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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: A Mind Forever Voyaging irony
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Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2002 01:23:11 GMT
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L. Ross Raszewski <lraszewski@loyola.edu> wrote:
>>Perry Simm deliberately retreated into a fictional world in the Epilogue.
>>In the context of the game, he had been working in the real world.
>
>He had been working in the real world . THere is nothing left for him
>to do in the real world -- that's the general gist of the ending. So
>he can go on living there, impotent, or be given a real world in which
>to live.

Or be given a *fictional* world in which to live.

I think part of this "debate" is simply because people are using
"real" in different ways. This conflation confuses arguments about
the value judgement on PRISM returning to being Perry Simm.

When I debate philosophically the notion of "an external, independent
reality", there's something pretty solidly defined that I'm referring
to, even if I can't prove it exists and its existence implies the
impossibility of that proof and thus of a certain sort of
"knowledge of the world".

If Bob is stuck in The Matrix for the first twenty years of his life,
and then pulled out of the Matrix and shown "the real world", and if
we have a god's eye view (because we're in the movie theater or the
computer desk's chair) and know which really is real, then we may
sympathize with Bob's dissatisfaction with the real world and may
understand his desire to be plugged back in and spend the rest of his
days eating juicy virtual steaks--but none of this will change that we
know that that one world is virtual, fake, fictional, *not* real; and
the other is real--and this is true whether Bob is corporeal or an AI
designed to inhabit the simulation.

SeanB
