one point is “the amount of dirt on the window…. and what that does to any of your observations of the truth”

dusan..

the dirt is the interface.

the fact that virtuality isnt new, or our reactions to it…ask any lucid dreamer, or TV producer.

the other point is meme, the medium that youll find any transcendence… other than just a faster more seperated culture that can onli interact with each other though a machine…. havent we done such a “good” job” communicating through fashion and language?- oops maybe not , in a historical view.

better we learn how we interact with each other from the examination of past mediums, than hold up any new ones as “special”

unless were selling the tech.– been there done that. you end up looking like Jobs on stage…something creepy there,

c3

I totally agree, by the way, that it’s not so much that virtual worlds are different from anything else, which is also Cube’s point really about interfaces (I think).

But what’s interesting to me is the opportunity to re-interpret our beliefs about self and experience because we have a visible domain, presence and specific tool sets through the lens of a virtual world or, more broadly, technology.

The truths we learn aren’t new, but the fact that we can learn them again because we have a new window to look through (excuse the PC metaphor) might shed light on transcendent experience.

The mind is always generating images and maps in real life in organic nature, and adjusting them. So the same “machine” goes on working in a virtual world exactly in the same way. Nothing magical happens. When you put a mirror in front of a cat, the cat thinks there is another cat there and paws at it. When you are put in a virtual world, and something flies up at you, you startle, just as if it were real.

In many cases (not all), people automatically map their sense of body/soul/self to the avatar — this is what Will Wright called “investing your consciousness in a toy” i.e. the avatar. So you begin to say “I’m flying” or “I’m sitting” or “I’m going over there now”. While of course you are deprived of smell and touch, you have sight and sound and even a sense of pressure that can feign touch because there is physics in the world. So you just mapt it all automatically, without thinking, you don’t deside to make an exotic new transposed self — just your ordinary self with its automatic reactions in the automatic nervous system maps, in even in a faulty way, so you begin to feel as if you are walking, picking up stuff, and even feeling depressed if you are in a dark and rainy place, feeling uplifted if the sun is shining, and so forth.

I’ve always been the first one to say that there is something more essential about avatar communications, but as time goes on, I’ve come to see that what seems magical and special about it isn’t that prejudices are stripped away due to the removal/change of the physical body, or that time and space are reduced or something utopian like that, but merely because people sit and listen more. They have conversations. They sit and listen. They are so unused to doing that in real life — with their TV, TV dinners, Internet surfing, i-phones, commutes with Kindles, etc. etc. that the shock of sitting down and listening to another soul while sitting on the bank of a river under a weeping willow in a virtual world is so great, so stupendous, that they they have a transcendent experience. That’s all — but that’s ok, that’s worth working for.

just wanted to share a memory with you; Darren and I had just finished our “Tribal One” concept world in which you logged on to facebook, and thru that landed in an OpenSim world consisting of other facebook avatars; one of its features was the ‘home world’, a sim generated from your facebook profile – one feature was that you could frame and hang pictures from your facebook photo album on a picture wall. The weird situation was, when Darren, Jim and I stood as avatars with our ‘real’ (facebook) names in front of my photo wall, looking at a picture of Me and Jim standing together IRL, looking into the camera. Now, everybody has had that eerie moment with a real-world photo in a virtual world, but this was also weird on a social connectedness level.

And then of course there are the RL psychologists who have realized that VR has tremendous potential for behavior modifications of various types: http://tr.im/PYHW , http://tr.im/PYKS and even http://tr.im/PYLl . And there are many more.

So no need to muse about “strange loops.” Just consider Goedel and Escher brilliant individuals who used their particular technical languages (mathematics and art) to describe a concept that ought to make most SL residents say “duh!” They just hadn’t yet seen an everyday application of the concept that we experience so intimately and often apply consciously.

they were very meta .