Thoughts in and Out of Season 15

Grave, morbid, and facetious

1: The Dominion of Māra

[At least, that is what my son Patrick calls it, and I find the phrase exquisitely apt.]

I have in various places and on numerous occasions explained why I think the notion that consciousness could be “uploaded” into a virtual world existing in a digital format to be a hopeless category-confusion. The mind is not a computer, thought is not software, and we are as conscious beings confined to the decidedly “analogue” medium of flesh and blood. Neither do I think it possible, logically or technically, that we inhabit some kind of computer simulation immeasurably removed from some other exhausted “base reality” (a theory advanced by any number of persons in recent years, I assume on account of an excessive immersion in video games). That said, there is a sense in which it seems to me we all now live—and ever more continually so—in a virtual universe. Gianni Vattimo liked to speak of late modernity as a “transparent society”, in which the instantaneity of communication, the ever more ubiquitous and simulacral reign of artificial representation, and all the other aspects of an age in which space and time seem to be in a state of constant dissolution and “de-realization” have rendered our inherited metaphysics and our empirical expectations of the world equally feeble. For him, this was something, if not to celebrate, at least to welcome as an occasion for letting go of “strong structures of being” and cultivating a humble habit of “weak thought”. Make of that what you will; what is certain is that his diagnosis of human experience in the late modern era was impeccable. The world we live in, even as we are confined to animal bodies, seems more and more like a simulation, with no grounding in any kind of “base reality” at all.