Is the Metaverse a new world? Interpreting the Metaverse from the perspective of Heidegger’s philosophy
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Date
2023-12-04
Authors
Moradi, Moein
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Abstract
This thesis examines the phenomenon of the Metaverse from Martin Heidegger’s
perspective, focusing on the concepts of Dasein, reality, truth, and the world. The main focus
of the thesis is the reality and the worldhood in the Metaverse.
The first two chapters will explain the main relevant concepts in Heidegger’s philosophy for
this topic. This starts with Dasein, which refers to the human existence, and world, which
involves the overall network of the significance of meaningful relationships and context. The
understanding of truth and reality is also highlighted and emphasized to clarify the existential
nature of the network that all these concepts form.
In Chapter 3, based on Heidegger’s theories, the relationship between technology and the
world is inquired. Heidegger argues that technology is not only a tool, rather, it has the capacity
to reveal the world as a standing-reserve, reducing the entities to mere means for certain aims,
by way of instrumentalization of the resources that are supposed to be ready for human beings
when they need them.
Through this preparation, the thesis provides a foundation to explore the ontological concept
of the Metaverse. Based on Heidegger’s philosophical framework, chapter 3 of the thesis then
concludes that the Metaverse is indeed a new world. The Metaverse, by providing an immersive
experience and a variety of new experiential and interactive possibilities provides environments
in which people can interact and get involved with visual and digital entities. Dasein through
this involvement allows the entities to refer, and in Heidegger, this means for them to be real.
The entities in the Metaverse are real, although not in the same way as the entities in the
physical world are.
The thesis then suggests that the difference between the reality of entities in the Metaverse
and the ones in the physical world can be explained by the fact that the kind of references they
make in the Metaverse are different from those of the physical world. This means that the
virtual representations and experiences within the Metaverse lack some ontological aspects of
the physical realm.
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Keywords
Heidegger, Metaverse, world, reality