"Advanced" use of virtual worlds? (Re: [MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>

> What epistemelogical and ontological framework are you coming
> from?

Mostly pre-Augustine; St. Augustine systematically ruined the field
for virtually all who came after him, by artificially restricting it
in favor of biblical accuracy/inerrancy. While there was still a lot
of good work being done, there was also a lot of good work NOT being
done because the church wouldn't approve. Anaxagoras' statement that
"all things are full of gods" has been almost completely ignored, as
have the Greek elemental hypotheses that make perfect sense once you
divorce them from the inappropriate material analogy. We lost
something profoundly important in philosophy around the fourth or
fifth century, and it's contaminated formal theories of epistemology
to varying degrees ever since -- sometimes irreparably. It left a
void, which is commonly filled by any number of concepts that are
every bit as ludicrous as the Greek elemental ideas... but a great
deal more wrong, sometimes dangerously so.

This isn't exactly an unknown viewpoint, but most people who hold it
seem to go too far in the other direction and throw the bible out
the window. Nobody in his right mind would suggest you study
philosophy without Descartes, but everyone seems to think it's fine
to study it without the bible. I think that's a mistake every bit as
dangerous and fatal as the ones Augustine made; the bible is, after
all, one of the most fundamental molders and shapers of Western
thought for the past fifteen hundred years. You can't really
understand Aquinas without a strong biblical foundation, and Aquinas
is IMHO one of the most important figures in this field.

> Briefly though, the problem with your definition of real and
> virtual are, I think, that you seem to assume that 'being' equates
> to a materalist-style existence.

Wrong.

The word "real" is not something simple like "apple". Something
either is or is not an apple, and that's all there is to it. (Of
course, as Magritte said, "ceci n'est pas un pipe".)

Real, however, is different. A cubic zirconia is real. It is a
physical object I can pick up and hold in my hand. I can point to it
and say "there it is". Even in the most naive sense, it is real. But
it is not, and will never be, a real DIAMOND. It appears to be a
diamond, and will behave in every respect that *matters* as if it is
a diamond. But it isn't one. It is *not* real.

Likewise, a virtual world is real in the sense that there really is
one, but it will never be a real *world* -- so as a world, it is not
real. As an *idea* of a world, it is.

Real and not real exist in every object, whether that object is
actual or theoretical. For suitable definitions of real, all things
are real; for other suitable definitions, all things are NOT
real. Perhaps the most accurate generalisation one can make is that
reality is subjective, but that's too easily misconstrued as Bohr's
side of the quantum debates.

This really comes down to the question of real vs. reality, a
complex issue on which I would refer you to Wittgenstein. (The
reference is similarly complex.)

> Well, the character Feregar may not be, but everything you do when
> you play him is a subset of you.

But what I do isn't what he does. I sit at a table rolling dice and
eating chips and drinking soda and talking. He roams through an
underground cave killing things and gathering treasure. I have never
roamed through an underground cave killing things and gathering
treasure. So that action is not a subset of me -- it's a null
intersection. But it's certainly a subset of Feregar. (Whether it's
a PROPER subset is rather more subjective.)

>>> Characters don't have emotions. People do. Characters are
>>> data-sets and/or ideas.

>> But they are ideas of people. And an idea of a person can have an
>> idea of an emotion.

> No, the idea of a person can't have an idea.

Not in the creative sense that I just had the idea of three guys in
women's lingerie throwing a guy wearing a suit into a soccer goal
tended by a sheep, no. (Stop looking at me like that.) But in the
*ownership* sense that I have a wallet, yes. An idea of a person can
have an idea of a wallet, because ideas are by nature sets. Any idea
is actually a collection of ideas, each of which it "has". The idea
of an elf is really a whole lot of ideas all wrapped up into one,
including a culture which is itself a whole lot of ideas wrapped up
into one. The elf-idea therefore "has" the culture-idea, which is
also a way of saying the culture-idea is a subset of the elf-idea.

Feel free to write something about "Buddha-nature" in response to
this. You know you want to.


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