National Geographic - USA (2020-08)

(Antfer) #1

CORONAVIRUS | THE BIG IDEA


without people mixing me up with someone else,
without this invisible force holding us together. But
the change also terrified me. Even when I had pushed
Ethan away, it was comforting knowing he was there.
And he was always there. Alone at college, I felt like I
had lost something.
I often think about that moment of separation
now, since normal life has been upended and people
everywhere have been forced apart by the unseen peril
of COVID-19. Suddenly the physical proximity in our
day-to-day lives, which many of us took for granted,
has been ripped away. I wonder what this will mean
for my future, for the future in general, and for the
future of my generation.

I’M STUDYING PHILOSOPHY, and in one of my first
courses I came across a thought experiment, devised
by philosopher Frank Jackson, that’s widely known
as Mary’s Room. The premise is that Mary, a brilliant
scientist, has lived her whole life in a colorless room
where her only sensory input is through a black-
and-white television screen.
Mary has access to tons of information and knows
everything about color perception; she’s just never
experienced it. Then one day, let’s say she walks out
of the room—sees the blue sky, feels the bark of a tree.
Jackson’s question is: Does she learn anything new?
Does experiencing the world tell us something that
we couldn’t have learned by reading up on it?
Jackson says yes. Those things we miss by not liv-
ing in the physical world he calls qualia, and they’re
everywhere—in the sun, the earth, other people.
They’re what’s lacking in a strictly virtual life.
For years I’ve had this nagging intuition that almost
everything I need to do can be done virtually. I can
talk to my friends, write, read, report stories, watch
television, listen to a lecture, scroll through social
media. When all my university’s classes went online in
late March, there were actually more things I could do.
My professors were more available online. I had fewer
distractions and easier access to a lot of materials.
In lockdown, I moved back to my family home but
my life went on much as it was. My mother, a therapist,
still sees her patients; my sister uses Zoom for her high
school classes. It’s just all virtual, a different reality.
This kind of virtual life is home turf to my gener-
ation. I grew up with computers; I got bigger as they
got smaller and more accessible. My peers learned
how to surf the internet before our parents, figured
out how to flirt through text messages, formed cliques
with instant-messaging group chats. Even before

NORMAL LIFE HAS BEEN


UPENDED, AND PEOPLE


EVERYWHERE HAVE BEEN


FORCED APART BY THE


UNSEEN PERIL OF COVID-19.


16 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
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