Over at the Institute For Ethics & Emerging Technologies Giulio Prisco has a thought provoking post : Virtually Sacred, by Robert Geraci – religion in World of Warcraft and Second Life. The post is inspired by a forthcoming book by Robert Geraci : Virtually Sacred: Myth and Meaning in World of Warcraft and Second Life. The book is pencilled in for an August 2014 release according to Amazon UK.
The book has a few chapters on Second Life and includes the virtual age old debate of Immersionists v Augmentationists. The basic difference is considered to be that immersionists see a virtual world such as Second Life as a place where they completely immerse a new self, one that is separate from their real life, a sort of parallel existence. Augmentationists are generally considered to be people who see Second Life as an extension of their real life, they will talk of their real life experiences, partners, job etc but will also embrace Second Life.
This used to be quite a hot topic in Second Life. Back in February 2008 New World Notes highlighted a brief discussion between the two camps with representations from Sophrosyne Stevenaag and Cyfish Traveler. Sophrosyne used to host some really interesting discussions on a Saturday evening back in the day too. Another name in these circles whom I haven’t seen or heard anything from for quite a while is Extropia DaSilva. I’d long forgotten about these sort of discussions until I read Giulio’s post today, they used to get quite heated to say the least.
Another subject at hand is that of Transhumanism, whereby people upload their brains to the machine. There are still plenty of discussions surrounding this today but not so much in Second Life as they once were. Giulio suggests a reason for this :
Transhumanists – techno-spiritual seekers who think that science and technology can and should carry humankind through its next phase of evolution – made a home in Second Life between 2006 and 2009, after which the pace of transhumanist events in Second Life slowed down due to the general Fall from media grace of Second Life.
I don’t quite agree with that theory, Second Life is still going well. I’d suggest that it may well have been that discussion groups have a hard time raising tier money, which is an age old problem for many communities in Second Life. The barriers are more financial.
Anyway back to the book, at its heart seems to be the theory that virtual spaces provide the means to build religious spaces in a fashion that 2D web pages simply can’t replicate. Furthermore they provide the means to provide spaces for new religions, as well as established ones. In his blog post Giulio explains this as :
One of Geraci’s central points is that shared virtual spaces provide a sense of place, direction, and orientation, which has profound implications for religious practice. Contrary to flat web pages, in virtual reality we can build holy places, cathedrals, and sacred objects, which act as a “physical” scaffolding to hold virtual religious communities together. While vision and hearing are powerfully engaged in consumer 3D virtual realities, the possibility to touch objects in virtual spaces “in which the brain regions associated with grasping can potentially respond as though to conventional reality,” isn’t available yet to most consumers, but this will change with new haptic interface devices. I am persuaded that next generation VR platforms, with support for haptics and full-immersion display devices like the Oculus Rift, will soon take virtually sacred spaces above critical mass.
The theory is further expanded upon via people such as William Sims Bainbridge … that’s quite a name, anyway William Sims Bainbridge argues :
Despite competition from science, religion has a future. All human societies have possessed religion, because it serves universal human needs (Parsons 1964). People want to feel that life is meaningful and that there is hope for future rewards even as the end of life draws near. The most recent theories in social science argue that religion will arise in all intelligent species possessing society—a structure of social relations among individuals—and which are gripped by strong desires which the current level of technology cannot satisfy (Stark and Bainbridge 1987). Cognitive science theories suggest that religion is wired into our brains as the result of the early course of human evolution, and could not be abandoned without major transformation of human nature (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Barrett 2004; Bloom 2004).
Virtual worlds may be able to provide both a meaning of life for some and also as technology evolves, those social relations can be strengthened. This could also give rise to new religions.
These virtual spaces don’t just have to be limited to Second Life either, Giulio and Robert Geraci both attended Convergence of the Real and Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft, by the end of which Giulio was shouting “FOR SCIENCE, AND FOR THE HORDE!” … personally I’m an Alliance man!
These theories and ideas sound crazy to quite a lot of people, to others they cross the line of blasphemy. The topics are controversial to say the least but today’s organised religions can, and in the case of Second Life, certainly do, build communities in virtual spaces. Whether such communities can ever replace traditional religious communities is another matter but as immersion improves, it is quite possible that religious communities will embrace more virtual spaces.
Whether you feel there’s merit in these ideas or whether they are complete mumbo jumbo, they do remind me of a time when Second Life seemed far more vibrant in terms of discussions. There was an accompanying event in Second Life related to Robert Geraci’s book, there’s a two hour youTube video of it, but it’s not as well as attended as a discussion such as this once would have been in Second Life. Whether that’s because of the time it was held, Second Life’s reach in terms of interested parties or because people simply don’t find these events attractive anymore is open to debate.
However reading the blog post, associated articles and quotes took me back to a time when Second Life itself seemed to be more vibrant. That’s a personal issue of course, plenty of people logging into Second Life today find it extremely vibrant and some find it far more interesting than those days of 2007-2009. That’s part of the evolution of the virtual world experience for both immersionists and augmentationists.
I am still around. I still host Thinkers every Tuesday. But these days I tend not to think and write about avatars and identity but rather the future of work and money.