Hmm. Not sure that's peculiar to virtual worlds, Ali. People fill in blanks and make assumption, because that's what we do....we search for patterns and meaning in what we experience, real or virtual.

My cat's name is Mittens.

Of course we do. It's all a part of creating meaning. I think it's more prevalent on the internet though, and if it happens to be a virtual world of our own making, well then of course everything is made up.

In a real world relationship between two people, we can observe the way they carry themselves, how they look when they speak. We can see the body language attached to certain statements and know if they're serious or not (largely). We can see how they react to their surroundings. We can hear tone of voice etc. Of course, all these observations are then processed through the filters we've developed due to our own prior experience, but we still then are able to make a better assumption based on our own understanding rather than the grossely wrong ones we are more prone to in a virtual environment.

well now i feel compelled to reply

more than once, in fact

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my cats breath smells like catfood

Hey, dude, I got your answer about the virtual world vs real world right here (old dwellars need not follow the link, especially at work, all y'all have seen this almost poetic rhetoric before....)

All things are virtual as they cannot be directly perceived by sapience.

Yes, the difference is that human sciences are a subset of natural sciences--
unless one allows that human sciences follow a separate "magical" set of rules.

Isn't question #1 the same as question #2? I think so.

What does Frued got to do with your questions? Except to say that the only time ole siggy got into the physical world was when he noticed phallic shaped objects otherwise he was too much into his head trying to dictate and disect the virtual world of others.

Isn't the military a virtual world?

By the way, freud was full of shit.

I would say the difference between a virtual world and the real world is that the real world is grounded in literal experience whereas the virtual world is not grounded.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) informs me that we have literal experiences that become sources for abstract ideas or part of other literal experiences.

The conceptual structure of a literal experience is mapped into another mental space to become part of another concept. For example: the experience of warmth resulting from being held by the mother is a literal experience that can be later mapped onto a subjective concept of affection. This means that the subjective concept then contains some or all of the conceptual structure of the literal experience of warmth. That is why almost everyone senses a feeling of warmth when feeling affection for someone.

Gee, all this time I thought that warmth was from rapid heartbeat, and subsequent blood pressure increase, causing increased blood flow through the smaller capillaries near the surface of the skin, where the nerve endings sense the increase in skin temperature. Silly me. :rolleyes:

I'm pretty sure this was a Lionel Richie song in the late 80s.