Tag: Eckhart Tolle

Virtual Reality Posted on

Embracing Virtuality

In 2009, a Japanese man married a woman named Nene Anegasaki on the island of Guam.  The curious thing was that Nene was a virtual character in the Nintendo videogame LovePlus. In 2013, Spike Jonze directed the highly acclaimed (and Academy Award nominated) film “Her”, in which the protagonist falls in love with an OS (operating system) AI (artificial intelligence). Outrageous you say? Consider that for centuries people have been falling in love sight unseen via snail mail.  Today, with online dating, this is even more prevalent.  Philosophy professor Aaron Ben-Ze’ev notes that online technology “enables having a connection that is faster and more direct.” So it got me thinking that these types of relationships aren’t that different from the virtual ones that are […] Read More

Living the Illusion Posted on

2014: Facticity: Once You Have Named Something You Will Never Again Truly See It

Facts are our labels to explain nature. The occurrence in the image above has been called a “galaxy.” Facticity is a term coined by Phenomenologists (philosophers who influenced Existentialists like Sartre and Camus) to more directly address what is. The image above is not a galaxy; it is a snapshot of an immense grouping of what we call “stars” that we have conceptually identified as a “galaxy.”  No “galaxy” exists in Nature outside of our brains. Phenomenology deals with only what we know for sure. We know we exist. We know that there are perceptions, feelings, and thoughts.  We do not know, but rather surmise, that there is a separate self because we observe (have perceptions of) the phenomena of other similar selves who presumably also […] Read More