ArkStream Capital: Talking about the Metaverse and Blockchain Games

Virtual Great Migration
Anyone who sees an impending storm should alert others. And I saw the storm coming.

The next generation or two will have many more people, even hundreds of millions of people immersed in virtual worlds and online games. Once we play the game, outside the game, things in "reality" don't happen anymore, at least not in the way they do now. When millions of man-hours are withdrawn from society, something mega-event is bound to happen.



——Edward Castronova, "The Great Migration to the Virtual World"



When I put on the Steam Index and entered "Half-Life: Alyx", I saw the towering tower in front of me, and the sound of the aircraft sounded in my ear, the boundary between virtual and reality was broken at that moment. There has never been a moment when I felt as deeply as now the pulse of the "Great Migration to the Virtual World" in the long river of history hit my senses.

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Half-Life: Alyx

Zhuang Zhou Mengdie
"In the past, Zhuang Zhou dreamed of a Hu Die, a vivid Hu Die, and self-proclaimed that it is suitable for you! I don't know Zhou. If you suddenly realize it, you will be like Zhou. I don't know that Zhou's dream is Hu Die, and Hu Die's dream is Zhou?? Zhou and Hu Die, then you must There is a difference. This is called materialization."

Did Zhuang Zhou turn into a butterfly in a dream, or did a butterfly turn into Zhuang Zhou in a dream?

Coincidentally, Hilary Putnam in the West proposed the illusion of "brain in a vat": if a brain is soaked in a vat full of some kind of nutrient solution, and a powerful computer interacts with it with various sensory information, then The brain will think that it is living in a real world. Think about it: do we just exist in a "jar" as a "consciousness"?

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brain in a vat
Zhuangzi and Hilary Putnam are representatives of idealist philosophers from the East and the West respectively. Idealism holds that we cannot know anything apart from our senses, and that anything is present in our senses before our consciousness.

fake as real
After the 20th century, people generally accepted the philosophical view of materialism, but technological progress forced us to reconsider the importance of consciousness. The world has my world, your world, his world, the physical objective world. A world without "me" means nothing to "me", because one can never think about the world before my world. From this perspective, "consciousness is primary".

The reality we face after the 20th century is: VR/AR technology, somatosensory clothing, and brain-computer interface technology are iterating at a high speed. After taking over our five senses, the boundary between virtual and reality becomes blurred. The virtual world replaced the physical objective world by taking over my world.

Virtual can become reality.

fake fake real
When technology gets to that point, can you really realize that you are virtual?

When it comes to the metaverse, everyone will use "ready player" as an example, but the author prefers to use "the world of Truman" as the expression of the metaverse. In "Ready Player One", the protagonist clearly knows that he has entered a very real virtual world from reality.

And the more real virtual is that you never question its authenticity. Truman has been placed in a set environment since he was a baby, and it was not until he became an adult that because of Sylvia, he began to doubt the unreality of this world. This is still a high-cost, flaw-prone "metaverse", and he has been deceived for so many years. Then imagine, if you are Truman, you have been connected to the brain-computer interface since you were a child, and you have grown up in a virtual environment. At this time, the virtual world is not the real world for you.