Is Nara-da’s life as Sushila real, or is it an illusion?
I think it is an illusion because Narada cannot return back to the life she lived in the illusion and continue it. This is the same as dreams because you cannot fall back asleep and continue the dream you had from the night before. However, this idea only works for illusions/dreams and not for virtual reality.
On one interpretation, Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream raises a ques-tion about knowledge: How do any of us know we aren’t dreamingright now? This is a cousin of the question raised in the introduction:How do any of us know we aren’t in a virtual world right now? Thesequestions lead to a more basic question: How do we know anythingwe experience is real?
This reminds me of the conversation we had in class. When you are dreaming, you don't feel what you are doing in your dream. If you are flying in your dream, you can't feel the air moving past you or if you are touching something, you can't actually feel it. Same with smell, you can't smell something in your dream. That is how you know you are dreaming because all of those things can only happen in real life. Same with virtual reality. Picking things up in virtual reality is just the task of moving your hand, not actually picking something up and moving it.
Each virtual world is a new reality: Reality+.Augmented reality involves additions to reality: Reality+. Some virtualworlds are as good as or better than ordinary reality: Reality+. If we’rein a simulation, there is more to reality than we thought: Reality+. Therewill be a smorgasbord of multiple realities: Reality+.
This point confuses me. At what point is the number of realities someone is a part of too many? As someone gathers more "realities" the importance of each one diminishes. This makes the fact that it's a reality almost irrelevant. I don't see how having multiple realities can even constitute them as realities because they can all be so different.