Future Belief E-Book

Dan Corjescu

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 293

Beschreibung

In this book we shall be arguing, among other things, for a belief or set of beliefs that neither requires God or is necessarily incompatible with such a spiritual presupposition. It is our view that modern belief does not require God, but may, nevertheless let Him in if so desired. What is most important though is that belief be viewed as a metaphysical-existential category of being that precedes every other category. Thus, for a human to be a human at all he or she must first believe. Therefore I primarily write for those who are neither convinced by traditional religions or who have not yet been soundly converted by the New Atheists. I also write for those who in their hearts and minds waver between the practice and theories of modern science and the traditional contents and moral prejudices of ancient belief. Religion has not died. God is still with us. And faith continues to be a power in the world. And although there are many who believe they can do without all three of these things, there are, I suppose, many more who would welcome at least a convincing modern substitute for them.

Leseprobe

Be Light

Un calife autrefois, à son heure dernière,Au Dieu qu’il adorait dit pour toute prière:«Je t’apporte, ô seul roi, seul être illimité,Tout ce que tu n’as pas dans ton immensité,Les défauts, les regrets, les maux, et l’ignorance.»Mais il pouvait encore ajouter l’espérance

Voltaire

Table of Contents

Introduction: Who is this book for and what is it about?

Chapter One: Why Believe in Belief?

Chapter Two: Virtual Reality: The Death of Belief?

Chapter Three: Religion and Belief

Chapter Four: Cosmology and Belief

Chapter Five: Evolution and Belief

Chapter Six: The Scientific Worldview and Belief

Chapter Seven: Philosophy and Belief

Chapter Eight: The Anthropocene and Belief

Chapter Nine: Death, Suicide, Madness, Terrorism, War: Bad Things to Believe In

Chapter Ten: Belief 2022

Chapter Eleven: Future Belief

Afterword: A Sketch of a Future Belief

Bibliography

Introduction: Who is this book for and what is it about?

In his most recent (2022) best seller, Rationality, Steven Pinker mischievously writes: I’m often asked whether I “believe in progress.” The answer is no. Like the humorist Fran Lebowitz, I don’t believe in anything you have to believe in.

Of course I don't think that Pinker was being quite serious here. A moment's reflection will reveal that there is no such thing as a human being that believes in absolutely nothing. Every human believes in something. If someone were unable to believe in something they would not be able to function as human beings and would perish from this earth.

As far as we know animals do not need to believe in something. Neither do our most sophisticated versions of AI. For now, the need to believe seems to be a quintessentially human condition. It is a special organic/metaphysical necessity that requires us to make some sense of ourselves and our place in the world; our relationship with others; and, finally, the purpose and meaning of our lives.

Many modern thinkers and philosophers have said that those two final questions, the “purpose” and “meaning” of life, are illegitimate. They have been interpreted as an unfortunate quirk of language but are themselves meaningless. For these writers, childlike “Why” questions are nonsensical. You can ask them but they do not deserve a serious response. For this type of thinker Questions like “Why are we here?” “What is the meaning of my existence?” “Does existence have a purpose” are cultural fossils of an ancient superstitious world consisting of unclear thought and troubled soul.

Yet while the clarity of such thoughts are still a legitimate target for inquiry the troubled soul of man has not gone away. Indeed millions if not even billions of our fellow men, women, and children are as much enthralled and demanding of answers to such questions as was Tolstoy when he wrote in Anna Karenina: Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.

Keeping this descriptive fact in mind, I am strongly inclined to dismiss the analytic arguments of many of our best thinkers concerning the legitimacy of such questions and go, at least in this, with the majority of mankind and say that, yes, “why” questions matter and matter terribly whether they meet the strictest standards of logic or not. Humans throughout the world still feel the urgent need to ask them and many spend their lives searching for an answer. I think that it is only fair that we take both them and their questions seriously.

In our contemporary world dominated by cold commerce, fetishistic consumption, and soulless concupiscence the need for Man to believe has not diminished. His need to find meaning for himself and his world has not gone away. Indeed, billions still cling to the old religions despite the Enlightenment Expectation of the inevitability of their fading away. On the other side of the spiritual divide, a growing number of people declare themselves to be without any particular faith or belief whatsoever but this does not mean that their need to believe in something or many things has evaporated entirely for, in the end, they are still human and thus believing creatures just as much as rational ones. Indeed, it shall be argued that Atheism, for instance, is, in part, a belief just as much as is Buddhism or any other religion; an assertion that often leaves many “non-believers” incensed and confused.

And so it is that Man must believe to live. If this is true, then the nature of his beliefs become very important both for his individual trajectory and the destiny of the world. If we grant the a priori human necessity for belief we might ask ourselves what, if anything, is good to believe in in the twenty-first century?

In this book we shall be arguing, among other things, for a belief or set of beliefs that neither requires God or is necessarily incompatible with such a spiritual presupposition. It is our view that modern belief does not require God, but may, nevertheless let Him in if so desired. What is most important though is that belief be viewed as a metaphysical-existential category of being that precedes every other category. Thus, for a human to be a human at all he or she must first believe.

Therefore I primarily write for those who are neither convinced by traditional religions or who have not yet been soundly converted by the New Atheists. I also write for those who in their hearts and minds waver between the practice and theories of modern science and the traditional contents and moral prejudices of ancient belief.

Religion has not died. God is still with us. And faith continues to be a power in the world. And although there are many who believe they can do without all three of these things, there are, I suppose, many more who would welcome at least a convincing modern substitute for them.

Chapter One: Why Believe in Belief?

Werthe legte erst der Mensch in die Dinge, sich zu erhalten, - er schuf erst den Dingen Sinn, einen Menschen-Sinn! Darum nennt er sich "Mensch", das ist: der Schätzende.

Aber wer das Land "Mensch" entdeckte, entdeckte auch das Land "Menschen-Zukunft". Nun sollt ihr mir Seefahrer sein, wackere, geduldsame!

Nichts ist wahr, Alles ist erlaubt`: so sprach ich mir zu.

--Nietzsche

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

—William James

Believing is the most mental thing we do.

—Bertrand Russell

Not satisfied with life, afraid of death

--Mathew Prior

quaestio mihi factus sum

--St. Augustine

Die geistige Freiheit des Menschen, die man ihm bis zum letzten Atemzug nicht nehmen kann, läßt ihn auch noch bis zum letzten Atemzug Gelegenheit finden, sein Leben sinnvoll zu gestalten.

--Viktor Frankl

La persuasione che la vita ha uno scopo è radicata in ogni fibra di uomo, è una proprietà della sostanza umana.

--Primo Levi

Der Mensch ist nicht fähig, nicht zu glauben

---Karl Jaspers

Imagine if you will a human being who is incapable of believing in anything. Would he or she be able to get up in the morning, go to work, live a life, create a future for themselves? I think we would all agree that the existence of such a being would be inconceivable. But the interesting question is why?

Why must we believe in order to live?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines belief, in part, in this way:

Any proposition (1) that is accepted as true on the basis of inconclusive evidence. A belief is stronger than a baseless opinion but not as strong as an item of knowledge. More generally, belief is conviction, faith, or confidence in something or someone.

Action or conduct indicating belief in, obedience to, and reverence for a god, gods, or similar superhuman power; the performance of religious rites or observances.

Since this is not a book about religion or religious belief per se, I would like to first concentrate on the assertion that belief is “conviction, faith, or confidence in something or someone.”

Clearly, in order to simply function we must at the very least believe that our lives are worth living.

This is an assumption that is not based on any fact. For instance, the fact that evolution has arguably fashioned us into “survival machines”, as Richard Dawkins once memorably put it, does not directly lead to the conclusion that we must believe that to be a necessarily good thing. That most of usfeel or experience our continued survival to be a good thing is a descriptive fact but does not and cannot serve as the essential ground for our belief that life is worth living.

If we want to seek the reasons for our belief that life our life is worth living we must look elsewhere other than in the world of facts and their multiple relationships with one another irrespective of whether or not they lie in the realms of culture, politics, biology, or common sense. None of these areas of knowledge can serve as firm philosophical ground for believing in the value of our own life.

It might be strange at first to say that belief in reasons for living cannot be based on facts. However this is just a slight variation of Hume's famous “ought/is” distinction that basically says you cannot cleanly derive an “ought” from an “is”. For example, just because we are all members of the human species it does not follow from that fact alone that any of us possess “human rights”. That we all belong to the human species is a fact. That we all possess human rights is a strong and widespread belief but not, itself, based on any independent facts. We do not actually possess human rights but we believe we do and thus pass laws and build institutions to thankfully promulgate, sustain, and spread these rights/beliefs the world over. But make no mistake about it, human rights like our positive or negative valuation of our own life is ultimately an existentially a priori act of will plus imagination.

We will and imagine both human rights and our own lives to have value. We believe in these two things and many other things besides. However, once we believe, through a primary act of will and imagination that these things exist and have value in the world; they then become cultural, institutional, historical facts. Thus it is that our beliefs spring from our will and imagination but once formed enter the world of facts sociologically, psychologically, practically. In this way, beliefs may not be initially based on facts but become factual once they are articulated, acted upon, and eventually institutionalized.

Nothing of this is new. Over a century ago Max Weber wrote his most famous book The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism explaining just such an idea. For Weber, Protestant beliefs helped lead to the growth and spread of modern day capitalism. Protestant ideas and concepts differed significantly from either Catholic or Orthodox Christian beliefs creating the conditions for new ways of living, doing, and thinking in the world laying, inadvertently, the foundation stones for modern life. The historical trajectory of Protestantism serves as an example of a set of beliefs that became socialfacts in the world resulting in enormous and fundamental material change.

Many of you might be disturbed by the idea that our beliefs about ourselves, our world, our morals, our very existence cannot be based on facts. That they are all creatures of our will and imagination. Just such an idea was expressed in the works of Nietzsche who believed that Man was the only animal to give “things” their value. For Nietzsche, man was not so much wise or rational as value creating. Indeed, today we know that many animals display some form of rationality sometimes even quite sophisticated but we know of no animal that gives values to both things and themselves in just quite the same way that humans do. Animals do not, as far as we know, inquire about the meaning of their life and existence in general. Only humans do that. In this way we begin to see how closely tied are questions of belief and of value.

We call “this” “good” and “that” “bad” and we create upon these fundamental axes of value the coordinates for the construction of multiple historical/social worlds. In one world “slavery” was “this good thing” and a human world based on it lasted for thousand of years. In another world “Jews” were “that bad thing” and a horrific world of extermination camps was born. In yet another world “non-Europeans” were neither “good nor bad” but “primitive” and novel systems of exploitation were created. And finally throughout most of our world “democracy” “human rights” and “empathy” are “those good things” worth living and dying for.

Thus we believe because we are, perhaps above all else, value creators. We give meaning to everything in our lives including ourselves. But those meanings and beliefs are historically arbitrary no matter how much we wish they weren't. The history of the human race reveals a tableau of values many of them radically opposed to each other as in the case of the “goodness” and “badness” of slavery. In one epoch, a great philosopher such as Aristotle would argue for its “naturalness” while thousands of years in the future another great philosopher such as John Stuart Mill would argue for its “unnaturalness”. Who was right? Surely today we side with John Stuart Mill and other moderns subtly arguing over our abilities for empathy, reason, and justice to furnish us with a firm moral ground to keep us safe from such evils as “racism” “sexism” and “xenophobia”. Nevertheless even though faulty reasoning and strong institutions can and do give us a semblance of safety from these historical evils they will never be based on independent facts but rather on our willing and our imagination as the value creating animal that we are. We are magicians who call forth novel values which in their turn enchant new worlds.

But if values and beliefs are always changing how can we be sure that we possess the “right” ones? The short answer is: we can't. All that we can do is work to either maintain or create the world that we collectively want but that will only be accomplished through will and imagination that crystallizes itself within strong institutions. If at any time our will and imagination either changes or weakens then the institutions that we once built and confidently found to be “good” will crumble to the ground as did the Egyptian Pyramids, Greek Temples, and, most recently, Totalitarian Idols.

There are no guarantees. Beliefs and values are inherently variable and unstable. They change and will change sometimes rapidly, sometimes imperceptibly. Thus life is not only a struggle for survival but an “eternal war of idols” as Max Weber once noted. In matters of values and beliefs we, as a global civilization, are very much in an existential situation not unlike the one described by Sartre in his famous Existentialism is a Humanism: We must everyday choose and choose again the world that we want. We must everyday reaffirm what we believe. There is no rest when it comes to maintaining the value system of the world that we want. There are no self-evident truths. There is only the strength or weakness of the human will and imagination to fashion a world that we deem to be better if not necessarily the best. The sad fact of the matter isthat we have not forever banished the concentration camp, or slavery, or torture, or injustice of all kinds. Their perpetual possibility and, thus, eventual unwelcome return will remain with us forever but the good news is that we can keep them at bay indefinitely with courage, struggle, wit, fortitude, conviction, and, above all, cooperation and wisdom.

This last attribute, wisdom, is interesting. What is it? It too is linked to belief and values. Wisdom is not solely or necessarily based on facts only; even if they form an essential part of wisdom. Wisdom is a deep knowledge of as many historical/actual forms of human life as possible and their material and spiritual consequences as well as the ability to form novel beliefs and values upon this knowledge leading to qualitatively better states of human flourishing.

Wait a minute! Didn't I just spend the last few minutes arguing that “better states of human flourishing” cannot ever be based on facts? Yes true. But this is where wisdom is different than just the plain knowledge of facts. The wise not only know where we have been, where we are, and where we might or should be going; they also have a unique capacity to morally reason about “good” and “evil”. But were not, for example, Schopenhauer, St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Plato, Mill, Rousseau, and Aristotle arguably among the wise and yet, did they not significantly differ in their world views over fundamental issues such as the “good” and/or the “just”? Yes, indeed they did. And it is because of these divergent opinions that the “wise” must ever be aware of the “wisdom” of the past and yet are not able to escape from the existential situation which forces us all to choose our individual and collective path through a combination of will and imagination. In the end, we can only hope that, like great artists, the wise of today will be able to paint convincing canvasses of possible human existences within which the majority of us would want to live. But that too is a belief, a wish, a value and will always be fought over by both the wise and the not so wise of the near and far future.

By now some of you might be asking: why should I believe in anything if nothing is ultimately sure? Why shouldn't I be a nihilist or a radical skeptic about everything and withhold my belief in anything?

In part, this is the attitude of the philosopher. His or her life is spent examining every question, assumption, or result no matter how common or absurd. For the philosopher one can never be 100% sure about anything but nevertheless one might be able, in some specific cases, to reach a relatively good level of certainty about some topics.

But that doesn't seem to help us much to solve our problem of what we should choose to belief in. Why should we believe that our life is worth living? Or as Albert Camus once put it: Why should we go on living and not just put an end to it right now? Why live?

Once again, I'm afraid there is no definitive answer as to why you shouldn't kill yourself. You simply must choose to live again and again every day of your life. And this also means you must repeatedly choose the reasons for why you go on living. The good news in this though is that you can always change the reasons for your existence. Today, it could be because of a loved one. Tomorrow it could be to save hungry children. Much latter it could be to discover new solar systems. The meanings that we might give ourselves are potentially endless. That makes it that much harder to choose perhaps, but at least it is a nearly infinite field of choice allowing for the possibility of a rich and wondrous personal development. Who knows? You might even find a modicum of wisdom at the end of it. But nothing worthwhile will ever be achieved without disciplined and strenuous effort on your part. The living work of art that is you will shine or be dimmed by all your beliefs, moral choices, and values as the creative sum of all of the days of your life.

Thus we as individuals and as a world are busy painting canvasses. Some we find horrible, others wondrous. But yet we still have not answered the question of why do human beings have to believe in order to live. Why can't they just be like other animals and live without asking why?

Primo Levi in his great and sorrowful work Se Questo è un Uomosaid that the concentration camp was, among other things, a place where you did not ask why (Hier ist kein Warum). In the camps, not only did you not ask “Why” questions but the very possibility for the creation of a meaning of life was to be eradicated. Thus for the human animal who needs to know why he or she lives in order to exist the camps offered a new perverse definition of hell: No Why Questions Allowed Here.

Viktor Frankl, another famous camp survivor, wrote in his courageous memoirs of that experience Trotzdem Ja zum Leben Sagen that those who survived the camp were those prisoners who were able to still give meaning to their life and through that ability to keep hope alive for some kind of personal future. Those who gave up hope for their future also gave up any hope of finding meaning in their present suffering. Incredible as it may sound to us, those who survived the camps were able to find meaning, even under conditions of torture, and thereby belief in their future.

Clearly then belief can serve, even under the cruelest of circumstances, as a means of salvation both physical and mental. This gives us a strong clue as to why we have these abilities in the first place.

We are intelligent animals. We are imaginative animals. We are animals that have a deep sense of time. We are animals that ask “why” about a great many things. We are animals that love to tell stories. We are social animals. All these reasons when combined go a long way to explain why we are “believing animals”.

We are able to imagine ourselves both in space and time and tell stories about what we would like to do with ourselves and others in space and time. For instance, we would like to be seen by others as adding social value. But in order for us to have social value in the eyes of others we must first know what kind of value we posses ourselves. Because we are necessarily social animals, ζῷον πολιτικόν, as Aristotle told us long ago we must believe in our collective and individual goals. Our values orientate us as to our place in the social world and organize our vital energies as to what we should do to whom and where and when. We believe so that we may know both who we are and who the “others” are. It is an existential mark of both the individual and the group.

In short, human groups and individuals who had strong collective as well as individual beliefs were probably better able to organize themselves and thus survive and reproduce more successfully than groups or individuals with a weaker capacity for belief. Beliefs vitally mattered for a social species with an unusually large brain. “Right” or “wrong” beliefs could very well mean the difference between both “social” and “natural” life and death. As human culture grew in importance so too did the nature and number of human beliefs. The more beliefs were able to bind groups together the more individuals were able to cooperate and achieve collective goals. Belief in such things as “Gods” “Money” “Kings” “Tribes” and “Nations” are some good examples of what I and others like Yuval Harari in Homo Deus are talking about. It is only relatively quite recently with the coming of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and with them the erosion of traditional societies and values that the question of “individual beliefs” on a mass scale was even possible.

Thus just as we are primed to be social, accept culture, learn languages, and feel empathy and aggression so too are we primed to believe and search for meaning in our lives. So the question “Why Believe in Belief” can be superficially answered that it is quintessentially human to do so. To be human is to believe.

But we cannot be satisfied with superficial tautologies. David Hume once quoted Mathew Prior who said that we were beings that were “not satisfied with life, afraid of death”. And indeed Prior was right. It is between these two poles of unsatisfied existence and fear of non-existence that belief takes hold in individuals, societies, civilizations, and epochs. We are perennially unsatisfied with either some or most aspects of our present existence and existentially terrified of our impending disappearance from this world that we find so woefully lacking. As Woody Allen once memorably put it:

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

We are dissatisfied with our life here on earth but do not wish it to end too soon. We seek endless remedies for this our human situation. We build Cathedrals, Rocket Ships, Wage Wars of Liberation, write Sonnets and Novels and play Music in order to fill the void of this our existential Scylla and Charybdis. But behind all of these strenuous exertions lie belief. It is not enough to build, to research, to kill, to love, and to live for their own sake; we must know why our hands move as they do and our lips say what they will and our hearts beat as they must.

Apparently one of Hannah Arendt's most beloved quotes from St. Augustine, the philosopher with whom she started her academic career, was quaestio mihi factus sum (I have become a question for myself). This is a beautiful quote and goes right to the heart of our present concerns. Once we become a question for ourselves spurred on and awakened by both our knowledge of our natural and social world and our impending death/transfor­mation we are shocked into asking “Why?” just as long suffering Job did of God (who, by the way, did not really ever get a satisfyingly direct answer from Him just: mind your own business all this is way above your pay grade).

Yet a possible cheeky response to the Old Testament God would be that our business here on earth is precisely just that: to understand the meaning of our lives and the world's existence and to discover the appropriate beliefs to structure and fill those meanings as best we can. We are, all of us, living question marks that need to direct themselves towards the human lights of meaning, value, and belief. Pure existence is reserved for all else in the universe as far as we know, but we, on the other hand, have been blessed or cursed with the task of living a human life which is ever and always a question of belief(s). Existence is a vast open book upon which morally empty pages we slowly write the commentary that illumines it in innumerable novel ways. We believe that the universe is worth knowing. The universe however is unable to reciprocate our intense interest and it is here within the gap created by this dis-balance of intrinsic abilities that we build meta-verses of culture, technology, and society all of which spring from our capacity to believe. As Hegel once memorably said: Es ist nichts Großes ohne Leidenschaft vollbracht worden.

Following Hegel's thought from above it is indeed our passions which stir us to action and not ever our cold calculating reason. "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions" said Hume. I might add that the passions (emotions) themselves however are guided and organized by beliefs which nevertheless may have their origins in our emotional life. It would be hard perhaps impossible to have beliefs and convictions that did not fulfill deep emotional needs; we are neither computers nor robots thus we must feel the rightness of our beliefs. If it turns out that we as individuals or a society feel that our beliefs do not resonate or cooperate with our emotions we would soon abandon them for other beliefs that did.

To believe in belief is thus a remarkable dispensation. It is perhaps the very psychological, social, even biological necessity which marks us out as human beings. It is at once the source of much of our creativity, vitality, and ingenuity as well as unspeakable cruelty, vanity, and stupidity. It is why we make peace and sometimes choose war. It is why we sometimes rush to save a life of someone we do not even know or desperately take our own. It is why we choose to love and to hate. And, most recently, why we choose to focus on the health of our planet, global society, and the possibility of a uniquely balanced human future. To completely destroy a person's beliefs and replace them with nothing would reduce a person to the status of a “Muselmann”: a term used in the Nazi concentration camps for a person who had lost all present and future hope and no longer believed in anything at all. Such a person would enter pure “existence” while leaving “living” behind. But as we have said, humans cannot just “purely exist” they must have embodied meaning, value, and belief. Thus the physical life of a “Muselmann” was inevitably short for they had already lost the very spark of belief that keeps all humans alive. Believe no one who says they “believe in nothing” for that too, ironically, is a belief however misguided and, anyway, they are probably lying to both you and to themselves for if they truly did not believe in anything they would not be here to tell the tale for long.

Chapter Two: Virtual Reality: The Death of Belief?

“Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakably Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.”

Thus begins David Chalmers enchanting new (2022) book Reality + which engages imaginatively with philosophical issues connected to Virtual Reality (VR).

In his book, Chalmers argues for:

Chronic Metaphysical/Ontological Uncertainty: We cannot absolutely be sure that we do or do not live in a Simulation. From this premise, according to Chalmers, it follows that we might either be Pure Sims (simulated beings wholly inside the simulation) or Bio Sims (biological beings residing (spatially) outside of the simulation yet connected to it)

Virtual Realism: The view that Virtual Reality is real. Entities in virtual reality really exist.

Virtual Digitalism: The view that objects in virtual reality are digital objects—roughly speaking, structures of binary information, or bits.

The it-from-bit hypothesis: Physical objects are real and they are digital.

The Equivalency of Worlds hypothesis: If the it-from-bit hypothesis is true, then both the natural world and the simulated world are real because both are based on bits which make up their underlying structure.

The Equivalency of Value in the Two Worlds: This is the view that life in virtual reality can have the same sort of value as life in non-virtual reality.

The Heim Prophecy: Based on the philosopher Michael Heim's somewhat prophetic assertion that “Virtual entities are indeed real, functional, and even central to life in coming eras.”

In principle, I only find myself able to agree with all of these arguments if I am allowed to make an important distinction between what I call Strong VR vs Weak VR.

Weak VR is the ability to create a simulation, participate in it while at the same time never being able or wanting to completely forget our original starting point in our presumed “natural” world. In Weak VR, we never loose our knowledge of the difference between the “natural” world and the “virtual” world although both are equally real, metaphysically speaking. In Weak VR we enjoy immersing ourselves temporarily in virtual worlds for purposes of entertainment and education. Conceivably, too, immersion in virtual worlds could serve as a temporary kind of virtual “punishment center” or “mental correction facility” for those we deem criminals although it would have to be scrupulously monitored and deemed safe beyond any reasonable doubt.

Most importantly, in Weak VR we inhabit both virtual worlds and our “natural” world never abandoning the latter for the former or allowing ourselves too much time spent in the former. We navigate these worlds achieving a “golden mean” where we enjoy the potential benefits of both. But in Weak VR we never decide to erase our memories of our “natural” selves or our “belongingness” to the original state that we were born into.

However things are very much different once we enter into Strong VR.

Strong VR has a long pedigree stretching back to Zhuangzi, Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes and more recently to modern philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Jean Baudrillard too. What these philosophers all have in common with recent popular science fiction movies like the Matrix is that they imagine that what we believe about our world and ourselves is completely false.

The key differences between an inhabitant of Strong VR and an inhabitant of Weak VR are the following:

In Strong VR:

You are completely unaware that some entity has either created the simulation, your identity or, most likely, both

It follows from the first premise that we are completely unaware of the intentions, if any, of the creator of the simulation

It follows from the first two premises that the creator might be able to change the terms, conditions, and properties of the simulation (and all those who inhabit it) at any time

It follows from the third premise that everything or some things in the simulation could be in a constant state of flux

It follows from the first four premises that we do not know if we are Pure Sims or Bio Sims

If the above premises are true then we have no way of securely following our own purposes, plans, or intentions. We cannot know if what we currently feel, remember, know, or experience has just occurred for a mere instance or for longer periods. This condition of “potential flux” negates any and all concepts of meaningful authenticity.

Under the above conditions we live at both the potential whim and command of the “Simulator-God” who created the simulation irrespective of whether that being, itself, is a simulation or not

In such a situation there is no extrinsic or intrinsic freedom only at best the “illusion of freedom”