After discussing essay topics in class, I’ve decided to take a philosophical approach. I want to create something with a significant thematic depth, not anything superficial or generic. This prompted me to begin compiling a list of potential questions, notes, and musings. An obvious selection could be Baudrillard’s Simulacra and its relation to simulations and the metaverse. In a lesson a few months back, when we were asked to come up with potential essay topics, I came up with something like to that, but now I feel it’s too obvious and simplistic.
I’ve been conducting research through reading articles, listening to podcasts, and reading essays, and I’ve compiled a list of prospective themes:
Could life be better in a virtual world? Ideally not run by one company,
Decentralised
Full of creations by different people
No limits to what you could be/do/have
Who needs the physical world
Advantages to spending much of life in a virtual world?
What if true reality is achieved?
Avatars beinging indistinguishable from the real person
Would it be easier to connect to people?
You wouldn’t have to travel, easier to meet and befriend people who have same interests as you
Better for environment?/ or will more people spend time online, meaning higher electricity usage?
Avatar manipulation? Could make you avatar more beautiful/ completely different to begin with – will there be laws around deception?
Will people intentionally make avatars to appeal to people? Eg will companies know your information and make avatars that look like you? Will this affect diversity?
Is there something about the real world that would be a shame to leave behind?
Metaverse/virtual realities could be genuine realities based on what we know/ think we know of material world
Our perception of the world is a highly embellished simulation of what’s going on, we perceive only a fraction of the info that’s available to us and from that our minds create maps
Newtonian physics states that the world is made up of atoms, and atoms are made from empty space, yet why does this world feel so real?
What is knowable and how do we know what we think we know?
Possible to live in a virtual world without being a slave to someone else’s reality?
Questions on the nature of reality are old as Time, versions of these question have been found through the centuries. Ancient Chinese philosopher asked how do I know I’m noit just a butterfly dreaming I’m me and decorates said how do I know there’s not an evil demon fooling me into all of this being real. These days the question has been rehashed into, how do we know we’re not in a simulation? A contemporary analogue of the old questions
Simulation movies after computer interned, world on a wire the progenitor
The world is changing a lot faster than that of previous periods, people are feeling ungrounded and we’re also in a period of existential confusion
The internet has built communities but also led to fragmentation
Philosophy has a central role in reflecting on technology
Techno philosophy as a response to neuroscience philosophy (put forward by Patricia churchland) thinking about virtual realities can help us address a number of philosophical queestions on reality -what is reality, how can we know about it, how to live a good life,
David Chalmer’s thesis of his book claims that virtual reality is a genuine reality, the objects within it are genuine entities eleven if they’re digital entities but a virtual reality is no less as a genuine reality. We could be in a matrix like simulation, we can’t know for sure but there’s s significant probability we’re in such a simulation. However this doesn’t make our lives less meaningful as all of this is still real as it was before.
In the matrix living in the simulation is seen as bad, but David doesn’t think it’s bad because it’s a simulation, it’s bad becasue it’s a prison constructed by machines. A world in which we chose to enter ourselves and exert out autonomy within isn’t innately bad. What makes the matrix dystopian is that people were being controlled, but is that an inevitable outcome of living in a virtual world where you have increasingly less and less contact with base reality (whether or not we can ontologically agree that it exists) in order to move up the stack
I’m talking about a computer simulation but the same philosophical tools that we use to open ourselves up to the possibility we’re living in a computer simulation are the same that we would use to open ourselves to the possibility that we’re living in a world created by a deity, Old Testament god etc and that’s partly how we can arrive to the realisation that we’re in a sense already living on a simulation. We only perceive a small portion of the physical world as it is, and our brains don’t merely fill in the gaps, they also what gives rise to the sense that we are conscious, we all are conscious but can’t quite know for sure what’s going on in someone else’s conscious experience therefore constitutes the type of conscious experience that would make someone a genuine person in reality