I'm starting to feel that the question of meaning in "being real" vs. "being virtual" is mostly about permanence and effort to modify. Like, imagine if Eve Online got frozen in its current incarnation, became magically impervious to any hacking, and its servers physically shipped out to a magically impenetrable vault. Everything that happens in game now becomes permanent[0], there's no longer the underlying threat of the company rebooting or shutting down the game. That becomes much more real in my eyes.
Of course, the ultimate determinant is, the real world is the one you can die in. But if we factor out death, the only thing that remains special about our reality is that no human controls it, it cannot be arbitrarily changed without putting extreme effort in terms of energy and coordination.
Of course, the ultimate determinant is, the real world is the one you can die in. But if we factor out death, the only thing that remains special about our reality is that no human controls it, it cannot be arbitrarily changed without putting extreme effort in terms of energy and coordination.
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[0] - At least on the scale of human lifetime.