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 an Augmented Habitat: Teleoperation

Cyber-culture as discussed above is significant, but it is still non-consequential at the ontological level. The more exciting thing is that cyberspace and virtual reality can go even further. Combining it with the technology of teleoperation, we can enter into cyberspace and interact with artificial objects to manipulate the actual physical process. When I perform an act of picking a stone in cyberspace, for example, a robotic surrogate body of mine in the real world will pick up a real stone. Since all of our physical contact with the natural world for the sake of survival and prosperity is hardly more than asserting physical force to objects, robots can, in principle, perform all tasks of the same kind. So we can build the foundational part of the virtual world in which we are able to accomplish all agricultural and industrial works without ever leaving cyberspace.

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Therefore, virtual reality with the capability of facilitating teleoperation will have all the necessary components of the actual world. Furthermore, if we were put into the immersive environment of cyberspace by our parents before we know anything about the actual world, and trained to do everything by teleoperation only, we will take cyberspace as the default habitat, and be unable to function well in the natural environment. As a result, we would develop a natural science about that unknown virtual world, if we are not the designer of its infrastructure and don?t know the design principles of this virtual world. Here is what Zhai wrote in his book:

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"Let us imagine a nation in which everyone is hooked up to a network of VR infrastructure. They have been so hooked up since they left their mother's wombs. Immersed in cyberspace and maintaining their life by teleoperation, they have never imagined that life could be any different from that. The first person that thinks of the possibility of an alternative world like ours would be ridiculed by the majority of these citizens, just like the few enlightened ones in Plato's allegory of the cave. They cook or dine out, sleep or stay up all night, date or mate, take showers, travel for business or pleasure, conduct scientific research, philosophize, go to movies, read romances and science fiction, win contests or lose, get married or stay single, have children or have none, grow old, and die of accidents or diseases or whatever: the same life cycle as ours."

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"Since they are totally immersed, and they do everything necessary for their survival and prosperity while they are immersed, they don't know that they are leading a kind of life that could be viewed as illusory or synthetic from outsiders such as us. They would have no way of knowing that, unless they were told and shown the undeniable evidence. Or they would have to wait for their philosophers to help them stretch their minds by demonstrating such a possibility through reasoning."

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"A more interesting possibility is that their technology would lead to the invention of their own version of VR, which gives them an opportunity to reflect on the nature of 'reality' in a tangible way, just as we are now doing at this moment. Then they would possibly ask the same type of questions as we are asking now."

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"If there were such a free kingdom, can we say they are in a state of 'collective hallucination'? No, if by calling it a hallucination we mean to know that ours is not the same. What if I ask you: 'How can you show me that this imagined nation is not the one we are in right now?' That is, how do we know that we are not exactly those citizens immersed in VR?

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In order to separate ourselves from such a possibility, let us assume the basic laws of physics in that virtual world have been programmed to be different from ours. Suppose their gravity is twice as much as ours. So their 'physical' objects of the same molecular structure as ours will accelerate, say, twice as fast when they are in free fall, and twice as heavy when they try to lift them. At the same time, they can see lights such as infrared or ultraviolet, which we cannot see. Their scientists will formulate the law of gravity according to their observations. Due to a well-coordinated interface, they can teleoperate things in our actual world smoothly and thus run their basic economy well."

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"Knowing all of these from our 'outside' point of view, can we thereby judge that their scientists are wrong while ours right? Of course not, because they would have as strong a reason to tell us that our scientists are wrong. Moreover, from their point of view, they are not doing any teleoperation, but are controlling the physical processes directly; we, not they, are in fact doing teleoperation. If we tell them that their VR outfit gives them distorted version of reality, they would tell us, by exactly the same logic, that our lack of such outfits disables us from seeing things as they are. They would ridicule us and say, 'You don't even know what ultraviolet and infrared look like!'"

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When cyberspace reaches the stage of Teleoperation, cyber-cultures in every sense would be able to develop just in the same way traditional cultures do in the actual world. Therefore everything we can say about traditional cultures in general would apply to cyber-cultures, and there is no need to discuss every specific mode of cyber-culture in such a circumstance. After all, as Zhai pointed out in his book, the basic idea is simple: ontologically and functionally, the goggles are equivalent to our natural eyes, and the bodysuit is equivalent to our natural skin; there is no relevant difference between them that makes the natural real while the artificial unreal. But the significant difference lies in their relationship to human creativity: we were given one world, but make and choose the other.

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