Sunday, February 14, 2010

Re: [Yasmin_discussions] living in a computer simulation or escape into semi-synthetic play?

Dear Margarete,

thank you for your post and - although we are at the end of this discussion - for opening a new strain about new declinations in the simulation issue. I think it would be very interesting going through this interpretation - as well as fostering a discussion on Popper's theory of the three worlds - which takes into account the virtual-digital worlds, and in particular the metaverses.

You (and others, like, for instance, Cristina Miranda) quote Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most beautiful creator of written virtual wolds (of simulations). Maybe literature is still the most economic and "easy" way to build shared and permanent virtual worlds, if we so often take some written dreamworlds as examples.

We are at the end of our (long) discussion on simulation, so I hope you'll be joining some of us in a new project on this topic we are thinking to set up. Please, we would be very glad! :-)

Best,

Pier Luigi


Il giorno 13/feb/2010, alle ore 19.53, Margarete Jahrmann ha scritto:

> Hello simulationists,
> and thank you for the invitation to participate, Pier Luigi!
>
> As artist working with simulations of reality – for many years with
> simulation engines (www.climax.at), but even more with a
> semi-synthetic play reality between the artefact an the virtual -
> please let me pose the question about the impossibility of
> simulation. Is simulation still possible – and how can we still
> separate the worlds?
>
> Thank you for such a lively discussion on the subject, with so many
> strains – so mulifacetted and overwhelming – that I just make a
> brief statement from my angle as Ludic-Society researcher – which is
> to question the concept of simulation as "retro-concept" in general-
> and to put an emphasis on the transgression of „simulation", which
> finds its expression in contemporary Metaverse, understood as
> technological simulacra, being "ubiquitos" nowadays – because of its
> presence in ubiquitous computing – and as coined by Neal Stephenson
> (1992), as summary of playful social online worlds.
>
> Allow me to come back to the point introduced by Avi Rosen:
>> of being and new ontological philosophy. Karl Popper's theory of the three worlds is dramatically
>> altered. Traditionally the classic world 3 of hypotheses can never influence directly the
>> empirical world 1 of physical "objects" and vice versa. To achieve this, the mediation of
>> subjective reality, human thoughts, feelings etc. of world 2 is necessary. Cyberspace
>> alters that fact.
>
> Yes, Popper proposes a view of the universe that clearly recognizes
> at least three different but interacting sub- universes. Physical
> 'World 1' interacts with 'World 2', the mental or psychological
> world, the world of our feelings of pain and of pleasure. World 3,
> the world of the products of the human mind, emerges as an
> evolutionary product from World 2.
>
> BUT: "Play sure", as a phenomenon developed by the Metaverse player
> in 2nd world game systems, uses World 3 conjectures or theories as
> instruments of change. The Popperian cosmology appears as very
> spartan juxtaposition to the idea of a parallel universe of
> data-avatars and documents, a metaverse à la Snow Crash.
>
> In present times simulation- or to speak with Baudrillard -
> Simulacra – another concept appears as more viable:
> Orbis Tertius (Jorge Luis Borges, 1940) appears as a world where
> the artefacts of man in an inscrutable 2nd world break into the 1st
> and finally this world becomes number 3. Literature in this world
> never referred to reality, but to the two imaginary regions of the
> map, described in the pirate copy of an encyclopaedia.
> Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace, Blogosphere and SL are such asimulacrum
> of social interplay, edited by a dictatorship of the masses
> (Balibar, 1976. Lenin, 1918). Although constructed by the human mind
> (World 2), commonly all of these fictional the graphical MUD Habitat
> was widely successful.
> Karl Popper conceptualized World 3 as produced by human minds. In
> MMPOGs, massive multiplayer online games, the mind's artefacts are
> "synthetic objects" (Castronova, 2006), traded and exchanged – the
> semi-material object trade- which appears much closer to Borges
> impression of merging realities and physicalities.
>
> In fact money systems, the simulacra (Baudrillard, 1976) of signs
> without an reference, are perfectly fitting to the bulb of Snow
> Crash millionaires. Now this auspicated crash softly unbounds,
> unwraps and deliberates into the poetic concept of a world that
> strikes back from a fictional third, via a second to a
> first reality: Uqbar!
>
> Is this the only possible simulation- the physical breakthrough of
> anew concept beyond simulation - the semi-synthetic play in hybrid
> realities?
> all the best greetings
> marguerite

--
Pier Luigi Capucci
e-mail: plc@noemalab.org
web: http://www.noemalab.org/plc/plc.html
skype: plcapucci

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