What is real?

Screenshot from the Second Life homepage 

"One of the things that our grand-children will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real… in the future that will become literally impossible." (William Gibson, writer)

That is the size of the revolution we are going through. We may not even have begun to grasp the significance of the current transition. 

Yesterday I watched an online talk at the Long Now Foundation by Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life, an online digital world that has become a proper place over the past few years. (On Second Life, real life countries have real embassies; real life companies have real presence; real life schools have real courses). He said that in the digital realm, we might find it much easier to fulfil some of our aspirations, fantasies, dreams and relationships. In some ways.

Right or wrong, that's not the question at this point.

What matters, however, is that the digital realm will become part and parcel of our every day lives, way beyond anything we can even begin to imagine today. 

Really, if you can forgive the pun, in a world where we can create movies whose special effects are so special that we cannot distinguish them from a naturally filmed scene, we have potentially just cloned the world. And much more than that- we can extrapolate our existence into the digital dimension way beyond our physical world and, - without harming it.

Just think of this banal greeting exchange of the future: 

"How are you today?"

"Really I am fine, but digitally I just got dumped."

We are mutants. We are merging with our avatars. 

Get ready.

Comments

[Teramis]

1.

I'm online in Second Life as well. Love it.
I'm fascinated by the entire VR evolution, and happily anticipate reaching a point of convergence where the VR experinece is on a part with some fictional representations of it that have occured in science fiction (Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends is one of many books in that regard that comes to mind: the infosphere is ubiquitous, and interaction with it through slick VR tools integral to story events.)