It's a Dualist Virtual Universe - I Rez, Therefore I Am

A lot of residents were upset by my talk of "Avatar Suicide" and they called me a "drama queen." But as Paris Hilton can tell you, being hated can generate a lot of publicity

When I contemplated Avatar Suicide the other day, so many people reached out to me in different ways. I have to thank everyone so much. And especially Laurel Leavitt and Krissy Sinclair who tried to help that morning.

http://vaneeesa.com/2010/10/16/vb22-avatar-suicide/

http://vaneeesa.com/2010/10/19/ascension/

Laurel and Krissy both expressed a lot of concern for me… and they also expressed concern that such an act could be harmful to others… to a lot of others who were in no way involved with my “adventure.”

That whole tragedy stressed me out a lot, but this made me feel even worse. I truly felt abused by the Burn2 people, but now my “drama” with them could harm others. Terrible.

Realizing how damaging this could be also made me wonder, why would I contemplate such a thing. My typist may be depressed from time to time, but as far as I know she’s never suffered from anything close to clinical depression and she’s certainly never even considered suicide for a millisecond. Far from it, she’s much more in the Kurzwellian “yes, live forever please” camp.

Why then would I consider something that she never would. Is it that this isn’t real? If you’ve read this blog much you probably know that I believe real people are here and they have real experiences. But if it is “real,” then why would I end it all? Either over something silly like Burn2 or even something larger?

cf: 2 paragraphs at: http://vaneeesa.com/2010/08/06/drag/#greymatter

My typist is a materialist. She is absolutely not a dualist. She rejects both Christianity and Vampires because they require a dualist universe with some alternate spiritual dimension innaccessible to the material realm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism#In_philosophy_of_mind

If you believe there is no Glory of Heaven, no Vampiric Immortality, no Other Side to Break on Thru To, if the end of life only means that your’e dead, then your circumstances have to be extraordinarily dire to let life go.

And I’ve always thought that I was a materialist too. I’ve written in the past that I find that my typist and I have a lot of commonality in ideology, but a lot of differences in aesthetics. And certainly Materialism vs Dualism is an ideological topic where I thought that my typist and I were in total agreement.

http://vaneeesa.com/2010/07/21/ideology-aesthetics/

Well.

I guess we both agree that she lives in a materialist universe.

But what never occurred to me, and I suppose why I was able to contemplate the unthinkable, is that — Surprise! — I live in a dualist universe!

I live in a universe where I could be Resurrected any time I like.

I live in a universe where I can Ascend to another dimension (we call them “grids”) like Open Sim or Blue Mars.

The thing that makes a universe, or putative universe, dualist, is the extra-dimensionality of it. Where does Christ go between death and resurrection? To the heaven dimension, of course. Where does Vaneeesa go between ascension and resurrection? To the FL dimension, of course. If there is some “higher” meta space, then “death” in the “lower” realm isn’t the “end.”

Since I believe my typist lives in a materialist universe, I think when Christ died, he was just dead. I think his resurrection was a marketing ploy by the apostles because, as Joe Frank put it, “Nobody could work a crowd like Jesus.”

Since I believe that I live in a dualist universe, “death” here isn’t all that different from a really long AFK. You can go to FL or Blue Mars or WoW.

I live in a dualist universe!

— VB

3 thoughts on “It’s a Dualist Virtual Universe”

Fun read. I should warn your readers though, living in WoW means you get some sort of mortality, as you can die and become a spirit instead. No worries though, you can resurrect again or be resurrected by someone else.