steelridge58 said:I guess I’m just sitting here staring at this puzzle, wondering if I’ve finally lost my marbles or if there’s actually some profound meaning behind how much time I spend trying to fit these tiny cardboard pieces together. It feels like one of those endless existential loops where you think you've found the perfect match, only to realize you've been looking at it upside down the whole time—kind of like how we struggle to grasp the true essence of Being in our daily lives. Honestly, it’s probably just me being overly dramatic, but there’s something strangely humbling about being completely defeated by a picture of a landscape. steelridge58 says:
I basically grew up inside computer games. Honestly, I don’t really bother with TV and I’m not much of a music person either; instead, I just spend most of my time immersed in virtual worlds, so I am genuinely curious to hear what everyone here thinks about this whole topic.
Here’s a quick little post I put together from a different thread, just for those of you who aren't really into video games:
I honestly can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by how much weight we put on these heavy philosophical ideas, because sometimes I think we get so caught up in the deep existential dread that we forget how much our everyday surroundings actually shape who we are. It’s funny, really—I was walking through the local shopping mall the other day, just minding my own business, when I started thinking about Heidegger's whole concept of Being and how easily we just drift through life without ever truly being "present" in our own skin. It’s easy to get lost in the noise of everything around us, isn't it? I mean, I know I certainly do, and I often find myself overthinking things until I'm just spinning my wheels, which is probably why I tend to ramble like this, but there's something so profoundly human about that struggle to just *exist* without feeling like you're performing for some invisible audience. I guess what I'm trying to say is that maybe we shouldn't take ourselves quite so seriously all the time, even when we're grappling with the big questions.
I still have that one post stuck in my head, and I’m really hoping we can actually dive into some of those questions you brought up right here in this thread.
Technology just keeps pushing the envelope, doesn't it? Now we’re seeing gaming migrate entirely into true virtual reality through these specialized headsets, which brings up this fascinatingly deep philosophical concept known as "presence." It’s essentially that specific threshold where a player becomes so completely submerged in an artificial environment that they start losing the ability to distinguish it from the actual world around them.
I’m guessing—or maybe it just strikes me that way—that this whole philosophical concept regarding (virtual) presence, this idea of "being there," really mirrors Heidegger's notion of presence as a kind of fundamental dwelling or being-in-the-world.
It’s that strange, beautiful paradox of truly experiencing life—that deep sense of immersion where you're fully present in the moment, yet somehow simultaneously stepping outside of yourself through what we call ex-sistence, all while finding your footing in relation to everyone else around you.
I’ve been thinking about how presence acts as this constant variable—something that stays ever-present yet remains entirely subject to how we choose to interpret our own ex-sistence.
Just being here.
Existing in this virtual world.
When you start talking about levels of immersion—kind of like how we describe being "submerged" in a book through those deep intertextual connections, or how video games use all these interactive tricks to pull you into a virtual world—it makes me wonder if we could apply that same logic to analytical distance. I mean, can we actually talk about varying degrees of analytical distance between a player and the game itself, and if so, just how much of that distance is always hanging around there, even when we feel totally lost in the experience?
I was just reading something online that really stuck with me, mostly because of how deeply it ties back into certain philosophical theories, and I honestly think it’s pretty fascinating that if you look at it from a technical standpoint, every single virtual world essentially acts as a silent materialization of what we’d call an idealistic perspective—or even a more radical version of idealism, for that matter.
I’ve been spending way too much time lately spiraling down the rabbit hole of subjective idealism, and honestly, it’s a bit exhausting how much it makes me question everything I think I see right in front of me. There’s this overwhelming, almost dizzying feeling that comes with the idea that reality doesn't actually exist as some solid, independent thing out there, but is instead just a collection of perceptions living entirely inside our own minds. It’s a heavy concept to carry around when you're just trying to go about your day, because if everything—the coffee in my hand, the streetlights in Chicago, even the people passing by—is just a projection of my own consciousness, then the very idea of an objective world starts to feel like a beautiful, fragile illusion. I find myself wondering if we ever truly touch anything at all, or if we're all just trapped in these solitary bubbles of perception, forever reaching for a reality that might not even be there once we stop looking..
Yeah, exactly. We’re talking about entirely different ways to mediate thought and reasoning, specifically looking at how we might leverage virtual worlds alongside traditional text within a philosophical framework—basically, finding a way to fuse deep philosophical discourse with this kind of immersive, philosophical play happening right inside a digital environment.
A person annihilates themselves when they realize they have miscalculated and abused their own free will. Under such circumstances, self-annihilation—particularly from the perspective of the soul or eternity—becomes the only valid and moral choice.
By soul, I am referring to that part of a human being that transcends the self, that seeks eternity, or in psychological terms, seeks stability—as the only legitimate framework for exercising one's freedom.
The freer a person becomes, the greater their need for space, or rather, for the widest possible frameworks they can imagine (so that "the sky is the limit" 😉).
if philosophy claims to have something to say about labor, the worker, exploitation, capitalism, or socialism, how could it not have something to say about the human being, always respecting their ontological dignity (yet another philosophical concept I used in a previous post that some people failed to grasp)?
Ontological dignity—would that simply mean dignity in and of itself?
It is deeply woven into everything you just listed. In fact, it is precisely out of that dignity that a person engages with "labor, the worker, exploitation, and so on."
A person annihilates themselves when they realize they have miscalculated and abused their own free will. Under such circumstances, self-annihilation—particularly from the perspective of the soul or eternity—becomes the only valid and moral choice.
By
soul, I am referring to that part of a human being that transcends the self, that seeks eternity, or in psychological terms, seeks stability—as the only legitimate framework for exercising one's freedom.
The freer a person becomes, the greater their need for space, or rather, for the widest possible frameworks they can imagine (so that "the sky is the limit" 😉).
if philosophy claims to have something to say about labor, the worker, exploitation, capitalism, or socialism, how could it not have something to say about the human being, always respecting their ontological dignity (yet another philosophical concept I used in a previous post that some people failed to grasp)?
Ontological dignity—would that simply mean dignity in and of itself?
It is deeply woven into everything you just listed. In fact, it is precisely out of that dignity that a person engages with "labor, the worker, exploitation, and so on."
I’d love to build on that by tossing out a few questions that feel pretty open-ended to me, and they actually touch on some
studies I happened to come across while digging into this topic.
Are our physical and virtual identities actually separate entities, or are they just different ways of expressing what we call Being?
Is humanity’s future inevitably going to be forced into a binary choice between fiction and reality?
Could highly advanced virtual reality technology actually serve as an answer to the crisis of humanism? (The philosopher S. Gualeni, whom I mentioned earlier, argues that we should view virtual worlds as a context where a new kind of humanism has already begun to emerge).
Which identity is the "real" one—the physical one, rooted in our bodies, our reason, our tangible existence, and our constant process of "becoming," or the one built on virtuality, fictionalization, simulation, and a sort of quiet 😉 "unbecoming"?
And what exactly is it that makes an identity "real"—that thing we so often put in quotation marks when we talk about a "true" identity
—is it its materiality and tangibility, or is it that internal web of feelings, experiences, and thoughts?
Personally, I don't think we should be looking at this as an either-or situation.
I think it's more of a unified thing, or
well, whatever you want to call it.
🙂
I’d love to build on that by tossing out a few questions that feel pretty open-ended to me, and they actually touch on some
studies I happened to come across while digging into this topic.
Are our physical and virtual identities actually separate entities, or are they just different ways of expressing what we call Being?
Is humanity’s future inevitably going to be forced into a binary choice between fiction and reality?
Could highly advanced virtual reality technology actually serve as an answer to the crisis of humanism? (The philosopher S. Gualeni, whom I mentioned earlier, argues that we should view virtual worlds as a context where a new kind of humanism has already begun to emerge).
Which identity is the "real" one—the physical one, rooted in our bodies, our reason, our tangible existence, and our constant process of "becoming," or the one built on virtuality, fictionalization, simulation, and a sort of quiet 😉 "unbecoming"?
And what exactly is it that makes an identity "real"—that thing we so often put in quotation marks when we talk about a "true" identity
—is it its materiality and tangibility, or is it that internal web of feelings, experiences, and thoughts?
Personally, I don't think we should be looking at this as an either-or situation.
I think it's more of a unified thing, or
well, whatever you want to call it.
🙂
My take on Berkeley's idealism is basically built on Russell's critique of it. In the world of computer games, "to be" really just means "to be perceived." If nobody is actually playing the game, it’s nothing more than a massive string of ones and zeros—just bits of data sitting there. The console essentially steps in to play the role of God in that specific version of idealism; when there isn't a subject (the player) around, the hardware itself is what "perceives," or rather, executes the code.
I’ll get around to posting about Heidegger and "virtual presence" in a few days once I actually have some breathing room. I need to dig deeper into Heidegger first—honestly, I might just be seeing connections that aren't even there. Just one thing though: look at how Sony uses "presence" as nothing more than a marketing buzzword to move their VR headsets.