Red ~C Diary: Witnessing the Metaverse

[C4Chaos]

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

'After catching the first Matrix film with some RealNetworks colleagues, Rosedale left the theater glum, announcing to them, "But that's what I was gonna make!"' - Philip Rosedale via The Making of Second Life

My avatar is already more than a year old but it wasn't until I attended virtual Conversation Week that my interest in SL was rekindled. Serendipitously, last week while I was browsing the bookstore at Dublin airport the book, The Making of Second Life by Wagner James Au, jumped right at me. I took it as a sign and devoured it during my 14-hour flight back home.

In one sitting I was educated with the history of SL, its ups and downs, its current impact on our culture, business, politics, economics, and its (almost sci-fi) potentials similar to Neal Stephenson's vision of the metaverse. I particularly enjoyed reading about the mirrored flourishing stories of in-world residents, the virtual revolts and cultural transformations of virtual groups and societies. From a psycho-social point of view, watching the history of SL is like witnessing the cultural evolution of humanity, in hyper-speed. Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) is akin to a group of benevolent dictators and Philosopher Kings who maintain order in a virtual world by allowing residents to do as they please within the bounds of SL's code of conduct. When viewed from an integral perspective, SL is a grand experiment on integral in-world governance. And when viewed from a psycho-spiritual perspective, explorations in SL can be used to aid in one's witnessing practice. (I'll groove more on the topic of using SL for spiritual practice in future posts. In the meantime, check out a parallel discussion on Open Source Integral.)

During the past week I have immersed myself in the virtual realm of Second Life® before retiring to sleep. I've meditated on air at SL integral, explored the green and sustainable community at Etopia Eco-village, did Tai Chi in a silk blue kimono, dressed up as a Samurai wielding the "three buddhas" katana, drank unlimited cans of Red Bull, practiced Tibetan Buddhist meditation, took a crash course on machinima-tography, sat on a campfire near a pyramid in Mexico, all the while taking snapshots of my in-world explorations using my trusty old Macbook Pro.

So what did I get out my in-world explorations? I'm glad to report that I'm now up to speed with SL. I've become proficient with navigation and the basics of in-world content creation. But more importantly, I've forged new connections with like-minded creative people who are out there exploring in-world and dreaming up better worlds. (We've also started a Metaverse Pod @ Gaia for members who want to meet up and learn together in virtual reality.)

Second Life is only one of the big slices of the metaverse but its on a category of its own. It mirrors real life (and wonderland) more than any other MMORPGs. It's not a game, it's an experience. But unlike the web, SL is not (yet) for everyone. Its early incarnation is still clunky. It has a high barrier to entry, a steep learning curve, as well as a need for a shift in mentality to be able to embrace and welcome its possibilities.

I harbor no illusion that SL is an "escape" from for the "real" world (what is "real" anyway?). SL is just another medium. It's a tool to be used for rapid prototyping of one's vision, expressing individual and collective creativity, and experiencing a richer sense of community not possible in meatspace. In short, SL is an extension of consciousness projection.

In the meantime, I'll continue with my in-world explorations. SL made it possible for my blogging persona to have an avatar form. In essence, my SL persona is a "third-order reality." Technically, my SL avatar is not my "second" life because I consider my blogging persona as my "second." My SL avatar is a digital incarnation of this blogging persona, not my "first" life. Yet they're all inseparably connected and meshed together in a single conscious life-stream I call "I."

"Real" world blogging on real world topics resumes shortly. But expect to see in-world blogging from time to time.

[ned]

As an Aurobindoan, I take the same view as William Irwin Thompson -- that technological progress is just a metaphor for an inner Reality trying to express itself integrally. But I think everything has relative value. Although Sri Aurobindo did see technology becoming miniaturized and redundant with growing human consciousness, he was no Luddite like Gandhi. The problem right now is that the opposite is happening -- technological progress is often happening at the cost of the miniaturization of human consciousness as you and BrightAbyss point out. There is a more direct way to achieve all the things that technology does for us if we are willing to make the effort and discipline our inner lives. However, until we make that effort technology will remain as a cheap substitute for that inner Reality.

[MetroPunk]

NED:

sub-realities
upon subs
is maya no doubt..

where does technology fit into your kosmology over all?

is all techne good
or is techne and obstacle?

what would siddhartha say?

[ned]

BrightAbyss~~,

How do you feel about the more immersive virtual environments? Those don't necessarily remove embodiment. As I mentioned in my earlier comment, these have been used with success to treat phobias, learning disabilities, autism, etc. (analogous to lucid dreaming).

But I do take your point about how a lot of the SL stuff is literally like creating more and more layers of Maya.

[BrightAbyss~]

PS-- The quote from Rosedale is telling: 'After catching the first Matrix film with some RealNetworks colleagues, Rosedale left the theater glum, announcing to them, "But that's what I was gonna make!"'

Why would we purposely create the Matrix other than to enslave ourselves? Notice how the Zionists valued being released from the Matrix; notice how the Zionists celebrated by embracing the viscerality of dancing - notice, in fact, how the Matrix is partially a 'cautionary tale' about the effects of technological hubris?

I ask again: why do we want to be plugged in-world? Is it because, like Sipher, after experiencing the surrogate pleasures of the Matrix we just can't seem to stand the raw, boring and mundane nature of the Real???

[BrightAbyss~]

C4Chaos,

You wrote: "I harbor no illusion that SL is an "escape" from for the "real" world (what is "real" anyway?). SL is just another medium. It's a tool to be used for rapid prototyping of one's vision, expressing individual and collective creativity, and experiencing a richer sense of community not possible in meatspace. In short, SL is an extension of consciousness projection."

I have no serious issues with this statement, but would instead ask you to think about why it is that you (or any of us) would be overly interested in "an extension of consciousness projection" that inherently removes the role of the body?

If an integral (post-symbolic, post-egoic, post-projectionist) awareness is an integrated and embodied awareness then how can view computer generated projections as conducive to deeper (trans-INCLUDE) transformation?

SL transcends the body by generating a digital playground for our mental-egoic projections without including the causal dynamics of embodiment. Thus it is not an 'integral' media, nor is it helpful for engendering integral waves of experience.

I grant that things like SL are fun, communicative and creative but at what 'price'? Simple example: does meditating in-world has the same transformative EFFECT as meditating for 'real'?

M~

[BrightAbyss~]

Fantastic response Ned! The WIT excerpt really resonates with me.

I agree that VR may have some relative value, especially as a tool for, as C4Chaos says, "rapid prototyping". The problem i'm concerned with is the way such media hyper-inflates ego. That is to say, in a computer generated 'in-world' there are no bodies - no flesh. We can fly, change our form, eat, drink whatever, and never have to deal with the Real world consequences. There is very little cause and effect - everything is an object of ego desire and wish fulfillment.

And without 'flesh' (and its causal efficacy) we generate non-embodied experiences, thus habituating alienated modes of communication and consciousness (see my earlier posts re: C's first blog about SL for an elaboration).

Using another semantic, I would equate the use and effect of media like SL to us spinning webs of maya upon maya for ego's sake. As fun as it may be, it is not conducive to a deeper experience of bodymind and kosmos.

In my opinion an 'integral' consciousness is an embodied consciousness - where the truth of the 'flesh', the truth of mental creativity and the truth of Spirit converge to generate an integrated experience of nature, self and society. As we become more aware of the deeply integrated nature of flesh and psyche we become MORE human.

In other words, it is about the post-formal integration (awareness) of flesh and psyche, as the awakening and totality of Spirit in individual manifestation. This is what awaits us beyond formal cognition. That is what should be cultivated...

At least that's how it feels to me...

Namaste~

[ned]

~C, a few thoughts as I'm exploring virtual realities myself lately.

Possible spiritual applications of such worlds:

1. Clinical applications, from the treatment of phobias (which has been quite successful btw) to the treatment of autism and learning disabilities ... because virtual worlds are so much more easy to manipulate than the "real" world, they are able to give people with phobias and learning disabilities a greater sense of control and independence and this always translates into tangible results in the "waking" physical world.

2. Academic applications -- Piet Hut is using Second Life and similar virtual environments to conduct experiments and conferences. His paper and an interview are below:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0712.1655
http://www.ugotrade.com/2008/01/15/exploring-reality-in-virtual-worlds-with-piet-hut/

3. Spiritual applications -- breaking down the very idea of the "real" world and expanding our sense of self. One of the most positive things I see coming out of the notion of virtual worlds is that it is really giving us a lot of new metaphors to play around with. What will happen when Google creates a 3D holographic map of the planet (as it no doubt wants to do)? The boundaries between "real" and "virtual" will eventually start to break down. We'll have to question the very notion of whether or not there is such a thing as a "concrete" physical world. Moreover, think of how virtual worlds can alter our sense of self. Immersive virtual environments can even alter our cognitive schemas about ourselves -- we can change genders, races, even species. To what extent does this flip the conventional metaphor in cognitive science, of the brain/body as hardware and mind as software? Because in these kinds of immersive environments, the body becomes the "software" and the mental environment becomes the hardware driving the schema that governs the body's self-perception. There have been some amazing experiments done in such environments; a book that talks about them is called "The Body has a Mind of Its Own".

So: definitely virtual realities have spiritual value if used with the proper detachment (same with everything else in life). Of course everything has relative value; the mystics would tell us that even the most evil things in the world have relative value and once this is realized, those evil things can be redeemed. Virtual realities are clearly just a tool here.

Having said this, I wonder, are virtual realities a lazy substitute for real mysticism and yogic techniques like lucid dreaming? I.e., don't virtual realities become redundant for people who actually become occult masters (if you believe in that sort of thing of course)? Sri Aurobindo for instance saw technology as eventually disappearing into humanity, and humanity as eventually disappearing into divinity.

I am reminded here of William Irwin Thompson's essay "Reflections on Machine Consciousness". Here is the relevant excerpt:

------------------

Technologists are closer to paranoids than they are to mystics in the sense that they are literalists given to perceptions of misplaced concreteness; they always see spiritual experiences as the products of technology — as emergent domains that are caused by technological innovations, such as LSD or computer networks. The 'difference that makes a difference — in the famous phrase of Gregory Bateson — between the mystic and the paranoid is that the mystic is in a state of wild cognitive and creative joy, the satchitananda of the yogi, but the paranoid is in a condition of anxiety and a cosmic sense of fixation on literalism and the control of reality through machines. Rather than saying her spiritual intuition has inspired her to see a pattern of connectedness to a world of higher dimensions, s/he claims to have been abducted by flying saucers who have implanted microchips into her head and are beaming directly into her brain from the mother ship.

Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe. For them, technology is like the Catholic Baltimore Catechism's definition of a sacrament: 'an outward sign of an inward state'. For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'.

The mystics, starting with Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo in the first half of the twentieth century, also prophesied that we were at a new stage in evolution, but they saw consciousness surrounding technology, and compressing and miniaturizing it into an antique fossil of intermediate cultural evolution as we passed on into a poshuman or 'Supramental' era in which we were welcomed back into the cosmic play.