This Virtual Life - Quareness Series 197th "Lecture".
For many of us of older vintage we may vividly remember our childhood as a time of picking up things, interacting with them, exploring, climbing, riding, falling and general "hands on" experiencing of the physical world around us. This constant and often messy interaction also encompassed ongoing use of our mental abilities in trying to figure out stuff and inventing games within a growth medium of unstructured play allowing each generation to naturally civilise itself. There was also a lot of what we might call real reading i.e. classic books and themes, histories, philosophies, science, mathematics and drama. We had synergy between theory and application in learning from books and testing such against the real world and its demands of "figuring it out". Indeed both success and failure tended to leave us hungry for more theory with an ever accessible real world there to provide the checkpoints so as not to stray too far from "facts". Looking back now we might be more inclined to recognise that the experiential was what helped to keep many of us grounded so as to avoid getting lost in false theory. Perhaps validation against actual experience is a kind of higher form of knowing i.e. with deep/immersive engagement and understanding.
As our life experiences now become more of a virtual nature, we might ponder why we are being increasingly pressurised to appraise and decide about faraway places/situations/things we've never directly experienced. Maybe what's inherent here is a new kind of ignorance...a mistaking of that which we are told for that which we actually know (or can really know). Is such simply replacing the "tangible" with a model used to validate a model?...and even if the model were true, how would we know? It's quite a common experience to find places we might visit turning out to be rather different from what we had previously heard/read about them.
In our globalist age we're asked to care about all sorts of far flung matters we cannot know in any tangible sense. We're being asked to believe in systemic racism, dangerous climate change, foreign "just" wars, threatening world wide pandemics, etc. whilst at the same time other (and maybe even more dangerous) carry on slides off the radar largely unacknowledged. Who or what can we trust for truth and how can we know? Government, media and scholarly reporting has always been slant and jingo prone but with the reach and speed of our modern info-tainment circuit we are growing much more subject to unknowing ignorance in a manner that seems to be accelerating. Although we're being encouraged to pretend we're in the middle of all this stuff happening, it's not really central to our individual personal lives...most of us are in truth just ineffective, ill informed and manipulated marginal characters on the edge of events.
The terrain of virtual worlds and virtual facts along with its inevitable selective reporting necessarily distorts perception and triggers ongoing associative cascades of confirmation and refutation bias that make it seem real rather than a perceptual deception seeming to validate underlying narratives. For example when they say "hottest year ever" pointing to a pile of data devised from error prone measurement devices, this can create a "consciousness" tending to confirmation bias whenever we feel hot or see a storm reported. Our reality is that we can never actually feel a small rise in global temperature and trying to pretend we do so can lead on to some strange illogical notions..."it must be warmer when the world is making more snow". Because it's quite uncomfortable for most of us to hold contradictory beliefs, we tend to grasp at those that fit with our prior assumptions, drop those that do not, and get on with confirming our biases.
When any issue or information we have a view on is virtual and cannot be experienced in a personal/tangible sense, we can become especially prone to group think and a seductive feeling of acceptance. In fact, however, we may simply be pledging allegiance to a collective interpretation (hallucination?). Maybe it ain't really healthy or wise to commit to any explanation/
proposition from strangers using a methodology with which we are only cursorily (if at all) familiar. It has been increasingly noticeable for some time now that many of those seeking to foist their virtual offerings upon others (and make them their own realities) seem to wish to efface the tangible. In this regard I might draw attention to an iconic tree which up to 2003 stood near to the seashore on Viligili Island in the Maldives and rather than let it stand as a testament to the island not sinking, climate scientists reportedly pulled it down thereby effectively hiding the evidence of their lack of evidence...quite a sobering event for the locals and some other observers.
Thinking along these lines we may get to wonder why so many of our modern "information shapers" seem determined to eliminate tangibility from the direct experience of those targeted for swaying by repetition and saturation. Why does much of our modern history writing tend to be so proscribed (unlike the more prevalent direct and incisive versions of the past)? It seems that in many cases now "telling it like it is" is not acceptable because of how such might upset some group or other. And perhaps what we see here is an inherent admission that the "frequently offended" readily find truth intolerable and those being "economical with the reality" prefer to deceive us through grounding our perceptions in dodgy virtual constructs rather than tangible truths.
Solving a video game does not teach us about the world...it just teaches the ingrained assumptions and models of the game designer. The true benefit of this understanding may rest with the realisation that the more we inhabit virtual worlds instead of real ones, the less able we are to discern that which is real from that which is not. When we apply a model to a simulation and get back simulated results (as we do increasingly today), it's all just filtered through the media deployed with many layers of selection and curation until we develop a strong view of what should be done, etc. which in turn winds up "validated" by later "reported sources". Small wonder that everyone now seems so bothered and bewildered when little or nothing has any sense of tangibility and hallucination is becoming the seeming state of mankind.
Does the globalist mindset rest on an ethos that requires the subsumation of the tangible to the virtual...of that which we can touch and validate to some sort of ideal we cannot? To put it another way...must we sacrifice that which is in front of us for the benefit of some amorphous collective we cannot truly know? Perhaps the scales of these global concerns do not and cannot suit us. For example we may question why globalism appears to be so anti-family, anti-community or anti-individualism and wonder if it's because these are things that can be directly experienced and actually known. Trusting that which we cannot see but failing to trust that which is right in front of us, may be a kind of madness.
In truth joy and meaning for us comes from what we experience directly and the real risk of this virtual world is that we may come to inhabit nothing corporeal. When we have nothing to go on but words and ideas (i.e. without any touchstone), it can be all spin without any substance from which we may orient or support ourselves. And this can hardly be a good path to humanity nor a fitting life for a human.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness,
November, 2023.