those external expectations for results need not exist, so that you might be able to maintain your flow state for as long as humanly possible. Along with this, within FDVR more stimulating activities might be engaged in, allowing for a wider gamut of flow state opportunities than what is currently possible.

Being rich can effectively be boiled down to having a lot of influence or power. Of course, there are people who have a lot of power but are not very rich, but those people are either few and far between or at the immediate beck and call of the rich. Though there have been times where the rich have held more power and less power, it seems that we are now trending towards the rich having extremely consolidated power over workers because of the coming automation wave.

When the automation wave arrives, many businesses will often no longer have to interact at all with everyday people because jobs will become scarce, and even if people receive UBI, the increased efficiency of automation will make their buying power significantly more limited when compared to other companies. Instead, most of these transactions will simply be between businesses, decoupling the profit motive from its original aim of producing the best product for the consumer.

This problem will only continue to worsen until either the profit motive is done away with, or the average person becomes so powerless that they are deemed useless eaters and discarded.

However, I do not think that AI and automation are in any way bad things. In fact, I want these two technologies to be accelerated. However, if they are to be accelerated, then our end goal must be FDVR. FDVR is the ultimate logical terminus of the profit motive. Within FDVR, you are able to do whatever you want and infinitely maximize your level of influence and power, going beyond any level of influence that you would be able to have in the real world. With the implementation of the decoupling of money from what has hitherto been seen as its tautology, power, we are able to move society away from this dystopian end and towards one where FDVR might be universalized, allowing everyone to live their optimum life.

In his 1990's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses two personalities: the autotelic personality (describing a person who engages in activities because the activity itself is rewarding) and the exotelic personality (describing a person who is motivated mainly by outcomes outside the activity itself). The former, the autotelic personality, is more readily able to achieve the flow state due to its innate proclivity towards actions for their own sake rather than to achieve an end goal. As I have said previously, it is my belief that an uninterrupted flow state constitutes the perfect human existence; however, unfortunately for us, society often persuades us away from that ideal.

Society has been, is, and will always be goal-oriented. You are judged in society by what you are able to produce or engender. You are a good worker if you produce a lot, you are a good partner if you engender strong positive emotions, and you are a good person if you produce more for society than you consume from it. All interactions between oneself and society are graded on the scale of results, with no interest in assessing one's internality to the extent that it does not affect one's perceived externality.

Because of this, society actively moves us away from achieving flow states, because it disincentivises the autotelic personality type. This is not something that can be changed by implementing a new political or economic system. For this to be fully done away with, we would need FDVR. Within FDVR, one is able to engage in whatever activity they wish for its own sake, rather than for the end result of said action.

If you have spent any time doing any introspective work, you would have realised the unfortunate reality that having a sense of self is not a given. Though you may exist, make decisions, and manifest yourself in all the ways that constitute a "self," it is still possible for you to completely lack a sense of self, for you have frighteningly little knowledge of who, as a person, you actually are.

However, if we take that as a given, that having a sense of self is not a prerequisite for human existence, that leaves us in an interesting situation in relation to attempts towards contentment.

Let’s say we have someone with a fairly weak sense of self that lets the opinions of society and others dictate to them who they are and what they are. If this person were to ever reach a point of contentment, a point where they feel truly satisfied with their lives, how would they ever be able to know such contentment is authentic? If they have, in all effect, externalised their sense of self to others, then will that same feeling of contentment not also be an internalisation of their feelings and opinions towards him?

In such an example, you have someone that thinks they have reached the pinnacle, that they have made it, but in reality, due to them having a weak sense of self, they are still far from their apotheosis. It is my opinion, however, that this is the highest point we can ever get to. No matter who we are or where we come from, we are always going to, at least in part, offload our sense of self onto others, precluding us from ever reaching our highest state.

However, with FDVR this is not the case. With FDVR, there is no longer any need for us to externalise our sense of self onto others, because the others within said simulation can align with our own true selves (or sense of self). In such an example, the malforming force of externalisation becomes an impossibility, and the contentment that we feel will be the true highest form of existence.

When you ask men and women to pick the ideal traits that they'd want in a partner, you often get fairly typical answers. Height, weight, personality, economic situation, and other characteristics all fall in the predictable range. However, when you ask people about their actual dating history, you will find that people go for drastically different partners than what they stated were their ideal. It's logical to think that this is because people settle for less than perfect partners. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. What is actually happening here is an example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences, and there is no better example of the difference between these two than our treatment of the idea of resistance.

Resistance can be thought of as the effort, or lack thereof, that we have to employ in order to achieve a desired goal. When it comes to everyday life, it seems like we are explicitly asking for more resistance: setting time limits on apps, trying to reduce screen time, being against short, quick dopamine hits in favour of longer, more arduous ones, ect. ect. However, when we look at many people's revealed preferences, we see a stark inversion. People are using short form apps more, spending more time doom scrolling, and doing small things that (by their own account) are just wasting their time or, in the worst examples, actively damaging them (with rage bait content, for example.)

We say that we want more resistance in day to day life, but we keep on opting for more and more "slippery" activities (here I'm just using slippery as the opposite of resistant.) The reason why this is the case is obvious: we're animals, it's only natural for us to look for the quickest and easiest way to get to a given goal. However, as time goes on, things are getting more and more slippery. The amount of effort needed to engage with the world is becoming less and less, and eventually we will be in an a-resistant world, or close enough to one. Whether you are pro or anti billionaire, this is the world that they want. Logically, they want things to be as slippery as possible. They want you to not even click a button to check out, just liking something hard enough should bring it to your door. This is the logical endpoint of capitalism. This is the contradiction of capitalism brought about by its founders' inability to differentiate between stated and revealed preferences, and it's something that we will all pay the price for.

Slipperiness cannot be banned in a capitalistic economy because it is the core of capitalism, and, since it already exists, banning it will just create other markets for it. The solution to this problem then becomes FDVR.

As I have stated prior, FDVR ought to be an experience of perfectly tailored resistance, where one is able to be completely in the ideal state of existence, that being the flow state. If this is not done, and FDVR is not implemented, then we will all slip down the slope into full, unadulterated slop, becoming slippery shells of our former selves. Weak in every sense of the word, like a tree that had never had to endure the wind, breaking and buckling at the lightest breeze.

The flow state can be described as a balance between two extremes: anxiety, and boredom. When you are at the perfect middle point between these two extremes, neither overloaded, nor under loaded, you are able to achieve a state where the conscious and the subconscious are able to become one, and you are able to become fully engrossed in the given activity you are partaking in.

In the reality, however, we constantly encounter states of over or under loading (anxiety and boredom) meaning that we are never able to be continuously in that ideal flow state. This, in my opinion, constitutes the main force behind our frustrated desires. In an ideal world we would never be bored, nor anxiety ridden however because we are not in an ideal world this happens all too often.

As it stands now there seems to be no way to fix this problem. No matter what political ideology you might subscribe to or what economic system you think is the best, it seems that this imperfect loading that constitutes the non-flow state will always exist, and because of that humanity will always be faced with this frustrating negative force.

The only solution to this problem is FDVR. In my opinion the perfect life can be seen as one where one spends the maximal amount of time within the flow state, and such a state is only possible within FDVR, within a world tailor made for you. As it stands now there are simply too many different people existing in the world for the world to contort itself to be made for everyone, so it prioritises a select group of people: those with the most influence over it. If we want to live the perfect life, as I have described it, we NEED to create FDVR, there is NO other solution to this problem, to THE problem of human existence.

With this we can live a perfect life.

A few weeks ago I made a post talking about how FDVR was not inevitable, and how if we did not put serious effort into bringing about its genesis then it might never exist. Now, although I still agree with that initial claim, I have come to the realisation that the "if" of FDVR is not what should be focused on, but rather the "when." From this realisation I have come to the conclusion that it is better to advocate for reasons why we should accelerate FDVR's advent, motivating people towards active pursuits to make it a reality, in whatever way that might be.

The first of many reasons that we should want to accelerate FDVR is because it solves a fundamental problem of politics.

In my opinion, the reason for the existence of politics can be boiled down to various political ideologies vying for power over one another. Said "vying" might take many forms depending on the type of political framework, however, each system attempts to achieve a "correct answer" so that the "majority" of its citizens will be satisfied with the decision arrived at after the process. However, in reality this is almost never the case.

For whatever reason, the majority opinion will always have to be compromised upon and altered, often in an attempt to not too badly upset the losing party (or parties). This, however, leaves both parties dissatisfied, living in a less-than-ideal system, similar to a friend group that, because they cannot decide where to eat, goes to a restaurant that none of them hate, but also none of them love.

This issue of compromise and loss is solved completely within FDVR. Within FDVR everyone might live within their own individual, non-compromising political systems, no matter how eccentric or unconventional that ideology may be. Imagine living in a world, where whatever ideology you want can be made manifest, and you also don't have to impose you will on others that would like to live in another system.