Virtual Reality

What's the difference between reality and virtual space? What's the difference between interacting with people face to face and avatar to avatar? Why are experiences in real life often considered more valid than experiences in a virtual environment?

I won't drop names, but there are people who passed away and played games like Second Life and World of Warcraft whose physical funerals were attended by very few people. This is understandable, because their interactions with the real world most likely stopped outside the workplace with an exception of keeping in contact with family. That said, those same people have had funerals held for them in their respective games that were attended by hundreds.

Clearly they had an impact on the lives of other players. It may not have been physical, but what about emotional? Does physical reality take precedence over mental reality? What is reality?

That's a very large, cumbersome topic. In a topic such as "What is reality," I feel use of 1999's The Matrix is necessary, in which Morpheus states, "If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." The truth is there's no way to know for certain that when I touch my keyboard it feels the same as if you were to touch it, there's no way to know our brains are interpreting those electrical signals the same way. We've come to an agreement that sandpaper is rough, but we can't know that we have the same sensation when we touch it. A good example of this is taste. Maybe the reason some people like tomatoes and others hate them isn't because they disagree about what sensation equals "tasting good," but because they don't taste the same thing.

I would argue the only things creating "reality" are the experiences we have. If the response to a virtual world is that it's not real because you can't touch and feel the chairs in the room, what about those who can't feel any sensation? Because they can't feel the chair, is it any less real for them? What about the blind, who can't see their objects to interact with them the same way the sighted can? Is it any less real for them? When you start to remove the individual senses, what you're left with are a set of experiences that define reality.

Put that in the setting of a virtual environment. Just because an attendee is experiencing something a different way doesn't make that experience any less real. There's still a mental experience occurring. In some ways, there's even a physical experience occurring as the users touch their keyboards. In another way, like the sandpaper example I used earlier, what if two avatars shaking hands is a physical experience because we agree that it is? Some would already argue that when they enter a game the avatar is not a representation of them, it is them. When those Second Life and World of Warcraft players died, did their avatars not die with them? They're no longer playable, not without account information. It's an extension of their being. I have a feeling that as the virtual experience becomes more commonplace, so will the acceptance of these virtual realities as truly real experiences.

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