Forms and formulae by Doc Nolan
NOTE: Xenon Darrow here. I decided to add a quick Happy Pi Day! As we celebrate mathematics by honoring 3.14 and a whole lotta fractional numbers that won't fit here, it seemed appopriate for this post - 3/14 Enjoy!
Visiting a virtual world can be an exploration of one’s mind in several ways. It raises questions about reality, complexity, and how our brains create environments from visual (and sometimes auditory) cues. Is Alternate Metaverse “real”? Are the trees and hills “real”? Are the people with whom we ‘meet’ and communicate ‘real’? And when you leave your computer or the servers are down for maintenance, does our virtual world disappear from view, or does it truly stop existing?
Now turn this all on its head. Is your RL real? Are your memories of trees and hills (not to mention people) real? When you close your eyes and sleep, does the "real" world still exist independently of you? Keep in mind that the world you see is not the same world other people in your town or city see; everyone has a different set of memories and ‘live images’ coming in via their eyes. In a sense, "real" life (RL) is a multiverse since no one sees much of it.
In AMV, we don’t have the senses of touch, smell, or taste. But do you have those senses when you’re sound asleep in RL? (Here’s a question: Do you have dreams in which you feel objects, smell odors, or taste foods?)
The human mind is a processor, taking raw inputs and turning sketchy signals into things with such names as pizza, rose, Freddie, foot, and rock. Beyond that, it shapes those objects into a stream called before, now, and ‘to be’. “The rock fell from his hand into the water” is a story. The mind patches disparate inputs into a ‘narrative.’
Isn’t AMV similar? Is your life in the metaverse real? And if it is not real, then what is it?
And since you, reading this, have never met my carbon-based analog to my online self, ask yourself, “Who is he?” And then, “Who am I?”
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