Saturday, February 13, 2010

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

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
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