Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Which world is "real"?
I learned a new word today: "meatspace". Definition: the real physical world, as opposed to cyberspace.
It appears that the dividing lines between the two are rapidly meshing or breaking down. For example, academic studies have been made of the enforcement of existing legislation on virtual communities. The question of whether one can be raped in cyberspace has been hotly debated. Courts are having to struggle with whether computer drawings of children having sex constitute child pornography. Analogies with the scenario presented in the film The Matrix are obvious.
As Pip Cummings points out in the Melbourne Age, the questions are becoming important because people are spending increasingly large proportions of their time in cyberspace, in internet chat rooms, or in role-playing games. This is now their "real" life. The lines between the two worlds are blurring.
There is a third world, which the article fails to point out: an interdimensional world which we sometimes call the spiritual world. It's just as real, if not more so. Without reference to that world, we soon lose our way in both cyperspace and meatspace.
I have just finished reading Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, by Hugh Ross, which contains a science-based discussion on the interaction of the interdimensional world and our own. Recommended.
I learned a new word today: "meatspace". Definition: the real physical world, as opposed to cyberspace.
It appears that the dividing lines between the two are rapidly meshing or breaking down. For example, academic studies have been made of the enforcement of existing legislation on virtual communities. The question of whether one can be raped in cyberspace has been hotly debated. Courts are having to struggle with whether computer drawings of children having sex constitute child pornography. Analogies with the scenario presented in the film The Matrix are obvious.
As Pip Cummings points out in the Melbourne Age, the questions are becoming important because people are spending increasingly large proportions of their time in cyberspace, in internet chat rooms, or in role-playing games. This is now their "real" life. The lines between the two worlds are blurring.
There is a third world, which the article fails to point out: an interdimensional world which we sometimes call the spiritual world. It's just as real, if not more so. Without reference to that world, we soon lose our way in both cyperspace and meatspace.
I have just finished reading Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, by Hugh Ross, which contains a science-based discussion on the interaction of the interdimensional world and our own. Recommended.
