THE VIRTUES OF VIRTUAL

All this talk about "virtual" reality is increasingly unsettling, assuming as it does that what we call reality is not virtual. Reality has always been what the goggle-and-glove people call virtual, but with eyes and hands instead of goggles and gloves. When you enter your house or ski down a snowy slope or drive a golf ball down the fairway or do any of the thousands of other things you do every day, do you really think you're actually entering your house or skiing down a snowy slope or driving a golf ball or doing any of the thousand things you think you do every day? Hasn't anyone told you? All that is only a sensorial simulation! So why, in another virtual reality experience, should you want to walk through a "virtual" room as though you're walking through an "actual" room, and "virtually" pick "virtual" things up as though you're "actually" picking "actual" things up? Where is the amazement in this? Is there a dearth of amazement around here somewhere? From what we call reality, go one level down, or out, depending on the angle you're at, into the full spectrum of waves and the full width and depth of time, and ZOW, the actual actual is a plasma you're dealing with at the electromagnetic level where nothing is actually happening, per se, anyway, it's just a hyperdimensionometric continuity soup containing everything. What could be the point of taking it one step backward, going negative exponential to construct something that enables you to feel as though you're feeling as though? What's the charge in being at two removes, for heaven's sake? Speaking of which, heaven is one of the earliest virtual concepts; folks have historically gone to unbelievable lengths to get there, even though it's only negative virtual. Most of those folks have gone beyond the here and now, virtually speaking, which is where the modern version of virtual reality is leading us apace: further away from life itself, the truest and most wondrous illusion of all, so far.