5apriljournal

I'm getting very caught up in this. I feel that sometimes i cannot detach myself from who i was years ago, trying to figure things out that would enable me to form a foundation from which to work on a project--something that would make me famous. I wanted to be Ronald Reagon so badly--i even wrote him a letter, addressed it to the White House and recieved back the iconographic representation of a leader--was he really though? Many commnetators, especially abroad, cannot believe that we had elected a movie star as our president--i feel the same way today....what the hell were we thinking? What ever possessed us to think that someone whose previous occupation was to fake other people would be a good leader, someone to look up to and emulate? This is what i see in technology and in computers. We have deified its essence so that we long forget that we are playing in a virtual realm. Now even Plato talked of virtuality in the "Allegory of the Cave," but he was interested in trying to figure out what was behind the "reality-appearance" distinction that has haunted man since the beginning--is what i see and percieve, is the life i live really what is going on? I mean what is in the mind's eye--is it really real? I now think of the question as rather moot; i now believe that what is really real, is real. How can it be otherwise? In language, i think we can see what Plato was talking about--manipulation of signs to signify reality--that one is wholly composing reality always already, as Heidegger is famous for saying.

Any world needs constraints and finite structure. But which aspects of the real (existential) world can attract our attention and sustain our imagination? Time must be built in, but the way of reckoning time need not duplicate the deadlines of the real world (as H. Bergson said, "If time is not real, then nothing is real"). Time could have the spaciousness of a totally focused project or could be reckoned by rituals of leisure (a new concept, historically speaking, that has only come to the fore in the 19th century with the seeds of global capitalism). Danger and caution pervade the real (existential) world, but virtual reality can offer total safety, like the law of sanctuary in religious cultures. Care (Sorge) will always belong to human agents, but with the help of intelligent software agents, as M. Heim might say, cares will weigh on us more lightly, more leisurely.

The ultimate virtual reality experience is more than likely a purely philosophical one, an experience of the sublime or awesome. The sublime, as Kant defined it, is the spine-tingling chill that comes from the realization of how small our finite perceptions are in the face of the infinity of possible, virtual worlds we may settle into and inhabit. Kant had only two a priori environments that humans inhabit--time and space. These were the categories that all else fit into, regardless of the vantage point of the onlooker of the existential agent. The fact that we recognize time and space illustrates, to me, the idea the both are real and that both are wholly created in our minds as well. The final point of a virtual world is to dissolve the constraints of the anchored world so that we can lift anchor--not to drift aimlessly in angst, but to explore anchorage in ever-new places, and perhaps, find our way back to experience the most primitive and powerful alternative embedded in the question posed by Leibniz: WHY IS THERE ANYTHING AT ALL RATHER THAN NOTHING?

Plato holds out ideal forms as the "really real" while he denigrates the raw physical forces studied by his Greek predecessors.

Aristotle soon demotes Plato's ideas to a secondary reality, to the flimsy shapes we abstract fromthe really real--which for Aristotle, are the individual substances we touch and feel around us.

In the medieval period, real things are those that shimmer with symbolic significance. The biblical-religious symbols add superreal messages to realities, giving them permanence and meaning, while merely material aspects of things are less real, merely terrestrial, defective rubbish.

In the Renaissance, things counted as real that could be coutned and observed repeatedly by the senses. The human mind infers a solid material substrate underlying sense data but the substrate proves less real because it is less quantifiable and observable.

Finally, in our times, the modern period attributed reality to atomic matter that has internal dynamics or energy, but soon the reality question was doomed by the analytical drive of the sciences towards complexity and by the plurality of artistic and informational data/styles.