I believe, however, that in a sense we already function, if not in virtual reality, then in digital environments: in a network of interconnected applications through which we work, have fun and establish relationships. What I have in mind are remote meetings on MS Teams or Zoom, shopping with delivery to a parcel locker, official matters, medical teleconsultations, social life conducted via various messengers. As a result, we already function in a virtual overlay on our real lives, we switch to Digital unnoticeably, we exist on the Map and not on the real (whatever the ‘real’ would mean in such circumstances) Territory (the metaphor of the Map and the Territory will be explained in a moment). And although it is difficult to talk about full-scale VR, the digital world is already advanced enough to have a significant impact on humans. And this impact should be considered one of the most important problems of our times.
VR, virtual reality, is a certain construct created using information technology, i.e. hardware and software. So, to put it simply, we could say that it is some kind of ‘artificial’ reality to which we are transported using a computer. Today we also deal with AR (augmented reality) or its quite similar variant, MR (mixed reality). It works by ‘gluing’ virtual elements to actual reality, for example using a smartphone or special glasses: while wandering the city streets, we can follow navigation directions and tourist information and at the same time talk to friends on the other side of the world. This technology is used by recently popular mobile games such as Pokémon GO and The Witcher: Monster Slayer.
The more perfect VR is (and this depends on the technology with which it is created), the more it undermines the distinction between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’. Multimediality, the polysensory (interface, i.e. the connection between a person and a computer, transmits visual, auditory and tactile stimuli), as well as interactivity significantly affect immersiveness (‘the phenomenon of immersion in digital media’), immersion (‘the experience of reducing the cognitive distance accompanying immersion in a fictional world’) and, as a result, world-feeling (‘experience and understanding of the world […] related to […] the act of imaginative inhabitation in a fictional reality’). With each subsequent generation of VR, they become better and better at imitating the ‘natural’ reality that we initially perceive.
Considerations about virtual reality and its significance for humans are extremely important, not only because they directly concern our reality. Considerations about VR, most often appearing in science fiction, are part of the philosophical dispute about how reality is presented to our senses, which has been ongoing since Plato’s time – the so-called dispute over representation. We will start with one of the most important Polish writers and thinkers of the second half of the 20th century – and at the same time the most important SF writer in our culture – Stanisław Lem (1921–2006). The author of Solaris was not only the author of science fiction novels; he was also a futurologist, scientist and essayist. As early as 1964, he published one of his most important texts, Summa Technologiae. In this essay, he reflects on the development of technology, makes very ambitious and temporally extensive plans for the auto-evolution of homo sapiens (i.e. transhumanism, which is the conscious evolution of our species using advanced science and technology), but also warns against the impact of this sphere on human life. What particularly interests us is the fact that he announced the creation of VR as early as the mid-1960s. He called them phantomatics – this term still exists in Polish today but is less popular than the term ‘virtual reality’.