With our exploration of the ‘art-of-the-possible’ we value the application of ‘impossible worlds’ to enrich modeling of imagination in the form of mental simulation enabled by AI spatial intelligence making use of 3D visualizations. We contrast possible with impossible worlds with counterfactuals in fiction and the metaphysics of objects tied to envisioned designs and innovations.

Contrasting possible and impossible worlds offers a vast array of applications. We believe this contrasting approach can be suitable to most branches of disciplines in the academy, ranging from logic to metaphysics and ontology, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of information, moral and political philosophy, and aesthetics. And the fruits of such mental simulation and 3D visualizations can benefit such fields that range from the semantics of natural language to game theory, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. 

In many respects our work in the Virtual Harmony community employs a holistic epistemology that inspires effort at the interfaces among Popper’s proposed three worlds: World 1 (the physical), World 2 (experience and subjective thought) and World 3 (products of the human mind). Importantly, although our immersive 3D simulations represent the so-called 3rd order of simulacra, we strive to address the utopian, transcendent sphere in the design and architectural structures. In our story telling with each simulation we purposively leave room for fictional anticipation and imaginary transcendence beyond the real world. In this sense, the community of Virtual Harmony lives ‘in the eye of eternity’ that knows no bounds in the transcendent sphere.

~ The Virtual Harmony Community ~

VIRTUAL HARMONY: INTERFACES FOR THE ART-OF-THE-POSSIBLE

The non dialectical mean between which extremes are suspended constitutes something like an interface, which is the condition of the possibility and the impossibility of seemingly seamless systems and structures. When radically conceived, this interface extends beyond every margin of difference to “contaminate” opposites that once seemed fixed. By approaching techno-socio-cultural processes of virtualization through the strange notion of non-notion of interfacing, it becomes possible to reconfigure rather than merely reinscribe structures of difference and systems of oppositions. As a result of this reconfiguration, contrasts like mind/body, self/other, human/machine, nature/culture, natural/artificial, material/immaterial, and reality/virtuality no longer appear to be what they once were. This recasting of differences as interfaces creates new interpretative and critical possibilities.

~ Mark C. Taylor, Hiding

I see now that the path I choose through the maze makes me what I am. I am not only a thing, but also a way of being–one of many ways–and knowing the paths I have followed and the ones left to take will help me understand what I am becoming. ~ Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

DELIGHT OF ADVENTURE

Nothing pleases people more than to go on thinking what they have always thought, and at the same time imagine that they are thinking something new and doing it combines the advantage of security and the delight of adventure.

~ T.S. Eliot

REFLECTION ON HYPERREAL

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending.

~ Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

PURSUIT OF WHAT TRULY MATTERS FOR A LIFE WORTH LIVING

To become experts at means, while remaining amateurs at ends?

‘And increasingly, I worry that to achieve this expertise in means would be to fail as a human being. We can all imagine extreme and sobering examples of this. But we can also find mundane examples of frittering away our lives. Lives that could have meant something to somebody. Lives that could have contributed a great deal to the world and opened up into a fullness of humanity, but instead enclosed themselves in narrow striving and the thin, meager expectations of society. So we should take our own selves, our own interior life, and the pursuit of what truly matters, with seriousness.’

~ Miroslav Volf, Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology, Yale Divinity School