Worldbuilding Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for writers/artists using science, geography and culture to construct imaginary worlds and settings. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In a society where full-immersion virtual reality is common, how much more of a hurdle would it be to trick the mind into accepting a different passage of time?
For example; you enter a virtual reality and seem to spend a year in it, but in reality only a few hours have passed.
This is a hard one.
Let's imagine that our VR device can read/stimulate every output/input neuron to the brain and thereby completely simulate a different reality. The problem remains that the internal processing of the brain is based in wetware - biology, going at biological speed. For the same quality of experience, time must pass at about the same rate. Otherwise you'd be watching reality in 'fast-forward', just like fast-forwarding a DVD you were watching. Not the same quality of experience.
An even more immersive experience would be where the state of the brain (i.e. all neuron states, all connections and connection strengths) could be read and copied (this is a tricky problem). Now we can put it on an electronic substrate, we can run it at any speed; running it faster would make the outside world appear to slow down. The problem here comes when you want to leave VR, because your brain-state is significantly different to that of the left-behind biological brain. A tricky merge operation would be required, limited by how quickly the biological brain could be updated.
So to answer the question, from a theoretical standpoint it's perfectly possible to trick the brain in this way, from a practical standpoint it's very very hard.
