You are the one who brought up Oscar Pistorius. Then you directly asked me a question about him. Now you are claiming that my answer to your question is derailing the discussion.
If you are going to choose to promote Oscar Pistorius as an example of why prosthetics are good, then it seems appropriate for me to point out that the outcome of that situation didn't turn out too well, and Pistorius is now in prison.
It looks rather like a common science fiction movie theme -- you are offered some phenomenal benefit based on scientific progress, but it turns out to be a trap and you turn out to be the mouse caught in a maze. Pistorius was offered wonderful new legs that would make him rich and famous, and so he was for a short time, but the ultimate result was not what he had envisioned. Rather like Pinocchio and his time on Pleasure Island followed by his time as a donkey working in the salt mine.
I brought up Oscar Pistorius because he is probably the best-known wearer of prosthetics, and because the prosthetics in his case gave him an extraordinary benefit, going from being confined to a wheelchair to becoming a professional athlete. I never said prosthetics are good because Oscar Pistorius has them. I merely stated their benefits to him. That he squandered those benefits is on him, not his prosthetics. It is irrelevant to his wearing of prosthetics that he is ruined for having killed his girlfriend. Professional athletes kill their girlfriends and so do random people we’ve never heard of—and just as one particular girlfriend-murdering professional athlete happens to wear prosthetics, so do countless other people we’ve never heard of wear prosthetics, and aren’t murdering people because of it.
You’re confusing an example of someone well-known for wearing prosthetics as somehow representative of how bad prosthetics are because he killed his girlfriend. It’s a baseless conclusion. Surely you see this. It is a fallacy to say that one must be representative of the whole. You need a larger sample size than one. It might even be true that wearers of prosthetic feet do murder their significant others at a higher rate than normal, but that would probably have to do with the fact that many of them are veterans and suffer from PTSD. It still wouldn’t mean prosthetics were the cause.
For the record, though, I didn’t ask you a question about Oscar Pistorius. The question I asked you was, “are you opposed to something like the prosthetic feet worn by Oscar Pistorius?” That question is about prosthetic feet, not Oscar Pistorius. To get us off this tangent, perhaps we can just switch out “Oscar Pistorius” for a Google image:
The runner on the left is an amputee wearing the same type of prosthesis as Oscar Pistorius. If your answer is, “I disapprove of such prosthetics because they cause the wearers to murder their girlfriends,” then we can discuss the statistical evidence for that claim. Which could always be interesting, but it may prove too much of a digression—in which case, swap the question about prosthetic feet with the question about ocular prosthetics. I had also asked if you were opposed to eyeglasses.
Even in hypothetical situations one has to consider logical consistency. "If A, then B." To me it appears that in a world where a VR paradise is possible, then it must necessarily become compulsory. That is a drawback to the hypothetical situation which is inherent in the proposal.
It’s not logical to conclude that the benefits of a VR paradise must necessarily be compulsory. If history shows us anything, it is that the trappings of any sort of earthly paradise are almost always reserved to an elite. Whether it’s exotic spices, fine wines, lovely courtesans, palatial dwellings, or any other sensual bliss, that sort of thing has usually been the province of the wealthy and powerful, while everyone else kept the system going by eking out a comparatively meager living. There is every reason to believe that if VR is expensive, it will be the province of the rich. Just as we Americans enjoy our iPods while
the Apple peons in China throw themselves off buildings to escape their work conditions, there is no certainty that everyone would be compelled to have something that a very few could afford in the first place. It would probably be more compulsory that you be the person who gently tucks the son of a billionaire into his VR tank and monitors his settings, than that you would be forced to have nothing other than any pleasure you ever desired (which is where the
Brave New World comparison breaks down, as those people were bred for castes).
One way a VR paradise would be available to everyone, however, is if some sort of hyper-intelligent A.I. took over the world and wanted to humanely dispose of us in the most generous way possible. Offering us an endless paradise while cocooned in subterranean VR tanks would be a nice way to do it. If you wanted to opt out, that would be up to you. The A.I. might say, “well, my plan is to cover the planet in solar panels, but if you really want an exemption from paradise then I’ll build fewer machines to do the work and you can take their place in the mines.” I suppose if you genuinely like poverty then that would be your preference.
