Unsubmitted Thoughts on Virtual Reality

Conversations in the Symbolic World

While it has not become the monstrous, looming problem that the Matrix film foretold, virtual reality as a fully immersive experience will be seen a millennium from now as the result of the nihilistic tendency of our age. I would say nothing about the limited uses of virtual reality for education or the occasional immersive experience.

However, the trend of our entertainment culture is moving toward increasingly removed experiences of media. Faces are buried in virtual spaces for information, encouragement, criticism, “enlightenment,” love, sex, and work. There is very little left in the realm of human relations that has not been at least suggested for virtualization. It would be important here to only consider those ways in which individuals and groups entertain themselves.

         The symbolic thinker and orthodox icon-carver, Jonathan Pageau, has spoken rather scathingly about the virtual landscape and its many pitfalls. He is convinced of its radical departure, following the through-line of postmodern thought, from a truly relational, embodied ontology. What does it mean to be a human person? It means to be in relation, and for our condition as finite creatures that relation is one with a body.

Temporality, finitude, space, and embodiment are all intimately linked. Ultimately, he believes that relationality is grounded in God. Though God is, in the Christian conception, a timeless, spaceless, immaterial, person beyond which nothing greater can be conceived, human relationality is embodied. It is not abstractly expressed or ethereally conceived. Rather, it is an “incarnate,” a fleshy relationality. 

I am inclined to agree with Pageau on the possible issues implied by an increasing movement into virtual “space and time.” The more we abandon the embodied reality we inhabit, the less human we become. A disembodied world is one form of entertainment that will be criticized by our successors. Virtuality, if used consistently as a form of entertainment will be criticized by our successors for distancing ourselves from an embodied reality. The negative side-effects of pornography demonstrably affect relationships between spouses and promote the objectification of women. On a social level, the emphasis and reliance on virtuality imply that our embodied locations no longer matter. Hence, I may fight vehemently for the people suffering in distant countries on online forums or virtual chatrooms, but I am neglectful, even reluctant, to go to a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen. 

We should know ourselves, and oftentimes knowing ourselves at a basic level entails an arduous yet simple process of discovering the hidden principles on which we make our choices. Plato came under great criticism by many for positing an idealism, a dualism between earth and heaven. Ideas, intellect, and formal abstractions are what truly constitute reality. Material things, emotions, bodies, etc., are merely distractions or illusions.

In fact, Christianity itself is often criticized for this kind of “Plato-brain.” Eager harbingers of virtuality have emerged from the technological moment of our culture as new propounders of a very old idea. The limitations of the body are negatively understood. They are shackles that bind you to the material world. AI and a new virtual landscape will free you from those shackles like Socrates freeing the other prisoners from the Cave in Plato’s Republic.

Plato himself would likely have been deeply disturbed if not outraged by the prospect of diving deeper into “images” rather than reality. The hellishness of the Cave analogy in Plato’s Republic lies in the distance of the prisoners from the true light of the Sun outside the Cave. The forms in all their splendor dramatically constitute the world outside of the Cave, an immaterial reality of eternal truths. The material world is only an image of those eternal forms. But in the recesses of the Cave, the prisoners only see images on the wall never seeing the THINGS in THEMSELVES. Our own virtual worlds manifest both negative aspects of the Cave. We are viewing images of images, and never the real things but at the same time, we are also subjected to a distancing from our embodied encounters with the world.

Even more contagious is this new expression of dualism, this new form of “Plato-brain.” For, this new expression of an extremist, Platonic duality does not direct individuals toward eternal and lasting truths, toward transcending values and a divine respite. The new expression finds its fundamental drive in two modes that are ultimately linked together: unrestrained sensual gratification and unhindered rational control. I will explore this more in the future.  

Standing with grace above the kind of dualism implied in the new wave of virtual culture, Christian anthropology understands the very center of reality to be incarnational. It is no coincidence or arbitrary detail that the ancient conflicts within the Church were due to disagreements about the nature of Jesus Messiah. At the absolute heart of Christian theology, ontology, and anthropology is the embodiment of the Eternal Word. 

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