I have been thinking about parallel universes. But not so much the arcane mathematical constructs of physicists. I mean the possibility of everyday parallel universes.
After we start wearing those cyberglasses or contact lens implants, the digital world and the physical world will fold together — even more so than they do now. The reality that we walk through with our physical bodies will be filled with bits, all stored in the Cloud and delivered to our eyes as needed.
Will this all converge to a single reality? For example, will we always go to a particular place to have a conversation about some agreed upon topic?
Or will all of these virtual universes become layered on on top another, imparting any physical place with a kind of multiplicity? If so, then you might walk into a particular room on Tuesdays to discuss some sports-related topic, whereas I might walk into the same room on Wednesdays to talk about the opera.
I suspect the latter to be the case. After all, we already do this sort of thing with the physical world around us.
When I teach my class at a certain time every week, the classroom becomes a microcosm of the world of our course topic, just for that hour. Two hours later, that same physical room might become a microcosm for discussion of some other topic entirely.
I suspect that this folding of multiple meanings into physical spaces will only grow more complex and multifaceted with time. Soon the world of our physical surroundings and the world of our digital realities will have become so thoroughly intertwined that people will find it hard to imagine that it was ever any other way.
Given Ghost in the Shell is back in the limelight (not sure that the Hollywood movie that just came out is worth watching, more of an action film and not so much cerebral sci-fi thriller) – this take the anime took on chat rooms I found fairly interesting. It might not be terribly compelling without having watched the series beforehand, but they had a fairly imaginative take on VR and cybernetics among other things 15 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poKi7YyuamI
You might benefit from Visualising PoSR, a paper from a few years ago (2012) that attempts to frame what PoSR looks like. Read the paper before watching Kevin talk. We don’t work much with Kevin and his talk may be different than what we are doing with PoSR, but he was the one who attended the workshop. He is more into traces, this might be interesting for you as well, but perhaps different than we intended fully with PoSR. We aren’t computer graphics people, and had trouble finding anyone to help us model PoSR w/o a fixed dataset. We see PoSR very much as layers that may form what you are considering to be ‘folded.’ We describe it in mathematical terms as a meta-multigraph. As such, while each person’s reality is relative to them, it is all happening, in our point of view, within our single reality. This was a workshop paper and as such the site was moved, but yay for the Internet Archive! https://web.archive.org/web/20140207061427/http://jitso.org/2012/12/03/visualising-polysocial-reality-revised/ “PoSR is a model that includes multiplexity as a basic network property. ” I have a rather primative diagram of PoSRas layered circles that can overlap or not… See this pub (2012) p. 3 for the diagram. The color circles are the same person, and the layers show the multiple reality relations” http://posr.org/w/images/a/a5/Applin_Fischer_AutoUI_2012_DRAFT.pdf – we can provide more clarity if you like….or hey, if you’d like to work with us on trying to visualize it, we’d be thrilled.
Also P.S. We’ve changed position on outcomes since 2012. All outcomes are relativistic and no longer are thought to be “negative” or “positive.” We updated that 2012 Auto UI paper in 2015. Here is the updated version: http://posr.org/w/images/e/e1/Applin_Fischer_Auto_2015.pdf Diagram is on p. 4