I argued with my brother this weekend. It was fun. Everyone had gone to bed, and he and I went outside to smoke weed. We were in southern Maine, at a lake house that has been in my family for four generations; as my brother and I walked down to the lake, our 98-year-old grandfather, the patriarch, slept not more than thirty yards from us, tucked inside his single bed, and opposite him, his late wife’s empty bed, a symbol of our missing matriarch.
My brother and I argued under the stars, our arms leaning over the wooden rail of our deck, the water just a few feet below us. All was silent, except for our loud-ass voices. Mars was red and huge just over the treeline on the other side of the lake. Most of Pegasus still lingered on the horizon, his nightly journey having just begun.
We argued about the nature of reality, but I think my brother’s unspoken point was that he was worried about me wasting my life playing video games, reading books, and watching shows and movies. I tried to explain to him that video games (not to mention the others) are a part of life, a part of reality, one that operates in another — virtual — dimension, but one that is no less valuable for what it is, an alternative experience of space and time. I reassured him that I am quite happy with my life, and that I spend many, many, many hours a day not playing video games (or reading books or watching shows and movies). That, in fact, I spend many hours a day talking to real live people, face to face, and that I often partake in outdoor activities here in the incredibly beautiful place where I live, just minutes away from real live rivers, real live lakes, and real live mountains, where even a trip to the grocery store can be a feast for the soul.
Yes, I play video games and read books and watch shows and movies, but I’m also alive in the world, and my brother ought not to worry.
He should, on the other hand, expand his idea of the nature of reality.
During my argument, I mentioned that physicists claim (in a rigorous language I cannot, in all sincerity, understand) that reality contains more than the easily conceived dimensions of length, breadth, thickness, and duration; it may contain, according to some theoretical physicists, as many as 11 dimensions.
This is incredibly difficult to conceive, and I am not one to fully conceive it, but I do recognize the truth of it. I know what it is like to be pulled outside of oneself, to exist in a real and true way seperated enough from my physical reality to experience, at the very least, a stretching beyond the body.
That experience happens in — or at least finds its causative effects in — a different — virtual — dimension. This dimension is not exclusive to the playing of video games. We experience it when we’re listening to music and we are moved to dance. The four easily conceived dimensions of traditional reality cannot explain why a particular sequence of sound waves stimulating the follicles of our ear drums causes one’s foot to move. They cannot explain the subjective sensation of joy that floods down one’s spine at the band-supported crest of a particularly well-played guitar solo.
That experience — call it the subjective experience of the being within — exists in a completely different (though not completely seperate) dimension of reality than height, breadth, depth, and duration.
Culture and entertainment exist, and are most powerful, within that alterative dimension of reality. The evolutionary development of subjective experience has led to a scientific, engineered, and artistically influenced exploration of that dimension, turning some of “the subjective beings within” into expert creators who are capable of not only experiencing that dimension but of using tools to draw that subjective experience into the more easily experienced dimensions of reality — or what some people call, the four dimensions of “objective” reality.
This — these(?) — non-objective dimension(s) exist(s), and subjective experiences originating from these dimensions ought not to be devalued against experiences that originate on a snow-covered mountain in France. Both experiences — one originating in the subjective; one originating in the objective — are real. And both of them have value.
I hope my brother would agree with me up to this point.
Where we differ is on the question of how much, relatively speaking, each experience ought to be valued.
I suspect most people would agree with my brother that the experience of skiing down a slope at Chamonix differs not just in kind, but in value from the experience of playing a video game where you control a digitally-created avatar as it makes its way down an artistically interpreted digital version of that same slope, one that includes not just a geometrically rendered version of that slope, but also its ideal colors and sounds rendered in state-of-the-art screens and headphones and accompanied by a synchronized rumbling in your hands to simulate the rumble of the snow under your skis, all of it coming together to increase what feels like your heart rate, adrenaline, and dopamine, all while you sit on a couch in your living room, one leg hung over the edge, one leg tucked beneath you, the back of the couch swallowing you, slowly and slowly and slowly.
Yes, it is an experience that differs from skiing down the slopes of Chamonix. But it’s no less real, and in many ways, no less enjoyable. But to compare one to the other, to value one over the other, is akin to valuing the taste of chocolate over the sensation of a feather tickling your skin — they are as different as they come, and there’s no need to prefer one over the other.
There are things I’ve yet to experience in the alternative dimension of video games, books, movies, and music. Things that simply cannot compare to standing a few feet over a calm body of water on a clear, dark night, sharing some weed with a brother.
Thankfully, my subjective experience contains, and is grateful for, all of the dimensions it can get.
