Cyberspace

Cyberspace, a metaphoric abstraction used in philosophy and computing, is a (virtual) reality which represents the Noosphere/World 2 both "inside" computers and "on" computer networks.

Cyberspace As a 3-D Immersive Environment: Interacting with Synthetic Entities

Video games don?t have to stop at the avatar-player level. Once an immersive environment is furnished in the game that separates the player from the natural environment, the objectified space will be incorporated into the first-person perspective. It will replace the original space, and the artificial space will be extending from the center of the player?s field of vision to unlimited possibilities, and thus cyberspace is experienced as the only space with no other level of spatiality being constituted. The 3-D images will be made to change according to a pattern such that the player?s movement will be experienced as moving in a stand-alone world; this world has a potential to evolve by itself, and can extend to the unknown remoteness. It is experientially equivalent to the physical world we are familiar with before we enter cyberspace. In his book, Get Real: A Philosophical Adventure in Virtual Reality, Philip Zhai suggested a game-playing scenario as follows:

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Suppose you and your partner are going to play the game for the first time. Before you get started, you will each be instructed to wear a helmet (or goggles) so that you won't be able to see anything except the animated video images on two small screens right in front of your eyes, and to hear anything except sounds from two earphones next to your ears. So you see 3-D animation and hear stereo sound. You need also, perhaps, to wear a pair of gloves that will both monitor your hand movement and give you different amount of pressure against your palm and fingers corresponding to your changing visual and audio sensations in the game. You are now situated in a motion tracker so that you can move freely without leaving the place and your body's movement can be detected and the signals can be fed into the computer; the computer also processes all visual, audio information as well. So you are totally wired to play an interactive game with your partner, mediated by cyberspace. Your partner is in another room, wired to the same computer, doing the same.

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As soon as the game gets started, you begin to see with your eyes, hear with your ears, and feel with your hands and with the whole body, a self-contained environment isolated from the actual environment. In other words, you are immersed in cyberspace. Let us assume a typical type of game contents as follows. Your partner and you, each holding a shooting gun, are ready to fire at each other. The 3-D images are so realistic, and your body movements are coordinated with your images on the screen in such a way that you can hardly tell the difference between the animated images and your original body. Your partner looks as real as yourself. There are perhaps a few trees or rocks between you and your partner. There may also be a house you can get in and out, or what not. You can touch the leaves of the tree, and feel the hardness of the wall. So you run, turn, hide, get nervous, bumped, scared, or excited; you hear noises from different directions; when your partner shoots at you, you feel the hit on the corresponding spot of your body; you hesitate and pull the trigger to fire back...back and forth?back and forth...until one of you gets a "fatal" shot, bleeding, and loses the game. Now the game stops but you don't feel a sharp pain or feel like dying even if you are the loser. Actually you will shortly get unwired and come back to the actual world, alive and amazed.

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In such a game-playing experience, the players must take the cyberspace as the actual space in order to get involved in the process. They must suspend the judgment whether the perceived spatiality is ?real? or ?illusory? and ignore what their memory tells them concerning the difference between the current immersive experience of the game and a real situation. They must respond to the objectified entities in cyberspace exactly like they do in the real world, since they visually, aurally, and kinetically experience their own bodies in the same cyberspace. The consciousness must undertake a Husserlian non-reflective act of space constitution in the same way it does for the actual space. At this point, cyberspace has realized itself as it is originally meant to be. It isolates the player from the actual space with the immersive environment; it represents the totality of the positive and negative volumes of virtual reality.

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As soon as we enter into such a virtual environment that enables us to interact with one another while we are constituting the very spatiality itself, we can anticipate the formation of cyber-culture in a non-metaphoric sense. If we communicate with one another in cyberspace in such a way for the purposes of conversation, value-sharing, feeling-expressing, or project-oriented cooperation, etc., then a cyber-community can be literally formed. A cyber-culture will then follow its own destiny of rise and fall.

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The idea of a fully immersive cyberspace, such as that depicted in the matrix, is often used as a possible situation in epistemology intended to demonstrate the possibility of skepticism and present one argument for it. This is perhaps one of the most popular arguments in all of philosophy, for a discussion of it see brain-in-a-vat. It should be noticed however that the brain-in-a-vat argument is unlike cyberspace as concieved here as it talks about the sense organs being bypassed and the reality experience being fed into the brain directly. One difficulty with cyberspace as a philosophical tool to promote skepticism is that it requires the existence of a 'real world' outside of cyberspace wheras a hardline skeptic would say that it is possible for there to be no 'real world' at all.

Related Topics:
Epistemology - Skepticism - Brain-in-a-vat

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