Sunday, December 2, 2012

About virtuality

<Versión.actual>
14 ene 2013: 18:30
Reeditado

1. What does virtuality is?

Why to talk about it?

For a lot of time for most humans the ‘important things’ were in the domain of natural flow, the one, let us say, of time and space. This affirmation is a bit tricky: for example, by nature, humans form groups and use tools, and in those concepts there can be found something that is essentially not in the domain of time and space. But we can observe, may be speculate, how other organisms, mainly those that developed a neural system, make similar things than humans and assume just a ‘quantity difference’ between humans and other beings. Humans don’t run that fast nor has powerful claws but have a more powerful brain to compensate in the fight for survival.

Virtuality

Over the time, we have tried to explain the difference between humans and other organisms in different ways, all of them mainly based in the same assumption: Humans can think and all other cannot. In historical time, that trend takes us by a strange way, the one that makes us to put humans as an organism in a second place and adopt the paradigm that ‘thinking is a quality’ that any other organism has. Now days we are a bit confused: scientists are telling us that emotions, that traditionally were related with animality, are in the base of our decisions and that thinking is not independent of them, so if seems that we have to consider our animality important, and that the difference with other organisms could be more a quantity one.

So we can say that humans are organisms that have a tool that permits them to think more powerfuly than the other organisms.

And were the power is? It comes from virtualization. Let us say that a human being can walk (a natural flow action), but that he or she uses shoes to walk. This last is a virtual act. Why?. First, shoes are a virtual think, because they are something that some one, a human, 'created' (maybe coping, maybe he was a blind man that had a great idea, it does not matter; shoes are virtual, let us say, 'because that').  I can see that it is strange to call virtual to something, so 'contundent', but (please, stop laughing and let me continue...) this is the link that permits the explanation of how, and this is the second way, being natural organisms, human can 'manipulate' (through virtual acts), virtual things. In other words, in the domain of brain, 'love' an 'shoe' are essentially equal (sorry for making you laugh again).

Virtual acts are so pervasive that human’s life is being developed over them in a way that it can be said that Virtuality is the actual life of humans.

Under this scope, we can establish a process in the brain that transforms something in the domain of the natural flow in something virtual, that is, something that only has sense in the way that human brain works (usually pets use shoes for a lot of thinks, but never for wearing them). Virtualization could be defined as  the transformation of 'natural thinks' in virtual ones. The question that arises is: are all things virtual?  The answer to this question is more theoretical than practical (it could take years to understand what philosophers wrote about it, but as a tip, just consider that in the world that there are more organisms than humans), and it looks like it is possible to consider that all things are virtual. Of course all that are related with knowledge are virtual.

Another interesting thing is that we can generate and implement new  things over virtual ones. Once e have something under the control of our brain, the results are unpredictable. We make shoes; cars, including those that have nothing to do with the natural flow: a book, the web... . And if I observe my surroundings almost all of them are of this kind or better said, all that I perceive as surrounding me are virtual. I live in virtuallity (and this is not a song's lyrics...)

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