Lecture Five Summary

Summary of Lecture: Understanding virtual philosophy. How we think about reality, in particular, virtual reality.

The theory of virtual reality:
* “What is reality”- the Matrix touches upon this (virtual reality)
* Plato’s main idea (allegory): prisoners (people in everyday life) are looking at the cave, the fire of life is behind the cave (the essences of life), this casts a shadow that we can see-this shadow is reality.
* Guy Debord- Part of a movement that says, we now live in a life that is a spectacle (we want to be entertained, we don’t want to live in reality).
* Umberto Eco- Hyper reality, the reality that we live in is NOT real, it is hyper real.
*Jean Baudrillard- A way we can think about an idea that says that computers are a way of reality (for example, cyberspace)
*William Gibson- Cyberspace
* Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari- Bringing everything together, concerning the above examples. Everyday life- a flow, a series of moments. Actual reality-our experiences of the world that moves through the passage of time. Every single moment in time there are different paths (the virtual reality). This theory draws from early quantum theory. This theory would say that the internet is not virtual reality, because it is part of our everyday life.

Documentary-Online virtual worlds
*Second life- life beyond reality
* Virtual worlds are worlds on the internet that aid us to make new friends, do new things etc. There is always someone there is second life.
* Personalising the character makes users bond with their character
* At any one time, 20 000 people are logged onto this “reality”
* The third parties are developing the content
* People pay real money for different things in this virtual reality- sex, dresses etc.
* Business opportunities in these worlds e.g.- sport (tennis opens)
* Prototype of a whole new way of behaving
* Sale of virtual land- intellectual privacy rights. Ailin Greaf is a virtual property developer.