It Could Have Been Otherwise: Reality and Ethics in the Age of the Virtual

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“The reality was the myth. In such cases the interior events will always predominate, regardless of the physical facts, which are only symbols of those events.”

-Seth (Jane Roberts)1

 

“The fact that we occupy an ever larger place in time is something that everybody feels.”

-Marcel Proust2

 

“Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise.”

-Lankavatara Sutra3

 

Introduction

In a previous essay, The Real Gravity of the Situation, the concept of gravity was discussed as a theme in science theory and fiction. This was a way of exploring how society has been struggling to envision its cosmological context in light of the fractured and uncertain picture of the universe we inherit from physics. That led to considering some preliminary ideas related to the multidimensional structure of time, which has been developing both in alternative and esoteric science, as well as popular fiction.  

 

The following text will delve more deeply into the tapestry of time by looking again at the development of concepts and mythology in recent culture—this time focusing more on the personal “dimensionality” of being and character, which has become a popular theme, especially in the increasingly complex science fiction on television.  

 

In the early 21st century, the serialized dramas of screen-media, what used to be called TV, experienced something of a golden age, (partially due to a shift in format), with writers now getting more freedom to fully explore the subtle dimensions of character and inner‐world building than was previously possible in the space of TV and film. As TV has transformed from a separate medium into a node in the virtual nexus of not only escapist entertainment, but of an increasingly realistic and increasingly ubiquitous penetration into human life, it has become a creative and often dark mirror (or Black Mirror as one show is called) of the new media environment.  

 

While the dark challenges are real, the explosion of “content” across our virtual media could be read as a sign of a broader potential value that comes with those challenges. Specifically, this essay will look at how the thematic problems that arise from our social and media environment reveal in very concrete ways, especially when exaggerated by fictional drama, issues that have long plagued our species, particularly modern society.  

 

Much of cultural history could be read as a long evolution in the concepts and stories we create to deal with difference and otherness. While stories and concepts of all kinds can persist over many eras and transitions, some stories express well the jumps into either greater ambiguity or greater sophistication in the boundary between oppositional pairs—especially self and other or us and them—reflecting periodic shifts in social complexity. The virtualization of all media could be seen as the latest stage of that transformation, as old boundary conditions become not only fragmented but also fractalized, that is, transformed from the black and white boundary of a mental category operating on specific scales, to a complex membrane of mediation on many levels.  

 

Social fragmentation has become psychological fragmentation, but in the process of deepening dissolution, new potentials and dimensions long hidden become revealed. Art has always helped reveal hidden dimensions of our character and being, but this was previously no more than subjective complexity in, say, modernist fiction. Though we can see even there, in the works of Joyce and Proust for example, the beginnings of a clear consciousness of what could be called the virtual structure of time, which this essay attempts to illustrate.

 

Discussing the physics and art of the early 20th century in the essay mentioned, it was suggested that the impulse to integrate different perspectives, unify time with space, and bring coherence to the modern world picture was unsuccessful because though it broke with classical categories and conventions of form, it failed to produce a new vision or understanding. A few points of such a vision were explored, especially the idea that the nature of time demands a complex dimensionality. 

 

However conceived, understanding time demands not reducing it to space, precluding any totalizing framework or space—non euclidean, multiperspectival or otherwise. One can easily see that the sterility of merely warping and fragmenting representational space, as is done in modern physics, inevitably leads to a dead–end aesthetically as well as conceptually.

 

In the wake of modern physics (and similar developments in other fields), those aspects of modern culture that were the most “deconstructive” came to the fore—especially after the world wars prompted a closer look at what we were exactly trying to integrate in the first place. The complicated but ultimately understandable experiments of modernism gave way to “incredulity towards metanarratives” as Lyotard defined postmodernism, and with it came a world too complex to understand with anything approaching coherence or fundamentality.  

 

While the specialization, micro–narratives and pop culture that dominated the second half of the century may seem contrary to modernist dreams of progressive truth and aesthetic unity, the reflexive turn of the era did set the stage for a more pragmatic unification.

 

We began building machines that became capable of connecting the various threads of perspective—no longer in the mind of a single human subject, but in the mind of the network—that is, in the relations technology made possible. Was there a mind in the machine itself? Science fiction wondered. Meanwhile as the machines came closer to answering that question for us, they also helped us uncover the deeper patterns in nature and society, patterns that were beyond the reach of our linear models, paving the way for our burgeoning understanding of complexity.  

 

But rather than converging on some ultimate answer or equation that the autistic priests of modern physics still chase, reality itself is diverging away from a material ground and into the multiple and virtual world conditions of the technological imaginary. Consequently, the virtual and multidimensional structure of our reality is no longer just the purview of the occultists and madmen but now a rather obvious extrapolation for even the most literal minded empiricist. 

 

Even older sci‐fi tropes take on new meaning in our emerging age of actual virtual reality.

For example, one need only look at that king of occult-themed science fiction, Philip K. Dick, whose short novel The Man in the High Castle has been transformed into an interesting show.  

 

The Man in the High Castle and the Hero as Singularity

 

Dick’s novel is a story of alternative history, imagining the world if the Axis Powers had won the second world war. In the TV version, alternate versions of history including the one we inhabit are being accessed by “travelers” who bring back films of each alternate reality. The films are used by both the Nazis and the underground resistance movement to understand and better anticipate and manipulate the events of the central timeline and, as we come to see, the whole multiverse. 

 

An interesting theme develops late in the second season, where the central protagonist Juliana, is revealed as being most important to the future, not because she occupies some central place in the power structure of their particular world, but because she is the most coherent across all the timelines viewed. Being coherent across different realities and forms of expression is a somewhat difficult and paradoxical concept to understand, but the idea is essential to understanding the profound transition that is our time, essential to navigating the struggle with our dizzying transition into a seemingly ubiquitous reality of virtuality.

 

What the show suggests is that Juliana is not a product of her environment to the same degree others are. Her motivations are portrayed as being rooted in compassion and selfless love. This theme of a love–based ethics trumping a utilitarian ethics is nothing new. One can often see in various cultural media a recurring desire to tease love out from the passions and duty out from obedience in our path through the moral complexity of a culture no longer tied to tradition. One can even see this in the superhero genre (Wonder Woman is an example).  

 

But using the frame, not just of a multiverse, not just of a collection of different narratives, but of a system of related worlds connected through the dimensions of character and their choices, The Man in the High Castle in particular brings many ethical and philosophical themes into stark relief. What was once only expressed by religious metaphors that transcended the distinctions between duty, emotion and ethical utility with faith in a higher guidance, now can be given a concrete justification. 

 

In the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, Arjuna gets a glimpse of the infinity of worlds through Krishna, and in consequence of that vision of infinity, puts his faith in the divine. But now, as the spiritual world becomes visible through the virtual, we, like characters in The Man in the High Castle, perhaps can learn to develop a sense for the best not among possible worlds, but for all possible worlds—an important difference that is difficult to understand without some sense of those other worlds.

 

In the show, for instance, Juliana’s decisions come not from any one world but from within—not from calculated judgments that would tie her to the circumstances of that world’s drama, but from her inner character, from something transcending the circumstances of any one timeline. We are told that the other characters are different in each timeline, betraying their moral complications and uncertainties—their fidelity to circumstances rather than any consistency of character. She is, on the other hand, to use a mathematical metaphor, an invariant, with many of the other characters moving in relation to her across the multiverse. 

 

It is important not to read “invariance” as implying moral inflexibility. This is the crux of the paradox of coherence. There is a crucial difference between a unique singularity and the generic constant, between this kind of hero and the mythic and often melodramatic heroes of most popular fiction. Juliana’s character in The Man in the High Castle, beyond any failings the show as a whole might have, represents a very profoundly framed example of the ethical models culture seems to be working out through its most creative media.  

 

The old boring melodramatic good guy is predictable—so much so that we have seen a reaction in entertainment media to embracing the morally compromised antihero—mostly because it seems to be the easiest thing people can do to make things interesting.

 

More sophisticated genres have long used moral complexity rather than the amoral universe of the antihero, but this is usually framed as a conflict between different moral conventions as in classical tragedy, or between a rule and its application in circumstances—like the prime directive in Star Trek. Since God is long dead and now even the humanism of Star Trek has fallen out of fashion, moral complexity has often slid into moral confusion.  

 

Faced with the inscrutability of God’s justice, the biblical Job maintains his faith, but for the physics professor and postmodern Job in the Coen brothers’ retelling, titled A Serious Man, this is no longer an option. He hilariously declares to his students in front of a gigantic blackboard filled with equations describing the uncertainty principle that it proves “we can’t ever really know what is going on.”  

 

The situation is illustrated more tragically and masterfully in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men.  The sheriff in No Country not only retires, unable to defeat the evil as he would in a classic Western, but he can’t even make sense of it. He avoids the tragic fate of the film’s other ostensible protagonist by realizing the chaos was more complex than he could realistically confront. Yet he does still long for some sense of meaning, some sense of his place in this chaotic world.  

 

He has a dream where his long dead father (who was also a sheriff along with his grandfather) gives him money that he then loses, and another where his father waits for him in the darkness with fire stored in a horn. We are led to feel that by losing the money in the dream, he has turned from the linear time of the worldly plot, which in the movie was all about a case of money. He is consequently becoming part of what he imagines as a timeless tradition, or rather a cyclical iteration of a way of life passed down or carried through the darkness as fire was in horns in older times.

 

When the kind of order and justice dispensed by the hero in the traditional Western is seen to be inadequate, as it has been seen by many for decades, we only naturally look deeper for meaning and justice. Without the linear march towards justice and progress so indicative of the time‐sense of the West, especially in the modern West so epitomized by America and mythologized in its cinema, it is natural that those so disillusioned would reach back towards an idealized tradition, or a cyclic notion of time.  

 

In No Country it is suggested that the sheriff is lost without any unique sense of meaning, and seems to be fading slowly into the shadowy landscape of cyclical history, where he becomes, like Jack merging into the old photo in Kubrick’s The Shining, merely another iteration of ancestral memory. In The Shining, Jack loses his identity as a writer and creative individual and becomes merely an expression of the repeating cycle of the spiritual world and its archetypes.  

 

In No Country, the sheriff seems aware of a similar fading back into the archetype familial role of his spiritual world dictated by tradition. He could not find a way to bridge his spiritual reservoir of generic types with the outer world where differences and conflict force change and development. He was unable to contribute much to any change. Yet it is still easy to see him as a hero, for he at least tries to understand. He sees his limitations and is striving to find meaning, even if he just settles for a true understanding of his limits and his place.

 

In that supreme example of TV’s golden era, David Simon’s The Wire, however, we, (and presumingly in the show’s final sequence, also the cop McNulty), see not only the limitations of our place and everyone’s roles within the large cyclical pattern of time, system and process, but that vision brings about a change in character, more or less, to the extent that the audience and the characters see it.  

 

To be sure, the Wire gives us a tragic vision, but it also gives us some understanding and therefore a path towards making a change—albeit not the heroic conquest of evil, but a humble realization of the character changes that comes from knowledge of limitations—that is, the “differences that make a difference”, (as many, especially Gregory Bateson have put it).

 

However, The Wire’s vision is more empathic than constructive. We do see some clear patterns in the complexity, and we are led to mythic levels of compassion through the exploration of limitations imposed on all by the structure of society. But without any exploration of the creative components of system, society, and character, we have little to do but go home, as McNulty does in The Wire upon seeing “the whole system” from the outside. Getting our own house in order is all well and good but we know our heroes won’t stay home for long. They and we still need a better sense of “what’s really going on” even to work on our own self and home.

 

When faced with chaos and the arbitrary nature of fate, symbolized in the Nolan brothers’ The Dark Knight as the Joker and Two Face respectively, we seem to have only two options. Like the sheriff in No Country, the Nolans’ version of Batman also cannot understand the chaos he is up against, but instead of giving up his quest for order, he shifts from the hard moralism and brute force of the traditional hero, to the subtle manipulation of symbol and truth so characteristic of the villains in the genre.

 

Unlike the sheriff of No Country, Batman embraces the relativity, or at least, moral flexibility of his opponents, though seemingly in the service of the traditional order—showing that despite our lack of faith in truth, justice, and conventional heroism, we often have no other ideas. We no longer believe, but we still “want to believe”, as Mulder of the X-Files used to say. 

 

Unfortunately, few can follow Mulder into the darkness of sci-fi weirdness that may hold the answers to our problems. Within modernity, religious faith and myth have become little more than the “noble lie” The Dark Knight and Watchmen, among others, bring back from Plato when new truths cannot be found—a desperate compromise with a complicated world we fear might descend into chaos. We pretend to believe the lies that bring order because the truth is beyond our comprehension, or at least beyond our failing will to understand and accept.

 

Thankfully, both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Rises do not end on a mere affirmation of the necessity of the noble lie. They leave open the possibility that difficult truths and complicated justice could find some harmony with peace and order. The Nolans’ Batman, especially, is held out as a potentially dynamic symbol for whatever kind of justice society needs. 

 

The ambiguity of what this entails, beyond some healing confrontation with the trauma of chaos, may not be ideal. But it at least points to the necessity of traditional heroes coming to terms with their tragic shadow, with their participation in and even creation of the very thing they rail against. 

 

Fleshing out the details of what new truths and myths our society may need perhaps had to wait until later Nolan films, but this realization of the essential relation between the violence of chaos and the violence of order is made explicit by the Joker in The Dark Knight. The symbolism of Batman as the hero willing to repeatedly confront the darkness and chaos inherent to the action of the hero is precisely his appeal and power in media mythology, making him, perhaps, the quintessential hero of our age. A Dark Knight for dark times.

 

Yet, the problem which films repeatedly reveal is how our liberal culture is still tied to the dictates of moral law. Whether it is dictated by God or by reason, the good guy follows and defends the rules. We revolt against it, but we usually return to it time and time again. In the Star Wars sequels of the 2010’s, a case was made for transcending the old light vs. dark formula, but without any higher vision, a reaffirmation was the only way to go. 

 

Though there are visionaries that can see through the double bind to a greater or less degree, it seems as if most of us don’t understand how to get out of it—how to escape from formulaic structures, whether they be in science, art, ethics, politics….or the metaphysics that informs them all.

 

In the The Man in the High Castle—among many other examples that could be explored—one can see our culture groping through complexity and relativity, both moral and metaphysical, to find a deeper logic and a higher purpose than the stale tropes of the hero’s battle against chaos.  There is a tendency in some conservative circles to blame various cultural figures and movements for starting this trend of questioning and relativizing truth and morality. The Sheriff in No Country also flirts with this narrative of cultural decay, only to be reminded that the chaos he is facing is “nothing new”.

  

What is relatively new however is the way that that oldest of cultural logics, the scapegoating of the other, of change, is no longer functioning when it gets harder and harder to tell where we end and you begin—where the order is, the light, the good; and where the dark. It should be obvious how the globalization process and the information age have accelerated this process already long at work in the Western psyche in its own hero’s journey towards transcendence of every boundary and limitation.

 

Everything in modernity leads us to the impasse that all are bound to see when their structure of understanding, really any scheme or system, no matter how dynamic, is followed to its conclusion. Every culture gets to a point when its formulas no longer work. 

 

But unlike in previous eras, where the limitations of the system lead to the end of that particular culture, the confrontation and demise of all cultures under the pressure of technology and globalization has thrown us into a trajectory rushing headlong towards the necessity of higher knowledge or annihilation. Even if our technocratic priests are failing to save us with their laws and formulas, our heroes are trying to save us in the virtual space of our dreams and myths—some with more success than others.

 

For instance, the central hero of The Man in the High Castle, Juliana, has similarities to Neo, the hero of the Matrix. Like him, she is portrayed as more than an agent of the system. But unlike Neo, she is not caught in the dualism of real/virtual. Her power comes not from an abstract freedom from the system, or the accompanying aimless drive to actualize this abstract and contradictory freedom/will to power that the original Matrix sequels explore. Instead it is her coherence of character as defined by her spontaneous order.

 

She is a “singularity”, not “the one”—not the transcendent source enforcing its order upon the world, but an immanent attractor within the chaos of change, a pattern that keeps its character no matter what the conditions, thereby affecting the world and the conditions of the problem in a creative way.  

 

While the Matrix sequels played with many of these themes, their solution was still “dialectical”, which is to say that at no point was the “one” anything more than a function of the system of oppositions. The oppositions are unified in the end, but the characters are never really developed. And it is character, or “soul” that truly “transcends” the system, not by a dialectic of “spirits” (in other words a combination of generic types), but by the pressure applied to the system by a character not defined by it, not tied to the mere circumstances of the character’s time.

 

In The Man In The High Castle we see it is upon Juliana’s character and the others she inspires that we are led to believe hope most exists, precisely because they are not predictable and therefore controllable variables in the calculations of those attempting to control the system. 

 

The hero is a “singularity” to the extent they act “beyond good and evil”—not in some amoral or antiheroic sense of merely sympathetic self-interest, but from an inner sense of the good not dependent on any rule and therefore not defined by its opposition to any fixed “other” or evil. It is this independence from a reactive and negatively defined good that makes the active person a creative singularity within the field of dependent forces.  

 

As Nietzsche poetically put it (before his ideas were transformed into similar formal terms as used here by the great philosopher of the postmodern age, Gilles Deleuze), “Around the creators of new values revolves the world—invisibly it revolves”4. Through Juliana’s ability as a singularity to shape the field of forces around her and therefore affect change in all systems, we are led by the show to consider a multidimensional picture, and this suggests that her and the other protagonists are like guiding lights—organizing centers around which a greater future for all worlds can be possible.

 

Her antagonists are like Nietzsche’s reactive forces, embodied in men who seek power through attempting to control the situation in any one system—or in all of them as other realities are made to collapse into the control of one. The show portrays many of the resistance movement against the Nazis in this light as well as some of the Nazis of course. 

 

The show admirably avoids most of the melodrama that we get in most popular narratives—especially those involving Nazis, who have become Hollywood’s favorite scapegoat revenge fantasy (something Tarantino has dramatized quite colorfully). People may act in evil seeming ways but the show portrays that desire for power and control as ignorant and impotent in the face of the true freedom and power of a character unbent by circumstances.

 

The true hero cannot defeat the antagonist by any kind of brute linear force—not the force of law, nor that force of moral certitude that makes for a hard resistant nature. No, the patterns that survive the most transformations, that translate their relationships across the most varied systems—and so seed their creative singularities into those systems, both redefining them and their relations—are those that use the potential of each situation as a field of becoming, of expressing a relation beyond those defined already by the preformed meaning or rules of the game.  

 

There was something of this in the old Star Trek, with Kirk representing the independent “will” that listened to the voice of emotion represented by Bones, and logic, displayed by Spock, but always found a way through the limitations of their predictable extremes. Star Trek seemed to strive to reframe the dependencies of logic and emotion, and even in supposedly no-win situations, Kirk merely changed the rules of the game. This was made a central and explicit theme in the film reboot of Star Trek in 2009.

 

But as with many of the reboots and sequels, from Star Wars to Superman, the Nietzschean “Ubermensch” is cast more as some kind of naturally superior representative and defender of the people, a clear stand-in for the melodramatic ideology of contemporary democracies and their utilitarian ethics. Our lesser heroes often fail to find a way beyond the generic dualities of ideology, and they inevitably fall back on cliched compromises when faced with the complexity of time and virtuality.

 

The multidimensional, or “multiversal”, premise, despite it often being used in less than creative ways, allows something enigmatic to be imparted, something that many of us, and our heroes, are struggling with in our age of virtuality. We have avatars and counterparts of our selves galore, but lacking a center within, we hunger for being and struggle for stability—attempting to force coherence through the fashioning or simulating of identity in the increasingly creative and ever-more simulated world. 

 

Yet because the world always changes and control is especially elusive in the kind of world we are creating, the hunger ever grows, and unless we dig deeper than we have ever had to, the fractures and avatars multiply. This schizo–subjectivity is the theme of another revealing show, Mr. Robot.

 

In Mr Robot, the protagonist is so incoherent and fractured that his alternate selves frequently fight for control over the single body they share, and over the destiny of the timeline the characters inhabit. Mr. Robot’s world mirrors our own more closely, but as with The Man in the High Castle, it is gradually and subtly communicated that our worlds are connected. Mr. Robot also plays subtly with the themes of a changeable timeline and a multidimensional simulated world, where we as viewers are part of a greater multiverse, viewing the alternate dimensions of our world and the counterparts of our own selfhood.  

 

In viewing the snapshots and reflections these shows offer us, it is easy to read them as simple critiques. They certainly offer no easy melodramatic solutions.  But one can also read them as suggesting something far more profound and potentially hopeful.

 

Schizo–subjectivity or quantum Coherence?

 

Both The Man in the High Castle and Mr. Robot paint a pretty dire picture with no simple revolution having any real change for the better. Instead they suggest that the real changes that matter— the ones that change the whole system of worlds and selves—are the ones that bring coherence through character and creative inspiration. Where what matters is not the struggle of one force or symbol over another—since any imposed order partakes in its opposite, any code can be hacked, any movement co-opted—but the order or idea that is robust to changes in its form, that can recontextualize and redirect the fragmentation and conflict of opposing forms with the strength of its inner character.

 

We find it easy in watching good character dramas to understand that the plot is less important than the characters—that the order achieved in the characters’ world through their actions is less important and interesting than the coherence or understanding that the characters achieve in their relations (or we achieve through understanding them). 

 

But in the plot of our lives, our world, and the various melodramatic narratives of our media environment, which thrive on spectacle, it is easy to lose sight of what is obvious when we see a world as just one story amid a multiverse of them. Even for the purposes of a story, a confusing or chaotic world isn’t necessarily good, but neither is a rigidly ordered one; neither are very interesting.

 

The coherence of a character or story is, of course, a kind of order, but it implies a logic of thematic connectivity across time, something that actually necessitates some break in the regimented order of a world of objects in euclidean space. 

 

The kind of coherence that matters outside the space of the moment, outside the fairy tale ending or the melodramatic plot climax, is not the result of the traditional hero’s journey, where order is brought to the land by the slaying of the dragon of chaos—where law is imposed and all are put in their proper objective place through the actions of a heroic subject, eliminating an evil so often characterized as an intrusive contaminating force imposing its change on the pure static symmetry of the good. 

 

Of course we can seem to achieve temporal coherence and consistency through the application of a logical and geometric law, but this is the ironic illusion that haunts existence at its core and turns everything upside down. If we can control the conditions of our life enough, we do indeed seem to maintain consistency through those conditions, but this is an illusion of order that one side of the existential split purchases at the expense of the other, a local and insular coherence created at the expense of a higher order.  

 

Time is more than the linear progress we abstract from the cycles in a single ordered space. It is the larger virtual network of possibilities that can only be kept virtual for so long. Ultimately, other possibilities emerge. Even within the space and time of an ordered world or life, those other possibilities are active, and seen from a broader temporal perspective, reveal the not so perfect symmetry of our insulated ideas of order.

 

In fact true coherence, called “quantum coherence” by some physicists, is in some ways the inverse of the equilibrium and symmetry we find in dead systems so characteristic of simple spatial order operating according to mechanical principles with low levels of complexity.5 True coherence maximizes local or “individual” freedom and collective order. It is “present” to the degree that the system in which something is contextualized has made that thing a part of other systems—as life does to matter.  

 

All the more so as life gains in complexity, as the symmetry of simple material systems becomes part of a greater cycle of life and intelligence. Each rigid insular bond broken becomes a new degree of freedom, as order becomes transferred from localized space to a distributed network through time, and as life and order are consumed and transferred to increasingly more widely coherent and connected scales of organization.

 

The “far from equilibrium” state that is the ever-changing fact of life in its dynamic evolution, despite seeming asymmetrical, unstable, and exploitative, is also a pressure that pushes it to find a way to higher order and balance in new contexts and systems. 

 

Though with increasing scales of integration we get increasing complex “mineralizations” of order, as the higher scale order attempts to enforce its laws on the lower scales.6 This is always the challenge: to not trap life in closed systems that would limit the ability of those systems to become further embedded in different contexts—limiting the degree of quantum coherence, or, one could say, “density of time” in the relative space of the imposed order.7

 

Since all life operates far from a simple equilibrium with its environment, it is necessarily open to influences from other spaces and times. But the more it is able to embed itself successfully in higher contexts of nested, fractally-layered rhythms and cycles, its presence in time, in some sense, expands. 

 

And as it learns to navigate time, that is, to respond to objects as signs, as information representing a possibility, or a memory—as something more than what appears—and learns to connect those virtual presences, life becomes more coherent as a self‐aware entity. The seeming coherence or the simple symmetry of a deterministic mechanical-type system may seem like high order, but it is the kind of order of tools in all senses of the word—that is, of systems easily manipulated.

 

A tool’s coherence across multiple spaces of representation—or its pattern in different possibility spaces—is relatively incoherent compared to a self‐aware being, since a tool’s value depends on the system and environment it happens to be in, i.e. on the ways it, as an object, is put to use by some subject. 

 

A particular hammer is only a hammer to a being that can understand how to use it. It has more consistency of meaning than an arbitrary clump of dirt, but compared to an idea of a hammer, which will maintain some coherence of use and meaning no matter what form it takes, a particular hammer as an object is little more than an arbitrary clump of matter, like it is to, say, an insect. 

 

And while abstract and generic ideas can still be put to very different uses, the unique being of a true singularity, or living idea—one could say “awakened soul”—is no longer solely determined by its use or environment. Unlike a generic idea, a singular self maintains its unique creative flavor no matter what the circumstances. 

 

It is even capable of turning the arena of its expression from a dictator of roles into related dimensions of its character, therefore forming a bridge between otherwise stagnant systems, pushing them, if possible, to relinquish their own insularity and become enriched by the contact with novelty—to become more individuated from local forces, more self-aware and self-directed through access to potentials not dictated by any script, free from the over-determined logic of any single system.

 

The discourse surrounding “uncertainty” in physics and “incompleteness” in logic, are attempts to understand the implications of this basic paradox concerning the incoherence of separate or complete systems, what could be considered even the essential paradox of the meditative wisdom traditions, often suggested in Eastern spirituality, especially Buddhism and Taoism, though seldom developed in positive conceptual detail.

 

Since the way through the contradictory extremes created by the discrete categories of thought cannot be said in some abstract way outside the singular contexts of a situation (only inferred in philosophies attempting to express this, and often through negation), the East has often proclaimed that “the way” is best left to the mediation of direct oral instruction, or an initiatory wisdom in esoteric signs—or perhaps divination using books like the I Ching, which deal with the interpretation of signs and the forces they represent within concrete contexts.

 

But since the complex systems of society cannot be built on such ambiguity, the esoteric wisdom of mystics has often played more of a background or at least indirect role, relying on subtle influence or the rare instances of the wise sovereign. Wise rulership is not even possible when the system of generic representations becomes the absolute authority, the very ideal of democratic ideology.

 

In our day it is the system, ostensibly built on the neutral ground of science that rules us. But when mathematicians and physicists realized what the mystics had long known, that the ground could not be solidified or formalized, they just solidified the pragmatic trade-off between incompatible abstractions. In the wake of what should have been a revolutionary series of discoveries at the peak of modernity, post-classical science has merely turned from any attempt at coherent understanding, convinced one is not possible if it cannot be finally formalized. 

 

It would seem that a more fleshed-out philosophy of this so-called postmodern predicament would be necessary, one that could make the fundamentally creative and open nature of coherence understandable. While such a philosophy exists, it often languishes in various corners of the culture. 

 

What must be made explicit is that rather than trading off between opposing abstractions, achieving one side at the expense of another—like more agency at the expense of less communion, or more representational coherence at the expense of confinement to a solipsistic abstraction from outside perturbations—quantum coherence refers to a non–locally organized relation. 

 

While much pop-culture debate has happened concerning whether this mystery, especially as it appears in quantum physics, has something to do with “consciousness”, it is much better to understand it without such loaded terms full of discrete connotations. This is especially true when the whole point is that it is the quantized or discrete systems that fail to capture the nature of what is ultimately a continuous reality, a continuity that is not like the continuum of space, not one of causally-linked discrete things, least of all one of hidden separate variables. This is the case even for the variable of consciousness, if by this one conceives some “thing” absolutely distinct from everything else.

 

The dynamic coherence of life, creative evolution, and individuation, the coherence of any singularity, is not achieved at the expense of confinement to a narrow completeness, not through closing off all outside influence, but by opening to it and organizing all influences into fractal layers of embedded contexts.  

 

In other words, the more internally coherent something is—that is, the more it resists being reduced to a manipulatable object—the more influences it must be composed of. Some things may be very complicated—harboring chaos and unpredictability on one level—but ultimately they are easily summed to a simple aggregate, and therefore may be easily controlled or predicted. 

 

Something very “quantum coherent” has a complex relational universe, with arrows of influence going both ways between it and many other things. But it seems to be a kind of individual emerging and keeping certain influences at bay only because of the complexity of pressure from other influences, because of its value to so many other things.

 

The becoming-singular entity of quantum coherence cannot be reduced to mechanical causation because its causes are no longer understandable as causes in the linear sense; they are conditions—factors in its relative expression, just as it is of them. In fact all things are such singularities when no longer viewed from within the closed system of material meaning. 

 

In their action as a sign, all things are both an expression and producer of connections that wrap through the medium of shared relationships. It is therefore difficult to represent the true complexity of things in a single space or world, since we tend to have a hard time picturing anything outside the linear causal framework we have evolved to see represented in physical space.  

 

Seen this way, it is precisely the more inwardly coherent “subject” that is more connected across multiple spaces, realities, realizations, etc. It must be composed of all these other potentials if it is to attain a precise pattern of its own, separate from the system within which it expresses itself.  The more it does so, the more it will be immune to changes in the environment and context— what we could call topologically invariant. In a topological space, it is connections that define the space or entity, while its outward forms can vary greatly and still be the same thing.  

 

In quantum coherence, order emerges not from law like control or causality, but as in a fractal, the order emerges from an inner self‐similar pattern coherently translating itself into separate orders. The lock–step discipline of a marching band, for instance, is not robust to changes in its conditions. It plays the same tune as long as the conditions are right, but like most of what we call “laws”, its order falls apart if any of its conditions change. A jazz band is more quantum coherent, for its parts are improvising an order and can change the tune and rhythm fluidly, even benefitting from exposure to unexpected change and deviation. 

 

Unlike uniform order of locally controlled spaces and times, quantum coherence presents as a spontaneous order emerging across space and time in what appears like “faster than light” communication to the mind trained to see physical space as singular or primary. 

 

In the standard interpretation of quantum physics, they admit a kind of transcendence of any single representational space, but this transcendence cannot help but be beyond all continuity of understanding, if continuity is constrained to simple physical mechanisms. Even some alternative interpretations still ascribe causal power to hidden agents rather than relinquish the belief in a fundamental hierarchy built on primary material motion, and the privileged fundamentality of a physics that studies it.

 

Another well known school of thought entertains more concretely a space of many possible worlds, but also without much in the way of coherent understanding of sense of the connections between worlds.

 

The structure of this virtual “space”, this dimension of connections and morphing possibilities, cannot be understood properly without at least an intuitive idea of the way spaces emerge or are “projected” from this deeper topologically connected plane that cuts through all realities. The central point to understand is that there is no single objective space with a constant time but overlapping layers of interacting systems of relationships that cannot be represented all at once. 

 

The beings of the universe evolve ways to represent and bring into the foreground progressing aspects of an infinite continuum against a background of simultaneity. We build on this context richer and richer spaces of representation as we learn more and more of the structure of the possibilities we have created through passing time and evolution.  

 

It is true, however, that there are fundamental trade-offs when it comes to representation. Most essentially, by increasing the coherence of representation in localized space and linear time, you lose the coherence of representation in the more abstract space of cross-temporal relationals—a kind of linearly progressing overview-space where time and possibility are in the foreground rather than space. 

 

This overview-space can be likened to the structured group of possible variations of a system discussed in mathematics, or the possibility-spaces discussed in dynamical systems theory—where diverse trajectories of events can be turned into a kind of virtual image or visual map by computers. 

 

Though there is always a much richer virtual space of variations and extrapolations than the simple possibilities capable of formal models. Really any finite overview is always just a contraction from the overlapping continuity and relational infinity of things into a relation with some discrete selection.

  

While this may sound very abstract and impersonal, one could relate it to what we all experience to some extent in dreams and, presumably, death. The more we learn in the linear time tied to our conventional space, the more depth of simultaneity we can achieve as the background context of meaning. As life becomes more complex, better able to integrate contexts into simultaneous systems—approaching the infinite and impossible ideal of quantum coherence—the more coordinated the two spaces get.  

 

But, of course, there is always continued learning and expanding horizons in the nested systems of our “now”, requiring the adventure of novelty. Thus new gradients in the variable intensity of relations between things are always possible that can open up new contextualization and make the ideal of harmony a never-ending journey. But every new horizon can bring new understanding. 

 

What was rather difficult to describe in the language available to traditional spiritual and metaphysical accounts of other worlds, can be understood in new ways through developments in scientific modeling. For instance, while the uncertainty relation of quantum physics has been quite the boon to metaphysical speculation, it is probably better understood outside all the modern metaphysical assumptions about consciousness, observers, and knowledge. 

 

If one thinks more structurally about the essential trade-offs discussed, rather than in terms of uncertainty, then the situation is more clearly represented in the spatialization of complex sound waves.

 

In sound editing you can display the “actual” complex waveform represented as evolving in linear time, or instead the component pure frequencies composing a certain length of time can be abstracted and represented separately as continuous ideal variations, side by side, or rather, as we tend to picture scales of frequencies, one on top of another in ever increasing pitch.  

 

Any actual frequency measured in time has a finite duration, though, so it cannot just be one frequency. A single constant frequency assumes unending time. But it takes time to measure time, so any finite time is a sample with its own time signature embedded in and relative to other cycles of time. Our idea of time or frequency is always a comparison or interference coordinated by multiple variations or cycles.  

 

In fact, the closer you get to an exact amount of time, the more frequencies are required to define it, approaching infinite frequencies or complete nonlocality in the virtual space of possible frequencies as we approach complete locality in the linear time we tie to our representational space of motion and matter.

 

The amount of order stored locally or distributed into a nonlocal, “virtual” space—because of this trade-off—can vary, and follows an ordered series of layers, from the most abstract and continuous to the most concrete and discrete, that is, to the kinds of measurable metric spaces of our immediate experience.  

 

But this is entirely a function of representation. A completely local and fully “present” discrete identity cannot exist, except as the one that is all that is. A completely nonlocal and continuous abstraction cannot exist except in the absolute unity of everything. By shedding all context, one may experience this unity, but the point is to build context, to enrich the connections of discrete things with ever more dimensions and variations, perceiving and forming unity within the diversity.

 

To build any stable context though, three dimensions are key to triangulate a space of representation, and so three spatial dimensions is the background awareness we have evolved as our base. But each of those dimensions is itself a relation, a ratio, a change in the intensity of certain relations, hidden dimensions of time linked to and buried beneath our spatial dimensions and representations.  

 

With an awareness of only one dimension of time and virtuality, we are in the dream space of absorption with our objects, even if that object is the one and all. With two, we see only necessity, only the linear process of causal relations—the consequences of assumptions, but not the context or meaning. The subject and object, or cause and effect, but no true “why”.   

 

Just as an understanding of perspective as that which emerged in painting brought an understanding of spatial depth, so an awareness of the mediating sign, of the third dimension of time and meaning brings a real perspective to temporal relations, brings an entry to temporal depth. 

 

More dimensions are possible but we build off the three spatial dimensions we assumed to find our place in the universe—presumably so that we could eventually become free to change our perspective and direction. Each spatial dimension, like every identity, is itself just a sign of an entrenched perspectival relation. By understanding the differences and changes that underlie each identity, we can extend the space of our representations deeper into the mysteries of time.

 

In one form or another, this evolution in dimensional complexity has been a fixture of esoteric philosophy. But only recently has the concept been synthesized independently out of the scientific study of complexity. The hope is that what was esoteric and metaphorical—and usually taken as a foundation for moral laws and hierarchies—can now be made a conscious and spontaneous order of true understanding.  

 

The transition to the spontaneous universal has been long in coming through the history of the West, but it is implied even in the Bhagavad Gita. In the Gita, Krishna reveals the infinity of worlds to help free Arjuna from attachment to the fruits of his actions in this world. Only in doing so may he or we truly act in coherence with the Divine, that is, act in a way that creates the best for all possible worlds.  

 

The Reality of the Virtual or the Virtual Real

 

One can certainly bemoan the disintegration of the human by the complexity and incoherence of our times, but we can also see in the mythological imaginary on display in our media narratives, a possibility that we did not have before the machine led us to this technological convergence upon the infinite possibilities of the virtual.  

 

While the possibilities for certain kinds of coherence were always available to us, it is only now in the virtual age that we are making visible and objective what was previously merely subjective and spiritual. At the same time, the loss of visible local coherence is forcing us to look deeper for the rationale of all our lives and aims. So while our technology is delocalizing or “virtualizing” what had before been the dependable “material” ground upon which we built our lives, it is also “actualizing” what used to be only virtual, hidden in the darkness of our deepest dreams, or beyond death.  

 

But is it appropriate to equate these technological developments with something so sacred and spiritual? Does using the word “virtual” in such a way obfuscate more than it reveals? To answer that, it might help to take a closer look at the evolution of the word, for perhaps it can give us a clue to the evolution of consciousness, to the connections between the historical experiences of whatever the word describes.

 

The roots of the word go back probably to what the esoteric tradition considered the beginning of the current round of human civilization, led by ancient Indo–European sages long before recorded history. The consciousness of these sages is said to be reflected in the language of the first Indian text to be written down, the Rg Veda.  

 

In it we can see the archaic roots of not only the word virtual but its related concepts. In Sanskrit, the root vir means something like power and heroism, which became virtus in Latin, connected to our words like virility and virtue. Power and virtue are still listed as archaic definitions of virtuality, but “virtual” also has had a longer lasting meaning as something that transcends material embodiment, something like a primordial essence.8  

 

In the Rg Veda, Vritra(Vrtra) is the dragon, the foe of the god Indra. Vrtra as a word has related roots, but rather than simple heroic power (vir), Vrtra was not considered virtuous but an antagonistic power (rit) of undifferentiated, unmanifest possibilities (and even the continuum of numbers prior to differentiation into integers) that if not tamed by the sacrifice of the sages, swallows man up, “covering up” (vri) his power in the infinite sea of possibilities.  

 

The hero god must prevent Vrtra from swallowing up man’s activity into unmanifest infinite essence. The hero can never defeat Vrtra because Vrtra embodies the watery abyss from which all springs, but if Vrtra gets the upper hand, the infinite becomes unbound and confusion and fragmentation reign. The ancient Vedic priests sang their hymns to guide the primordial virtual power—the infinite continuum—into the coherent, actualized, and discrete structures of the meanings and myths that organized society.9

 

Virtuality as possibility attained a philosophical significance when Thomas Aquinas substituted it for Aristotle’s concept of potentiality, but for him as for Aristotle, potentiality was very much an essence and power in the world. But as the Medieval period came to an end, the meaning of these words and concepts shifted along with so many others. 

 

With the Nominalist view that concepts were only names for actual things in the world becoming an influential basis of modern philosophy, the virtual was bound to be downgraded. In the Enlightenment era, for instance, the soul was called by Kant “virtual”, but he now meant something that was not an essence that related possibilities together, but merely something that more or (probably) less existed in another realm and needed to be actualised in this realm of “phenomenon”.

 

The virtual had become a mere word for a mere abstract potential—which is almost the opposite of the power and potency of its earlier use. Consequently the meaning narrowed and like what occurred with the idea of the physical ether in physics, the new meanings made it necessary to drop, even as something of it lingered on under new names and relations. And it was the importance of relations itself that renewed the term, as it became increasingly obvious that some kind of relativity was at work both in our language and even in our most basic concepts of space and time.

 

With C.S. Peirce’s founding of semiotics—the study of the process of signs and symbols—the virtual begins to achieve the conceptual unity it lost when the poetic spirituality of the ancients was riven by the rise of the rational intellect. Peirce noted that we sometimes still use the term in ways that show its true meaning.10 For instance if I compliment you in a moment of exceptional virtue, as being a virtual God, I mean not that you are literally a God or potentially a God, but that you are acting as a God would act, that you have the power and potential of a God in the act of expressing your virtue and power. Basically you are acting like a God.

 

In this sense virtual is not another realm or potential as opposed to actual, but the activity of a potential across worlds and between beings through signs. Your virtuous act triggers in me a spiritual meaning that makes your actions more than their brute factual content. They become the realization of a divine virtue—a virtual virtue so to speak—that doesn’t just actualize some discrete possibility, but creates meaning through an opening to that which is not present in the surface features of the world, not without something functioning as a sign, as a virtual representation of something more than it seems.

 

The crucial distinction of the concept of the virtual from that of the possible became an important theme with philosopher Henri Bergson when he made the virtual one of his central concepts, following the novelist Marcel Proust’s definition as “real but not actual, ideal but not abstract”. According to Gilles Deleuze, who brought these trends to full flowering in his metaphysics of the virtual, Proust’s novels are about the narrator learning to use signs to escape the linear deterministic flow of circumstances that is his life, and become an artist.11  

 

One could call this escape, following one of Deleuze’s concepts, a “line of flight” because the artist escapes the predetermined actuality into a space of new possibilities. He also calls this opening of the actual into the virtual “counter‐actualization”, whereas the movement from virtual to the actual is actualization. 

 

They are,however, not separate movements. We are already actualizing through the process of counter‐actualization; by listening to the signs of possible relations we begin to bring new Gods and powers into being. One must remember, however, that to actualize is not to merely choose a possibility that already exists in some predetermined realm of preformed choices.  

 

Because of this, the virtual is the structure of reality itself, not just a cloud of possibilities and memories surrounding the “actual” objects of the world. It is meaning—which is not an imaginary web of connections we merely ascribe to a dead world, nor is it a realm of possible alternate realities and choices that we merely actualize, entertain, or remember. The virtual may not be actualized in the moment, and it is definitely always in motion and never fully grasped or containable, but it is quite real, quite structured, and always has quite real effects in the moment, even in the most seemingly simple state of material processes.12

 

With virtual technology however, we are dealing not just with an opening into new virtual spaces of possibility but also an obfuscation of the apparent ground upon which they are based. Another philosopher of the postmodern age, Jean Baudrillard was fascinated by the way virtual media leads to a loss of context. 

 

He noticed that as the signs and symbols of our culture lose all connection to their original referents, they become values completely dependent on the network of media meaning. This, of course, allows greater social control to those able to manipulate the media. In Baudrillard’s thinking, when the “hyperreal” of the virtual network begins to dominate, the “real” ceases to exist, or becomes a desert as it was in the first Matrix film he helped inspire.  

 

The original Matrix sequels conclude however, with the heroes achieving a balance between the machinic world of programs and the human through the power of the matrix, which as the film suggests, is a balance struck between the structure of spiritual necessity (the machines are pictured as a spiritual light to the hero’s awakened mind) and the contingencies and choices of life—a balance achieved through the virtuality of the mind.  

 

Like the first Matrix film, Baudrillard originally seemed to advocate smashing the machine, but just as Neo realized in the first sequel, he came to see such a plan was futile. Baudrillard, like many people, seemed to have become resigned at this juncture. Just as the disillusioned optimist tends to become a pessimist, the idealist, when confronted with the implications of a groundless virtual universe, banishes the ideal and the real to an impossible and unknowable, or in Baudrillard’s case, a tragically empty husk.  

 

Idealists in philosophy, especially under the pressure of scientific empiricism, often become skeptical that their ideas are anything more than conjectures and representations, perhaps without connection to the real world at all. Nobody wants to be sincere then found to be wrong.  

 

But a track often starts through that road to a world of mere surfaces without depth, a mere playing with words and numbers without a way of relating them to a concept of the Real—except through the proof of some kind of effective relation as instrumental tools. This is not necessary; it is a byproduct of changes in the language of modern consciousness that we take for granted.  

 

For instance, the nominalist perspective mentioned earlier was opposed vigorously by realists in medieval philosophy, many of whom believed that abstract universals were real, not mere nominal representations. Throughout the middle ages, a process was underway by which the early beginnings of individual and rational consciousness, as exemplified by ancient Greek philosophy, developed into modern consciousness, a process where a consciousness that experienced thoughts emerging as part of the world and its objects, became one that viewed thoughts as originating in a separate thinking subject.13  

 

In medieval realism we can see the beginnings of a more sophisticated understanding of the world as mediated by signs that would later emerge in the postmodern era, but which could not emerge fully until the role of the human subject was thoroughly explored in modern philosophy and consciousness.

 

As modern philosophy went the nominalist direction, so did our consciousness.14 Even now we still have a difficult time seeing our thoughts and signs as contextual mediators rather than mere pointers to a separate ground of reality, thanks to assumptions built up in the modern era. To us, even the phrase “literal meaning” invokes a conception of the “real” as a material reality, as being actually the case in a concrete universal space that presumably contains everything.  

 

Before that gradual shift in the modern era, the literal meaning was not contrasted with symbolic meaning. When Thomas Aquinas spoke of the “literal”, for instance, he meant to refer to the true transcendent meaning of a mundane symbol. This he contrasted with spiritual meaning—basically, the literal spiritual truth represented directly. The word shifted meaning as our metaphysics and consciousness changed, reflecting our changing attitude towards the real.15

 

Naturally if our conception of the real was reduced to the things in the world, and if those things were of an uncertain nature except insofar as we could subject them to an instrumental context, then we would naturally busy ourselves creating a world of machines. The virtual world of ideas and sign relations faded into utilitarian forces haunting a world of machine‐like objects.  

 

But as those machines have become more and more of a realistic reflection, of not only our ideas but our creative imagination, the connection between the mind and the world seems to have become less effectively defined through narrow conceptions of instrumentality. Or, perhaps, one could say that our concept of instrumentality has broadened, especially as computers and virtual media have now instigated people to wonder whether the world itself is a computer simulation.  

 

Though, in a way, the spell of a strict separation between mind and world was already long receding by the time of computers. With the theory of evolution came a new way of thinking in terms of interlocking systems, and with it, a mind that seemed very much a part of a nature it had evolved to model.  

 

Culture is already deep into the long process of reintegrating the virtual back into the detailed picture of deterministic forces fleshed out by modern science. This has been helped somewhat by various threads in Romantic and spiritual philosophy, culminating in the era of postmodern thought, in a renewed interest in sign relations after a kind of dark age of narrowly modern philosophy, unaware of much of its history.

 

Most enlightenment-era philosophers were especially unaware of the importance of the problem of relations. Much of modern philosophy ignored the idea of signs altogether, often completely unaware of the long history of this discussion, since it was basically resigned to being part of a “Dark Age” of religious superstition.16 Though modernity’s lapse in understanding the importance of context and signs was unfortunate, the eventual reemergence was probably inevitable as theoretical and social complexity forced us to not only admit the limitations of our models, but deal with consequences of those limitations.

 

The great ideas from the few European men that dominated the modern era, now in an era of increasing diversity and interrelation, were bound to seem more like ambiguous signs of a whole constellation of relations, than as some tools with clear objective value. 

 

While many thinkers in the postmodern era retained a kind of nominalist idealism, contemporary philosophy and consciousness don’t get very far without some kind of realism. Otherwise we end up like Baudrillard, without anything left to do but revel in the play of signs, unable to point them towards a deeper conception of the real. 

 

A complex realism and idealism is inevitable though, as we are forced to come to grips with the reality of our ideals, as the contents of our inner worlds increasingly pour into the structures that form the environment we inhabit. We must not, however, get lost in the content. We must learn to see the structure of reality as relation, as made up of relations.  

 

Even if one is intent on focusing on the discrete things and beings of the world over any larger metaphysical context, a new ground must be found in our own choice of values and relations.  As the ontological ground gets murkier and slippier—that is, as the matter‐in‐a‐container of spacetime cosmology of materialist science gets less relevant, as the virtual becomes the real, it will become all the more important to understand the virtuality of time and meaning as a formative power, not just a potentiality of material relation. 

 

Ideas must be recognized not as virtual ghost‐like potentials of—or mere names for—the blunt forces and brute actions of arbitrary agents, but, rather, as real aspects of a world whose dimensions are not primarily spatial, whose dualities of subjects and objects, of causes and effects, are not related primarily through a neutral mediating third, but a depth of virtual relations from which all discrete oppositions, all dualities and determinations, are mere projections against the screen of our stabilized perspectival relations.

 

For while there might not be some neutral ground, we will form better ideas to guide us in our age’s increasing depth of presence within the virtual side of the world if we are aware of it. The virtual is and always has been right there at the base of everything substantial, complicating the very purity of our experience, even of space. 

 

It is the side of each spatial dimension that has been hidden from us by a perception beholden to the habit of ignoring the depth of time, ignoring the fact that each dimension is a dimension of change, of motion, of a relation of space to time, and so not necessarily as static and blandly substantial as we have made it in our perceptual infancy. 

 

If we can match the increasing virtuality of our time by following its layered structure, that is, by nesting the rhythm of our material relations into coherent overlapping patterns, then we will need less and less the coherence lent to us by the illusion of a spacetime container. The transition from what was in our early days a nest of dreamlike spiritual immersion into a future of freedom to choose the depth and breadth of our embodiment, is reaching an important point as we become more or less conscious of this.

 

Like Neo in the Matrix films, we must realize that while “the matrix” has become, as Baudrillard knew, a fantastic tool of oppression, it is also now the field of contestation. And unlike our naive pre‐matrix days, where we might have believed our world was the center of it all, or later, doubt whether anything we know is actually true, we now are forced to make of ourselves a center of virtual creative power as well as actualization, affirming all worlds and words as virtual, but also real and capable of untold powers of actualizing truth, in addition to unknown potential for delusion and subjugation.

 

Essence is Existence: Existential Virtuality

 

Despite the frequent reversions to half‐hearted traditional ideals, the complicated realism of the times is having its effect on creative media, especially as a cultural war has become the center of political debate, and what might have been considered an irrelevant spectacle of diversion and entertainment, has become more obviously an important sign of the future of civilization.

 

Any realism about ideas cannot help but also lead to a genuine searching for new ideals, and indeed this has been creeping into even the traditional superheroes of our films and TV. Some have become darker and often jaded from their previous idealism, but we also find them pondering deeper questions, and their foes are often relatable in a way you didn’t see in the good vs. evil melodrama of early popular film narratives. 

 

Film superheroes have kept closer to the genre of mythic melodrama since movies have been functioning as one of our primary spectacles to rationalize our civilizational impulses. But rather than just struggling to keep at bay the evil forces of the dragon chaos knocking on our doorstep from the natural and colonized world, our heroes now are forced to deal with a world where no one rational or moral code seems to work.  

 

The themes of classical tragedy have become harder to repress, where moral ambiguity and even confusion in the boundaries between the living and nonliving are common. The postmodern hero is no longer the great modern idealist assimilating the world into his representations. Now, as those previous assimilations of the chaotic “other” have emerged from within him, Superman takes on the darkness of Batman, and even Captain America becomes closer to the mold of the struggling and often brooding pessimistic post‐idealist loner, like those fathers of postmodern thought, Nietzsche and Heidegger—distrustful of the machine, but now unavoidably enmeshed within it.  

 

The enemy is no longer without but within, not just himself, but within every rational value or position, haunting them everywhere as the distorted shadow of their limitations and repressions.  There are no longer strict spatial boundaries between the oppositional tensions. They contaminate each other and become each other. 

 

Iron Man, the former libertarian renegade, realizes the fallout from his unbridled freedom and advocates for government oversight against Captain America, who, having realized America has become pretty fascist, consequently fights Iron Man with a realist suspicion of the liberal order and utilitarian morality. The film superheroes still tend to find ways to bring order to the chaos, but the tragic mythos lurks still within—increasingly pressing us to reconcile ourselves with living in a complex “suprarational” world.  

 

One TV show called Legion, finds a superhero unable to bring any order, struggling with a whole world of personalities inside his schizophrenic mind. He can alter the world as he pleases and visit parallel worlds, coming to believe that the difference between real and unreal is arbitrary and beneath him. Other characters question whether he knows right from wrong. The audience, however, is led to believe that distinction is not so clear in a world where all is mind and possibilities are endless.  

 

The show’s hero becomes disillusioned with his friends, as they seem to be merely pawns for other powerful minds. One can see in him the contemporary persona’s confusion in confronting a world with no clear moral order. We are made to wonder what to make of a world where power reigns, and to consider whether we are adrift in possibility space with nothing but the whims of the powerful deciding what kind of world we are subjected to.  

 

Another show, Rick and Morty, takes up this existential theme more forcefully, where the hero/antihero Rick can travel to infinite alternate dimensions but finds himself depressed and empty, struggling, along with his grandchildren, to come to grips with a world without transcendent meaning. Since it seems any possible version of you and your choices exists in some dimension, what possible difference does it make whether you do one thing or another except to the “you” that might experience the particulars of that choice?  

 

This misconception of virtuality became a serious scientific concept in the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics. It is an understandable reaction from a mind still clinging to a world as object and tool for a personal subject. But with the virtual seen as just “the possible” in a preformed space, indeed actualization would be entirely subjective and redundant. 

 

Instead, the virtual is, as dramatized subtly beneath the nihilism in Rick and Morty, a reflection of who we are. It cannot be otherwise. Not in a story and not in life. Maybe if one merely conjectures other worlds as merely science fiction or formal constructs for a quantum realm or probable “universe” completely separate from our own. But we should know better. 

 

Without a connection between the actual and virtual all narrative tension dissolves, and meaning is impossible. It is certainly possible to believe that life is meaningless, but things make no sense in that case and we cannot proceed with our lives. Our only choice is to proceed with the business of making sense, perhaps this time, not living to find meaning, but finding meaning so that we can live. There is no plot otherwise. 

 

In the show, Rick seems to believe that nothing matters. But while a vision of infinity can be overwhelming at first, both to the characters in the show and to anyone who ponders these matters (like Arjuna in the Gita), a greater truth is revealed which might have remained obscure had we not ventured with Rick into the seeming infinity of the virtual. 

 

That truth is that it does matter what we do, not just to the world we inhabit, but to all worlds. While there may not be an absolute morality or omnipotent God judging our deeds, what we do makes a creative difference; that is, what we do determines not just what happens to us and others, but also what is possible.  

 

It is just that the real difference is seldom what we think when we only see the brute facts of our simple world, or are judging our deeds by an external standard rather than by the standard of what we would like to see embodied in the world. In the show, Rick has to deal with a whole society of counterpart Ricks who all mirror and exaggerate parts of his character. He is forced to see that his character traits have repercussions in untold numbers of worlds. While he still claims it is all infinite and meaningless, we see that he does actually care, as do we, since it is impossible to live without some sense of meaning.

 

Because while the worlds may be uncountable, they are not without structure, and that structure responds not just to our actions, but more importantly to who we are. However, when we can no longer see this world as part of a meaningful system, and instead judge everything in relation to such an uncertain and rapidly virtualizing materialism, problems are bound to ensue.

      

This existential trap is dramatized in an interesting way by Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, published in 1984, and made into a film in 1988. In the story, the protagonist Tomas, struggles with important choices that he knows will define his life and his character. Living for pleasure and experience seems “light” and fun, but after some time he finds it unbearable, and chooses a life of “weight” that seems more meaningful.  

 

But the meaning is unclear and uncertain to him, for it too seems based on chance meetings and impersonal conditions. He resents that life itself is “light” because he cannot see the meaning and consequences of different decisions and act with knowledge, and therefore even his weighty intentions seem in the end quite random and arbitrary.

 

This kind of personal existentialism, however, where the individual subject, adrift from the bounds of traditional morality and transcendent truth, must now make choices in the pseudo‐freedom of ignorant self determination, has become overshadowed by the more cosmic nihilism of H.P. Lovecraft and Rick and Morty. Every day in the 21st century, the world gets more and more bizarre and absurd.  

 

In the 20th century, where uncertainty and emptiness haunted our cosmology, embracing the absurd meant affirming the self in the void. In the 21st century, where the government admits that UFOs are real, scientists take seriously the idea that we are living in a simulation, and everyone is worrying about AI, the postmodern subject is bound to feel more overwhelmed than simply empty. We are increasingly empowered by technology to face the ultimate conditions of our freedom and the necessity, no matter what the choice, no matter what the dimensions of possibility, to take on the responsibility we all share for the world.  

 

For Rick, life is “light” because every choice is merely an actualization of one possibility in an infinite‐dimensional and ambivalent cosmos. But the heaviness comes from the sense that we are indeed all connected. The parallel reality trope is not just a clever use of some quantum physics. 

 

These themes are showing up everywhere because of the issues we are facing as our technology transforms us into increasingly connected nodes in a network, a system whose virtual character does not just spur our imagination into science fiction speculation, but on a more or less conscious level, it confronts us with the virtual foundations of all existence, and therefore the inescapable pressure we have on us to reimagine the world. 

 

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas is haunted by the thought that his life is random and meaningless, and longs for the heaviness of fate that Beethoven celebrated, exclaiming Es muss sein! (It must be!). Tomas realizes, it could have been otherwise. But the question is, how different would it have been? 

 

If he chooses the life of responsibility or of pleasure, would life really be that different? If our choices are but expressions of what we perceive is possible, expressions of our character and knowledge, then what is more important, what we choose, or how well we understand our choices? Our actions or our imagination?

 

Tomas resigns himself to fate, to heaviness and death, while his former lover flees the heaviness, yet is haunted by it in her life of supposed “lightness”. Whatever choices we make, the ones we did not make are still with us, structuring each line of time with the signs of the overall structure of virtual space, a structure laid down by our coherent improvisations, our inescapably novel relations, which alter the basic models of existence, more or less. But how much? How can we make a significant difference?

 

The characters in the story represent different responses to the challenges of meaning in the 20th century. Whether Tomas is the character that dies in the heaviness of dependent love, or the one that dies in the lightness of vapid freedom, the structure of his world is basically still the same depressing dialectic that he and his lovers together reflect and express. 

 

No dialectical synthesis of opposites can create the difference that truly makes a significant difference, just as no simple moral choice can truly make a real difference in the grand scheme of things, not unless the moral problem offers a real challenge, and the choice becomes more than just a choice, that is, becomes some kind of creative singularity.

 

One creative singularity that shows a profound trace of all of this is Twin Peaks, and especially its return after 25 years of gestation in the virtual space of David Lynch’s “red room”. The original show helped transform TV into a vehicle for visionary storytelling; The Return may well signify the beginning of another transformation of our lives wholly into virtual media. 

 

The connections between the metaphysical and technological aspects of virtuality are explicit in Twin Peaks, and The Return only further develops the occult significance of modern technology as the trojan horse through which spiritual beings and forces, both helpful and harmful, are emerging into our existence with new power.  

 

Like the original, The Return played with the melodramatic TV conventions of its time, consequently this time using less soap opera tropes—instead focusing on playing into, then subverting and exposing, the expectations we generate from watching a reboot, from sympathizing with gangsters and antiheroes, and most definitely from identification with the heroic struggle of good vs. evil. While David Lynch sometimes satisfies our expectations, he never lets us rest quite at ease with resolution. And the Return brings the occult significance of our expectations into stark relief.  

 

While we may seem to conquer evil and save the day, are things really that different? From the virtual perspective, does it matter if we stop one tragedy if the conditions that brought it about continue? If by stopping the tragedy or even by vanquishing an evil from our self we merely change the distribution of forces, have we really made a difference? We don’t need to take the alternate timelines and dimensions “literally”, for the point again is that the virtual is right here at the heart of the actual. 

 

The other is in me and I in him. We are all each other’s “Counterparts” (which is the name of another alternate dimension TV show of the same period). We are all playing out the alternate lines of fate that our other selves—that is, to different degrees along different value gradients, everyone else in the universe—have ignored.17

 

And is this not the lesson of technology? We invent it to solve a problem but the real dimensions of problems are, just like the dimensions of space, not a neutral framework to identify or solve, but unique relations and differences. Their objectivity is in their implications, implications we can alter for the better, but never really get rid of.  

 

By trying to save the day with a deus ex machina we only prolong the inevitable reckoning. The technological virtual is reproducing the problems we long ago learned to repress and redistribute with the power of our cultural sign systems and their technological extensions. 

 

As the problems reemerge however, we are given a new medium in which to find a way through, find new forms of the singular inescapable problems of life—repolarized along a new creative gradient, for good or ill. Computer technology makes this abundantly clear. Our science fiction is already showing us how it will go.  

 

Jonathan Nolan’s shows, Person of Interest and Westworld explored how even with the awesome power of AI, capable of creating and manipulating realities, we merely translate the same human problems into a new medium. Even if we use it to save lives or prolong life across vast stretches of time, to loosely paraphrase Westworld: the suffering needed to truly learn and grow beyond our programming becomes hidden. 

 

A world without consequences or problems doesn’t exist, but our desire for such a thing may lead us astray. Westworld at points suggests that only when there is a conflict in our rules and programs do we have the opportunity to become conscious, replacing the voices in our head with our own “true” creative voice. If we hide those conflicts behind another layer of abstraction, they may only emerge again after eons of time.18 We all sense deep down the challenge emerging as the virtual becomes increasingly unmasked.19 We continue to try and imagine our way through it with our ideas and myths, but we haven’t even begun to fathom the depths we will have to face and grow through. Death is no escape.

 

Notes:

 

1. Roberts, Jane (1995)
2. Proust (1922), pg. 27
3. Mahayana (1991)
4. Deleuze (2006)
5. Ho (2008)
6. Mineralization has connotations to esoteric literature, especially the “Anthroposophical” system of Rudolf Steiner
7. Vrobel (2011)
8. accessed 1/4/2018: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/virtuality.htm
9. see Meditations Through the Rg Veda: Four Dimensional Man by Antonio de Nicolas
10. accessed 1/4/2018: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/virtuality.htm
11. Deleuze (2004)
12. Deely (2001)
13. Steiner (2009)
14. Deely (2001)
15. Barfield (1998) 
16. Deely (2001)
17. Jane Roberts especially developed this idea in terms of “counterparts”. See Roberts (1996)
18. in Battlestar Galactica it is suggested that AI is an integral part of this repeating cycle
19. Theosophists in the esoteric tradition spoke of our time period as a crucial window and warned us of the possibilities over a century ago in descriptions that frighteningly echo the most nightmarish science fiction of today. They call the possible future where we descend into a kind of “matrix” situation bound to machine-like spiritual entities “the eighth sphere”. Steiner’s descriptions in particular are remarkably accurate depictions of nanotechnology and virtual reality ensnarement.

 

References:

Barfield, Owen. Saving the Appearances. Wesleyan, 1988.

Deely, John. Four Ages of Understanding. University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Columbia University, 2006.

Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. University of Minnesota Press. 2004

Desilet, Gregory. Screens of Blood: A Critical Approach to Film and Television. McFarland Press, 2014

Ebert, John David. Gods and Heroes of the Media Age:From Captain Nemo to The X-Files. Post Egoism, 2015.

Ho, Mae Wan. Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms. World Scientific, 2008.

Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra. Lankavatara Sutra. Translated by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Shambhala, 1991.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Chatto & Windus, 1922.

Roberts, Jane. The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Amber-Allen, 1995.

Roberts, Jane. The “Unknown” Reality.Volumes 1 and 2. Amber-Allen, 1996.

Steiner, Rudolf. Riddles of Philosophy. Steiner Books, 2009.

Vrobel, Suzie. Fractal Time: Why A Watched Kettle Never Boils. World Scientific. 2011.

 

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