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Sunday, December 22, 2013

If reality is social, then where's reality?

From a NYTimes article about an online game, Clash of the Clans, and a young man who was once the best in the world, George Yao:
To those of us raised in the world before social media, it is a given that the “real” world is the one in which you sit in traffic on your way to pick up the dry cleaning. Our connection to this world is the chief measure of our sanity. But if we’re honest about it, reality is hardly so simple now. When a guy like George Yao can plow through an anesthetizing day of mortgage regulations only to return at night to a digital fraternity where he is loved and celebrated, with friends who share his daily experience, who’s to say which is real and which is illusory? If a game can make you famous, if it can yield genuine friendships and even a new career, then why shouldn’t it become, at least for a time, the epicenter of your life?

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. I don't see why reality can't include "virtual reality". As far as I recall, no one in my mother's generation considered the hours she and her friends spent on the phone "unreal" -- it was part and parcel of friendship.

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    Here's a quote which I think goes far deeper into the "reality" question:

    Philosophers almost always start by saying: “I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is a table. What does this table show to me as characteristic of a real being?” No philosopher ever started by saying: “I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is my memory of my dream of last night. What does this show to me as characteristic of a real being?” No philosopher ever starts by saying “Let the Mozart's Requiem be a paradigm of being, let us start from that." Why could we not start by positing a dream, a poem, a symphony as paradigmatic of the fullness of being and by seeing in the physical world a deficient mode of being, instead of looking at things the other way round, instead of seeing in the imaginary -- that is, human -- mode of existence, a deficient or secondary mode of being?

    Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments, p. 5.

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    1. Well, yes, that passage is deeper. But depth isn't what I was aiming at. I was interested in ordinary walking around reality, not how the world "really is."

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