Hubert Dreyfus on Virtual Embodiment and Myths of Meaning in Second Life

= Virtual Embodiment and Myths of Meaning in Second Life: Hubert Dreyfus; June 2, 2008; 41 Minutes; VideoKeynote by Hubert Dreyfus, Professor of Philosophy, UC Berkeley

URL = http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/podcasts/art/bigbang08/MED3461

Description

"Second Life is a popular networked 3-D virtual environment where millions of online visitors control avatars that interact with each other, build structures, visit shops, and engage in a variety of social and economic activities. Dreyfus analyzes Second Life from a philosophical perspective, exploring how thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger would respond to the virtual embodiment enabled by such systems. Dreyfus argues that the explicit conscious indirectness inherent in how responses and emotions are conveyed in Second Life is distinctly Cartesian, dualistic, and fundamentally limited. Drawing from Existential Phenomenology, Dreyfus suggests that maximally meaningful human experiences require an intuitive shared sense of vulnerability, mood, and emotion that is currently lacking but may be possible with future technological advances that would directly link the bodies or brains of the participants in Second Life with their avatar bodies in the virtual world."