The metaverse is real: reconstructing society from first principles

Homo sapiens are a fascinating species. Our bodies do have some advantages: opposable thumbs, decent endurance, bipedalism — but are quite mediocre overall in the grand scheme of evolutionary physiology. Where all our skill points have been allocated is in two key areas: communication and imagination.

Natural selection is an autonomous process, and our existence is completely meaningless. Yet, through our imagination, we have conjured fictional structures like religion, nations, economies, money etc. to give it all some meaning. Though our communication abilities, we have collectively given legitimacy and continued to memetically evolve all of these structures. But really, these are purely artificial constructs backed by some material creations.

The meatspace is already a multiplayer video game — you earn arbitrary points to accomplish certain tasks, with different methods to create the rules of the subgames. However, there’s one severely crippling limitation to meatspace, bound by physics: Our imaginations have far, far wider potential than what can be built physically, or experienced by our fragile bodies. There are also many arbitrary boundaries set that cripple our creativity. Further, the more we want to build meatspace things, the more toxic waste and damage we’ll leave. It’s affecting other species first, but eventually, biosphere collapse will catch up with homo sapiens and lead to our extinction. Now, of course, one would argue that the solution to this is colonizing the galaxy…

But a much easier and more feasible alternative is at hand: building the metaverse. Unconstrained by the many limitations of meatspace, we can collaborate on creating fairer societies from first principles — an opportunity our ancestors 10,000 years ago did not have.

Ultimately, the goal is to derive “happiness” out of our meaningless existence by leveraging our imagination and communication superpowers: the metaverse can accomplish this goal in a better, more benevolent, creative, and sustainable manner.

So how can all of this be accomplished? It’s early days, I don’t know. It’s very likely that a lot of the follies of meatspace will be translated over to metaverse in the early days, but hopefully the tools to break this cycle will be much more accessible. What do you think?