In what I am doing to understand the metaverse I am drawing on idealism. I start with Plato and travel through Descartes, Kant, phenomonology and post-modernism to how we talk about the metaverse today. There was a good essay in Medium that struck the right balance for me yet has enough weight to build one. I highly recommend it although I will repeat many of the same points over the coming months. Here it is:
https://medium.com/the-atypical-archetype/plato-and-the-origins-of-western-dualism-6d0b067dbc0e
One point I’ll make has to do with a mid 20c turn in philosophy toward language. The Platonic world of perfect forms to me resides in the shared language context of a culture. As children we learn the meanings of words from our environment. Eventually we encounter concepts where different people from our own culture will have different interpretations of the same word. But often the vague sense of the word is shared even if we put shades of meaning on it that are not always shared by others. This vague shared sense of the word may be the concept from many of the older philosophers. Plato had his world of pure forms. The Descarte and the English idealists sometimes thought of it as the mind of God. Hegel spoke of Zeitgeist. But may it is all just this immaterial cultural context that gets expressed in language.
Many people speak of The Metaverse. To be clear nothing Zuckerberg has said yet comes close to the broadest understanding of some all encompasing universe as described Gibson or Stephenson. Commercial interests want to build islands without wasting time and money on bridges. But our cyber lives are already too Balkanized and enduring the constant transit from one island to another will not lead to the kind of unifying experience I want. And I suspect I am not alone. So my ideal of The Metaverse is beyond the VR experiences offered and even beyond the web.
So that is my position and I will continue to build on that in my posts.
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