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Even if it controlled your vestibular system perfectly, it unfortunately wouldn't help. You need your sense of balance to stand and walk. If you mess with it to

Even if it controlled your vestibular system perfectly, it unfortunately wouldn't help. You need your sense of balance to stand and walk. If you mess with it too much you will hit the floor very quickly. Physics isn't fooled. You could imagine supporting yourself with a harness so you wouldn't fall, but certainly you can also imagine that constantly struggling against a harness won't feel like natural walking either. And there's also proprioception that will sense that your limbs are not moving in the way your inner ear predicts they should. Proprioception can't be fooled. If it could your limbs would get out of sync with your brain and who knows what chaos would result. Unfortunately we won't be running around freely in arbitrary VR environments until the invention of The Matrix's brain jack. So, not likely within our lifetimes.

latentsea 3y ago
The first chapter from The Brain That Changes Itself is about a woman who couldn't walk because of some bacteria (iirc?) that attacked something in her inner ear that wound up destroying her balance. The chapter is a story about attaching electrodes to her tongue connected to a helmet with accelerometers that helped restore her sense of balance. Initially the effect persisted for a short time after removing the helmet and electrodes. With subsequent sessions the duration got longer and longer and after several years her balance was completely normal again.
moron4hire 3y ago
Actually, proprioception can be fooled quite easily. There are a number of different examples involving phantom limbs, vestigial tails, redirected walking, etc. Almost none of the human senses are absolute. They are holistic, subjective, and relative to experience (both recent and past), culture, age, etc. Honestly, the fact that we can get any semblance of objective communication of our senses together, based on how wonky and unreliable the individual parts can be, is amazing.

latentsea 3y ago

The first chapter from The Brain That Changes Itself is about a woman who couldn't walk because of some bacteria (iirc?) that attacked something in her inner ear that wound up destroying her balance. The chapter is a story about attaching electrodes to her tongue connected to a helmet with accelerometers that helped restore her sense of balance. Initially the effect persisted for a short time after removing the helmet and electrodes. With subsequent sessions the duration got longer and longer and after several years her balance was completely normal again.

moron4hire 3y ago

Actually, proprioception can be fooled quite easily. There are a number of different examples involving phantom limbs, vestigial tails, redirected walking, etc. Almost none of the human senses are absolute. They are holistic, subjective, and relative to experience (both recent and past), culture, age, etc. Honestly, the fact that we can get any semblance of objective communication of our senses together, based on how wonky and unreliable the individual parts can be, is amazing.