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Ron Purser, a professor at San Francisco State University, has written several interesting essays on the potential of emergent virtual technology to impact the development of integral/aperspectival consciousness. Below, I will copy an excerpt from his essay, Cyberspace and Its Limits: Hypermodern Detours in the Evolution of Consciousness, which he wrote for an annual Gebser conference.
Before reading the excerpt below, which explores two modes of virtualization, VR1 and VR2 (which, in the Gebserian sense, have the potential to undergird different modes of conscious engagement with the world), I recommend reading this brief discussion of the nature and potential of a VR2 technology called Osmose.
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Virtualization and Integral Consciousness
Setting aside the hype, pathologies, and crass commercialization associated with cyberspace, we face an unprecedented historical situation. Never before have human inhabitants experienced the capability to instantaneously communicate via a global information network. We are fast approaching a technical capability that could drive home the reality that we actually do live in one world. Given the exponential rate of technological innovation in telecommunications and computing, we can expect to see dramatic advancements and rapid diffusion of technology. In a short time, we can expect more of the earth’s population will gain the ability to connect to global cyberspace. Couple this with advances in language translation programs, and improvements in video conferencing, we will soon be able to easily communicate without barriers to virtually anyone on the globe that has access to the Internet. While I am not one to subscribe to Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a “noosphere,” the prospect of attaining “oneness” on a technical level of connectivity forces us to ask what it means to be a participant in world where boundaries between nations and differences between cultures are being virtualized. Indeed, we will soon be faced with the question of what it means to embody a planetary consciousness.
Our cultural response to such a fundamental historical question, I believe, is not predetermined or inevitable. One possible response to virtualization is simply to continue down the current path of mindless consumption, in which case cyberspace becomes nothing more than a sophisticated globalized shopping mall. In this McWorld-like scenario, planetary consciousness is homogenized by the flattening effects of consumption. We will recognize that we live in the same world– not because of some deep appreciation for the universality of human consciousness– but because people will identify with global brand images. Anyone, no matter where they are on the planet, will recognize a pair of Levis or Nikes. Unfortunately, this scenario already has a great deal of cultural momentum behind it.
Virtualization, in principle, has the potentiality of either dimming or intensifying human consciousness. Paul Levy (1998) defines virtualization as a dynamic that leads to a “…change in identity, a displacement of the center of ontological gravity of the object being considered” (p.26). But Levy’s definition, while helpful, is deceptively neutral in its tone. The potential of virtualization to alter identity and its capacity to fluidize spatial and temporal reference points, warrants further analysis into how virtualization is manifesting itself in culture, and it potential import in the evolution of consciousness. I am particularly interested in examining how the dynamic of virtualization will unfold with the advent of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, which has the potential of becoming a new mode of aesthetic expression. While Virtual Reality technology is in a very embryonic stage of development, its potential can be discerned in how it is already being used commercially in rudimentary applications, but also, and perhaps more significantly, in how VR has been equated to being an emblematic symbol of postmodern culture, likened to a new form of postmodern art.
In this last section, I differentiate between two modes of virtualization, which are mirrored in the design and conception of different trajectories of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, what I refer to as VR1 and VR2. The first mode, VR1, as we shall see, is a further amplification of the hyperreal trajectory of cyberspace which I have discussed at length in this paper. In this mode, VR1 accelerates the dynamic of virtualization, but in a direction which spirals downward, into further chaos and fragmentation. This trajectory will leads us further astray into a hyperreal world-into the depthless and nihilistic void of pure simulacra. In fact, I argue that with VR1, we enter a closed world with a proliferation of commodified images, while human consciousness becomes even more fixated and one-sided. The very meaning of human intelligence descends to a functionary level, ruled by the hyperrational logic of algorithmic reasoning. What emerges is an image of the human subject that is colonized by cyborg and artificial intelligence “anti-consciounsess” discourse, and metaphors of the brain as a cybernetic information processing device. Indeed, science fiction images of cyborg brain implants and the like may even come to pass. In sum, the human being becomes an extension of the Digital Nervous System-a dutiful consumer of images.
Rather than helping us to evolve into integral consciousness, VR1 results in the virtualization of consciousness. In effect, a hyerrational structure dominates, while our consciousness contracts into a solipsistic, disembodied subject, and compliant instruction follower. In other words, consciousness is progressively automatized. In many respects, what emerges is a mentality that operates and acts very much like the sort of “bi-cameral mind” that Julian Jaynes (1990) describes. Only in the new millennium, people don’t hear the voices of the Gods telling them what to do, but the instructions are now ubiquitously present by the computers that surrounds their lifeworld. In this hyperreal world, where human beings find solace in visual hallucinations-the world of simulacra–difficult decisions of the “real world” are “delegated” and entrusted to the agency of computers.
The other alternative, VR2, is a trajectory which has the potential for bringing about a new collective aesthetic and liberating forms of cultural expression, a new conscious figuration, or trans-figuration, a fundamental change in meaning of being a participant in the world. The narrow view of rationality that has ordered how we represent the world, as a privileged viewpoint, is opened up, or transparentized. If VR2 develops momentum, it could potentially trigger a new renaissance movement, a mutation, that stimulates a personal and collective inquiry into the nature of appearance. Ratio becomes re-balanced, allowing for the emergence of integral consciousness to come to the fore. If this movement takes hold, the integral, consciousness-raising potential of the VR2 path will result in the rebirth of the collective imagination, where society at large, in different fields and domains, radically shifts to considering how human beings are implicated in the creation of “the world.” This shift in consciousness will legitimize and support a new form of discourse, fostering a collective inquiry into the processes by which we construct and call the world (and self) into being.
Similar to Gebser’s notion of “transparency” and “diaphany,” VR2 inspires a “transparentizing” aesthetic in culture that provides evocative spaces and unleashes a creative temporal dynamic that leads to a concretion of the spiritual. VR2 intensifies human intelligence and our capacity for aperspectival vision by challenging the nature of reality as substance. VR2 technologies and art forms stimulate the collective imagination, open up our capacity for verition, rendering appearance diaphanous. I use the word imagination in the Barfieldian/Coleridgian sense, which “in its deepest sense signifies that very faculty of apprehending the outward form as the image or symbol of an inner meaning” (Barfield, 1977; p.19). Ultimately, the evolutionary path of VR2 presentiates conscious virtualization, whereby we enter, through the space-time freedom of “verition” and “waring,” the virtual reality that is already present in the truth of Being.
The characteristic differences between these two modes of virtualization, and their technological correlates (VR1 vs. VR2), are reflective of the cultural tensions that signify the transition between perspectival and aperspectival consciousness. Similar to the transitional crisis periods during paradigmatic shifts in science that Thomas Kuhn has described, the movement toward and emergence of a new era is usually uneven and full of contradictory developments. Clearly, the transition to a new era is far from smooth. VR1 appears as a technological extension or continuation of perspectivism, while VR2 offers the possibility of a discontinuous break from the mental-rational structure.
VR1: Virtualization of Consciousness
This pathway toward virtualization scatters human awareness across the surfaces of images. Rather than serving to intensify awareness inwardly into the greater depth available in space and the freedom that time offers, VR1 plunges culture into the manifold distractions and seductions of simulacra. VR1 breeds confusion, an outcome of a fusion of mere fancy with the real. Imagination is subverted to constructing images that exploit the self’s insecurity and desire for recognition, along with its insatiable appetite for more stimulation. The whole spatially fixed sense of a separate, on-looker consciousness, the whole proprioceptive structure of embodied experience, is left untouched by the VR1 aesthetic. In fact, VR1 depends on a collective representation of the self as a fixed and permanent entity that “has experiences.” The whole movement and momentum is inexorably driven toward the consumption of more experience. This mode of consciousness, which is exploited by VR1 type technologies, is intentionally directed toward generating not just images, but experiences as mass commodities. VR1 technologies are simply a means of procuring the unlimited desires of an isolated consumer self.
The commercial promise of VR1 is to offer the consumer a self-contained realm of unencumbered and sanitary enjoyment. The whole meaning of “safe sex” will be taken to whole different order as VR1 technologies become more advanced with body suits, allowing its users to enjoy simulated sexual sensations and encounters. This is actually a hideous path of how our imaginative capacities could collectively devolve to the level of mere fancy. VR1 positions us to be passive consumers of technologically constructed and packaged experiences. Over time, as VR1 proliferates, it eventually could lead to a progressive displacement of imagination in culture. The seductive attraction of VR1 as a sophisticated form of sensory escape, essentially privatizes human experience, and virtualizes what remains of our public spaces. With VR1, the user does not simply view the simulation from a distance, but enters into the image, and participates in what appears as a self-contained world.
The technological marvel of VR1 is that it can literally substitute information for reality. What appears in VR1 has brilliance, vividness, and a “separate reality” that seems more real than reality itself. However the “separate reality” experienced in VR1 does not have any likeness in quality to the sort Carlos Casteneda describes, but is a heightened manifestation of our modern idolatry (Barfield, 1988). The VR1 experience is, at heart, a postmodern form of “radical idolatry.” By radical idolatry, I refer to Owen Barfield’s notion that images, which are in effect our own creation, in the course of time, can soon be perceived as completely separate objects and things. As Barfield (1988) states, idolatry “…results when man begins to take his models—his representations—literally” (p.51).
VR2: A Tool for Conscious Virtualization
We can think of VR2 as an enabling technology, which can provide civilization a new aesthetic expression that fundamentally alters our identity and calls into question the ontological status of reality. However, I want to stress that an enabling technology, in this case, VR2, does not automatically guarantee or cause integral consciousness to arise. The convention of linear perspective art was not the “cause” of the mental structure of consciousness, but it certainly was a critical precursor to a new way of representing the world, which provided the cultural context for the emergence of the scientific worldview. Similarly, VR2 technology has the potential of stimulating a collective dialogue around in a new art form that in turn could lead to a fundamental change in the epistemic order of society. The introduction of VR2 into society could be a critical trigger, on par in magnitude to that of the linear perspectival art. Indeed, I believe VR2 could potentially become an emblematic cultural symbol of aperspectival consciousness.
One of the unique features of VR2 technology is that it would provide the capability for ordinary people to program their own software, allowing an individual, or even groups of people, to project their own imagination into a collective space. Essentially, VR2 technology would empower the average individual to be an artist in virtual reality. According to Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of Virtual Reality technology:
The result will be a mass theatre of spontaneous shared imagination and dreaming. My fond hope is that it will take the form of networked VR with inspirational authoring tools that are capable of quick, improvisatory creation. But whatever the specific form, what we are building will encourage people to share interior vision and treat it as a tangible, worthy thing, even into adulthood.
As Lanier suggests, VR2 would be an empowering, interactive art form, allowing the average user to invent the contents of a virtual world. Not only this, VR2 would, according to Lanier, come with a shared virtual world interface, allowing users to share and co-mingle with their imaginative creations in a collective virtual space. Whereas VR1 is a con-fusion of fancy with the real, VR2 is a jazz-fusion of participation with imagination. It alllows the user to consciously participate, and experience in real-time, what it means to invent and co-construct a reality with others. The architecture and software design assumptions of VR2 are epistemologically aligned with radical constructivism. The observer in VR2 can experience directly the simulated world as a product of their own interiority, an admixture of collective representations and a dynamic mosaic of their own mental constructs.
Certainly the most radical feature of VR2 is the capacity for users to directly share the contents of their imaginative experiences directly with others. Lanier predicts that this new media could give rise to a “post-symbolic order,” transcending the limits associated with the narrative structure of language. In a VR2 world, images can be projected and experienced directly, without the mediation of words or language. In many respects, a VR2 environment is analogous to our dream world, where we encounter and experience events that are projected by our own imagination. As Lanier elaborates:
It’s really different than language. It’s a new way to communicate, where people would directly create a shared world by programming it, by modeling it in real time, as opposed to merely using words, the intermediaries that we have to describe things. So it’s like cutting out the middleman of words, and finding a new form of communication where you directly create shared reality—real-time, waking-state, improvised dreaming.
If VR2 technology evolves to the point that Lanier envisions, I believe it could provide the necessary aesthetic mutation for the evolution of consciousness. Just as linear perspectival art was a catalyst for the mutation into the mental structure, VR2 could do the same for the integral structure. Linear perspectival art was also a symbolic order, which intensified consciousness to the point that it could break from the mythical structure. Consciousness was able to mutate to a rational structure, whereby it could see itself as a separate and independent observer of the phenomena—a distant on-looker. VR2 technology creates a new aesthetic that is akin to a state of lucid dreaming. It stimulates an ecstatic experience, an intensification of consciousness, which opens ratio into the whole of appearance. What appears in a VR2 world appears as a magical display, co-arising with participation-as-observer. In VR2, the cone of perspectivism is rendered transparent.
“World as Spectacle” versus “World as Shared Lucid Dream”
Whereas VR1 technology posits the world as a distant spectacle, VR2 technology presents the world as a shared dream. Virtual Reality technology (whether VR1 or VR2), relies on sophisticated sensors—typically head-goggles and hand-gloves—which are donned by the user to enter a virtual world. These sensors track the changes and movements in the user’s sense organs, and then digitally represent these changes as visual and kinesthetic outputs that then again feedback to the user’s senses. The user becomes part of the cybernetic circuit. From a hardware standpoint, VR1 and VR2 are not far apart. Rather, it is the software, and the design assumptions that determine the user interface, where these two technological variants part company.
Within a VR1 world, the depths of user’s imagination, the source of figuration, is not incorporated into the experience. Instead, the user of VR1 enters into a pre-programmed world, perhaps rich in the variety and range of interactive experiences that can be accessed, but it is by design, limited to experiencing artificial worlds that will be packaged for mass consumption. In addition, since a VR1 user cannot actively participate in creating a shared virtual world with others, this limitation is compensated by injecting content that is designed to shock the senses. VR1 presents imagery in such a way that it forces the user to stay within a perspectival posture, albeit in a so-called interactive mode. Participation within a VR1 world is primarily vicarious in nature. One feels the thrills and exhilaration of the simulation through immersion in a world designed to titillate and over-excite the senses. We already see indicators of this in the rise of shock TV, docu-dramas depicting “ER” victims with blood and guts, “COPS,” and the fascination with the suffering of others—as spectacle. VR1 dazzles the user through both sensory overload, and by presenting an array of images which can be explored interactively in succession. Clearly, the allure of VR1 will be the intensity of experience that it offers. However, like recreational drug addiction, as the threshold of excitation shifts after prolonged drug use, higher dosages are required to secure the desired effect or “high”. We can expect VR1 will have a similar mass appeal, and hence the need for more novelty, more shocking experiences, and a continuous upstaging of previous narratives.
The emphasis on pure sensory stimulation suggests that VR1 has an empirical bias. Its design assumptions and architecture seems to reflect a belief that our only form of contact with phenomena—is through our senses. The interiority and imagination of the user is simply not part of the VR1 equation. VR2, on the other hand, is used as a tool that can extend and display the user’s imagination. The connection between the phenomena and the user goes deeper than simply what meets the eye (or other senses). The link between the user and the phenomena in a VR2 world has a non-material, imaginative connection, which goes beyond mere passive sensory stimulation.
VR1 confines the user to a structure of interactivity that is preordained by the software, with the purpose of defining the user as a consumer of commercialized VR experiences. In other words, in VR1 the user has the experience of being active, interacting with vivid images in real-time, but all the while maintaining a cognitively passive receptive stance-not unlike a highly engaged teenager engrossed in a video game. VR2, on the other hand, puts the user into an active mode of configuring the software so as to be able to project and share their imagination with others in a virtual world. To summarize: VR1 merely copies experiences and makes them available for mass consumption, whereas VR2 is a tool for tapping one’s own creative imagination, and sharing it with others, providing a real-time experience of co-creating a virtual world.
The integral potentialities of VR2 are apparent in several respects. The VR2 user, in constructing and interacting within a highly imaginative virtual world, draws upon long repressed magical and mythical dimensions of human consciousness. The richness and depth of the virtual world can inspire awe and appreciation for the myriad dimensions of consciousness that are co-present all at once. Virtual worlds in VR2 are evocative, requiring the user to consciously become aware of their participation in the figuration of appearances. Rather than repressing or disengaging the user’s consciousness, VR2 turns the lights on, intensifying verition and active imagination. In other words, VR2 could open up human experience to a simulation of integral consciousness, providing a technologically mediated glimpse of a new vision, a new way of seeing the self in relation to the whole.
This is an exciting possibility, since it could potentially provide the capacity for people to express and participate in the creation of aperspectival virtual worlds. However, VR2 differs from VR1 in that it does not simply provide more surfaces to interact with, or a greater span of visuality. Rather, VR2 offers the possibility for entering into the interiority of space, of expanding inwardly into the depth of the image. In VR2, the user can, for example, see how a rainbow arises as an active construction or collective representation, involving both the user’s perception, the image that is apparently distant, and the meaning-giving process that flows between percipient and the phenomena. In other words, the user would have the opportunity to actually experience what a participatory consciousness feels like in a VR2 environment. Experience within VR2 would evoke a meta-awareness of participation-as-observer. What I mean by this is that in a VR2 environment, the user feels and experiences that his or her presence arises together with the appearances. There is a dynamic feel as the presencing of appearance comes into being. In VR2 one experiences, through immediate feedback, how one’s figuration of appearance is implicated in what appears.
The capacity to share and exchange interior images in VR2 shifts the center of gravity away from a fixed vantage point. Indeed, the whole meaning of what it means to be an observer, with a “point-of-view” is radically decentered and transparentized in VR2. This technology actually would allow one to virtually get inside another person’s shoes, to feel and experience the other’s perspective. Not only could a user try on for size another person’s mental models, we can expect that more sophisticated versions of VR2 technology would provide multiple users shared interfaces that would allow any one user to see from any perspective. In what would amount to a collective, improvisational virtual world, it would quickly become difficult to know who was the subject and who was the object. Entering a virtual world of subject-object reversals would be somewhat dizzying and disorienting at first. But the intensity of subject/object blurring experiences would generate a sort of ecstasy, a Sufi dervish-like whirl, and a sense that one was everywhere and nowhere at once.
The most radical implication of VR2 is, I believe, its evocative power to simulate a mode of consciousness in which appearances become virtualized. Apperances within a VR2 world would appear and be experienced as projections of light, as phantoms, including the appearance of the observer that is watching. That which appears to the observer in a VR2 world is recognized as not being the ultimate reality, but as having virtual substance, vivid but transparent, like an apparition, like a mirage, like an echo, like a dream object. It is this transparentizing aesthetic that could potentially open vision into aperspectival knowing by open the viewing angle to the whole.
VR2 can be thought of as ritual technology that not only inspires the collective imagination, but also deepens the intensity of awareness or verition. Instead of vision being refracted and distorted through the cone of perspectivism, instead of only perceiving with the light of reason, ratio opens up into the whole, into the zeroless dimension. What arises is a sort of “a-dimensional” mode of awareness, whose origins are “ever present,” prior to the establishment of a viewpoint, prior to the splitting of the perceptual field into duality, prior to the ratio, “before” measurement takes hold. Vision opens perception into the depth of space, accommodating the observer and the observed simultaneously, in a synaresis. As transparentizing of awareness intensifies, expanding inwardly into greater depth, space becomes more accommodating of multiple modes of consciousness.
Conclusion
The hypertrophied rationality so characteristic of the current Information Age is the virus that no software program can cure. Ratio without grounding in a human matrix of the whole will continue to infect every corpuscle of society, its radiance so brilliant, so piercing, so inexorable that it blinds rather than enlightens. Without the proper antidote of a more balanced, integral consciousness, the ratio virus will proliferate, seeking to maximize and diffuse its power both outwardly in our material affairs, and inwardly, into the information matrix of the biosphere. In whatever domain, ratio, now fused with the powers of information technology and cyberspace, can rapidly spread, altering our sensibilities to a point that we may lose touch with our very sense of humanness. Computation now reigns supreme as the dominant metaphor for modeling our understanding of the world—whether of brain functioning and intelligence, economics, or biology. This hyperrational metaphor promises a world of total calculability and control, where the clarity of rationality supersedes the search for meaning. We have been led to believe that ratio, on its own, could solve all our problems. Computation delivers us to the Promised Land of accuracy, but upon our arrival we discover that it is a rather cold and desolate place, devoid of human meaning.
The colonization of cyberspace by commercial interests, and VR1, are technological developments that simply mirror our progressive decrease in intrinsic awareness. The production of endless simulacra, images, and spectacles never get down to the key issue: to realize the true nature of reality. Instead, these media will keep us preoccupied and entranced which, in reality, simply mimics our “real world” ignorance and state of deception in duality. I am sure that VR1 will no doubt appear at first glance as a technical marvel of the highest order, and why shouldn’t it be an object of awe. This technology has the capacity to project a world that in reality has no substance. Yet, despite this technological feat, our consciousness in VR1 will still be habituated to grasping at experiences that we will predictably judge as either pleasurable or hideous. Our intoxication with consuming novel experiences will perpetuate a way of knowing that remains trapped within a perspectival world. We will continue to be mesmerized and taken in by the proliferation of images—real or virtual—all the while mistaking the image, the appearance, for the thing-in-itself. The modern spell of idolatry will not have been broken.
Whether we are inside or outside VR1, we inevitably remain locked within our own self-made 3-dimensional universe, confined to the cyberspace cave, unable to see through it. Lacking transparency and diaphaneity, lacking the necessary temporal intensity and space-freedom, our knowing will remain dimly aware of the virtual nature of our everyday lived experiences. William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace, likened it to a “consensual hallucination.” It’s true, cyberspace, but especially VR1, will also appear as a dream, but with a key difference: infected with the ratio virus, the consciousness of the dreamer will continue to be divided against itself. Disjunctive thinking, dominated by a mode of consciousness still caught in subject-object duality, will be bound to a Cyber-Faustian dream—a delusionary state of hubris, where seductive techno-dreams eventually turn into nightmares with real consequences for sentient beings.
In this respect, VR1 stands as a cultural symbol for our hypertrophic rational structure of consciousness. The wizardry of VR1 is a “wizardry of wrong notions,” an entrancement to a magical display which results in a proliferation of spatio-temporal displacements, time-space compression, and a dimming of Being (Guenther/Longchenpa, ). The texture of experience in VR1—excitation, nervousness, and acceleration—is very different in quality from that of VR2. In VR2, we are allowed to enter a world that has become more spacious, where time can be slowed down as well as speeded up. We are granted the ability to exercise our imagination and intelligence, to observe the observer, and to use VR technology to help us witness and pay attention to the subtle process of proprioception, both at the level of our body and our thoughts. In this virtual world, the habitual reflexes of mind can slow down, allowing us to cultivate verition, to deepen our capacity for “waring,” and to seed the ground for insight to grow.
Ultimately, though, even VR2 depends on the intentionality and consciousness of the user. VR2 is not some magical “techno-enlightenment” machine. This technology is not a substitute for active and disciplined inquiry. However, VR2 can serve as a new cultural symbol, functioning as a sort of souped-up bio-feedback device for the perceptual apparatus of mind. Having the power to transport the experiencer into a virtual world where imagination and speculation can alter all the rules and perspectival conventions for space and time holds great potential for the inception of an aperspectival cultural aesthetic. In this connection, VR2 could function as an intermediate and experimental space for the evolution of consciousness. The next great mutation, the leap into the integral structure, will ultimately mean shifting from experiencing the world (and the self) as substance to experiencing the world as one virtual holomovement, as emanating from an ever present origination, an on-gong presencing of the whole, the pure wizardry of Being.
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