Me and My Virtual God

Process Theology and Virtual Church
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Can full immersion in a computer-generated three-dimensional environment provide a context for religious experience? 

What is the status of the digital persons in the environment? 

Is God a virtual reality, too?

In fact, there’s no consensus over what qualifies as virtual reality. For some, it’s any 360 degrees world that you can enter via a headset. Others argue that the audience needs to have more agency than merely looking around; that they need to be able to move through the virtual space. In which case, VR is not restricted to the use of a headset, but can also be an installation where projections transform the room the visitors are in.

​- Time Magazine
"The metaverse is the convergence of two ideas that have been around for many years: virtual reality and a digital second life...In virtual reality, you wear a headset that immerses you in a 3-D environment. You carry motion-sensing controllers to interact with virtual objects and use a microphone to communicate with others."

​- NY Times
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What is Spirituality?
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What is Process Theology?
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What is Virtual Reality?
What is Augmented Reality?
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​What Is AR?

Almost any person with a smartphone can get access to augmented reality, making it more efficient than VR as a branding and gaming tool. AR morphs the mundane, physical world into a colorful, visual one by projecting virtual pictures and characters through a phone's camera or video viewer. Augmented reality is merely adding to the user's real-life experience.

What Is VR?

​Virtual reality takes these same components to another level by producing an entirely computer-generated simulation of an alternate world. These immersive simulations can create almost any visual or place imaginable for the player using special equipment such as computers, sensors, headsets, and gloves.

What's the Difference Between the Two?

The distinctions between VR and AR come down to the devices they require and the experience itself:
  • AR uses a real-world setting while VR is completely virtual
  • AR users can control their presence in the real world; VR users are controlled by the system
  • VR requires a headset device, but AR can be accessed with a smartphone
  • AR enhances both the virtual and real world while VR only enhances a fictional reality

- Tulane University School of Professional Management


What is the Metaverse?
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​Excerpts:
What is the metaverse, anyway?

The metaverse is the convergence of two ideas that have been around for many years: virtual reality and a digital second life.

For decades, technologists have dreamed of an era when our virtual lives play as important a role as our physical realities. In theory, we would spend lots of time interacting with our friends and colleagues in virtual space. As a result, we would spend money there, too, on outfits and objects for our digital avatars.

In what techies like Mr. Zuckerberg call the metaverse, virtual reality serves as a computing platform for living a second life online. In virtual reality, you wear a headset that immerses you in a 3-D environment. You carry motion-sensing controllers to interact with virtual objects and use a microphone to communicate with others.
That’s it? It’s you and your avatar interacting with others in a digital environment?

To put it simply, yes.
Does the metaverse already exist in gaming?

​A precursor to the metaverse could also be found in Second Life, an online social platform developed by Linden Lab nearly two decades ago, where people created digital representations of themselves to socialize with others. In the virtual space, users could shop and build property to enrich their virtual lives.

​Virtual reality is also somewhat advanced in video games. In 2016, Sony released the $400 PlayStation VR, a virtual reality headset that plugged into its PlayStation 4 console to play virtual reality games. This month, Sony said a second-generation headset was coming for the PlayStation 5, though it did not share a release date.
But those were just steppingstones toward the complete metaverse, which is still taking shape. Technologists say that thanks to a number of things — fast internet connections, powerful virtual reality headsets and a large audience of gamers — it is now more possible to live in a richly animated, lifelike 3-D simulation.



​Process Theology and the Metaverse
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Four Questions
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Can virtual realities (digital objects in 3-D environments) evoke religious experiences?

​More specifically, can virtual realities educe qualities of heart and mind that are recognized by the world's most inclusive interfaith network, Spirituality and Practice, as spiritually significant?

​​​attention  -  beauty  -  being present  -  compassion   -  connections  -  devotion  -  enthusiasm  -  faith
forgiveness - grace -  gratitude  - hope - hospitality - imagination  - joy -  justice - kindness - listening
love  -  meaning  -  nurturing  -  openness  -  peace - play  -  questing  -  reverence - shadow - silence
​teachers   -  transformation   -  unity  -  vision   -   wonder  -  x, the mystery  -  yearning  -  you  -  zeal
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​What is the ontological status of virtual objects, anyway? 

​Are they fictional products of a consensual hallucination, as some claim?  Or do they have a kind of reality of their own? 

In Process and Reality, Whitehead speaks of eight kinds of existence: actual entities, eternal objects, nexus, subjective forms, prehensions, contrasts, propositions, and multiplicities. Are virtual realities actual entities? Propositions? Contrasts? Some combination? If we imagine virtual objects as actual in some way, can they enjoy and suffer in their own right? Can they feel other things and make decisions? Can they die?
Where is God in virtual realities?​

If we think of God as the soul of the universe, can God appear through virtual realities?  Can we receive divine guidance and divine comfort through them? Can our interaction with virtual realities be as valuable as our interaction with actual entities that have physical bodies?
Is God a virtual reality, too?
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​Excerpts
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How real is virtual reality?

The most common view is that virtual reality is a sort of fictional or illusory reality, and that what goes in in virtual reality is not truly real. In Neuromancer, William Gibson famously said that cyberspace (meaning virtual reality) is a “consensual hallucination”. It is common for people discussing virtual worlds to contrast virtual objects with real objects, as if virtual objects are not truly real.

I will defend the opposite view: virtual reality is a sort of genuine reality, virtual objects are real objects, and what goes on in virtual reality is truly real. We can get at the issue via a number of questions. (1) Are virtual objects, such as the avatars and tools found in a typical virtual world, real or fictional? (2) Do virtual events, such as a trek through a virtual world, really take place? (3) When we perceive virtual worlds by having immersive experiences of a world surrounding us, are our experiences illusory? (4) Are experiences in a virtual world as valuable as experiences in a nonvirtual world? 
Conclusion

One can summarize the position I have argued for by saying: virtual reality is not a second-class reality. Or at least, virtual reality need not be a second-class reality. It may be a second-level reality, in that it is contained within physical reality and realized by processes in the physical world, but this need not make it less real or less valuable. In the short term, of course, virtual realities may be inferior to physical realities in all sorts of respects (while perhaps beginning to be superior in other respects). But even in the short term, virtual reality may be real, non-illusory, and valuable. In the long term, and in principle, virtual reality may well be on a par with physical reality.

David J. Chalmers Department of Philosophy, New York University



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