Metaverse: The latest sign of human existence

Abstract

The explosion of the “metaverse” provides an opportunity to reflect on the impact of intelligent digital virtual technology on contemporary humanity. While the metaverse opens new worlds of possibility for humanity, the extreme reality. The world and the people in it have been rewritten as a result of the inversion of reality and the obscuring of so-called “augmented reality”, which has led to the retreat of the original reality. In the metaverse, the world is grasped more by perceptual perceptions, the objects are informational and symbolic ideas, and the subjects of grasp are increasingly becoming twin digital doppelgangers, digital beings. The metaverse will bring about the tribalization of public life and the territorialization of public space. The construction of a metaverse order is essentially a governance of the human imagination, which will require a shift in political philosophy. The metaverse is the inevitable consequence of the so-called “humanization” of technology. The increasing “staying” and “involution” of people in the world of intentionality, their domination by instrumental reason, their anti-intellectualization and their dumbing down, all of which are the paradox of “human, too human”. The interaction between individual intentionality and extensiveness, as well as the risk of serious consequences brought by technological innovation, make the individual’s free choice involve problems, so we must appeal to re-moralization, and the basis of re-moralization is individual cultivation. Philosophic workers should not only keep an open attitude, but also keep a thinking attitude towards the metaverse.