Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2016 number 6

The virtual reality technologies (TVR) would not work if the natural virtuality of the human being did not work. The person's ability to experience virtual states, like any other human ability (upright posture, intelligence, labor activity and so forth), remains throughout the years of the development of virtual reality of computers, the Internet and so on outside the focus of the philosophical, scientific and technological mainstream. In other words, it is not considered by the «normal scientific understanding» as a fundamental anthropological constant. As a result, the word «virtual» is understood by scientific mainstream as everything that is happening today in cyberspace. In the end, the word «virtual» means nothing specifically and explains nothing. The author through the concept of virtual conflict, introduced into scientific usage by N.A. Nosov (2002), using the example of asthma sociology, reveals the type of epistemological casus in the sociology of modern philosophy and sciences studying virtuality. Similar casuses are presented by the examples of other idiopathic pathologies (diseases of unknown origin), in the field of flight safety and so forth. The source of a virtual conflict, virtus, is in the knowledge-related, paradigmatic structures of subjects, whose activity leads to a casus «we wanted better, but it turned out as always»: we have kept describing virtuality, and still have failed to conceptualize it in terms of classical and neo-classical scientific paradigms. The article is written in the genre of «philosophy as expertise» (a term by B. G. Yudin), the precedent for which have been the successes: the coming to life of mass user of the technologies of virtual, augmented reality (TVR), developing in the conditions of time shortage to ethically reflect on one’s achievements, their legal regulation and humanitarian support, and a global failure of the scientific mainstream in the understanding of virtuality. Today, there takes place a struggle of meanings for the word «virtual»: between the constant (classical and neoclassical) scientific mainstream outlook and the virtual, post-nonclassical one represented by scientific and philosophical school of N. A. Nosov (1952-2002), still holding the world's priorities in the theoretical understanding of the phenomena of virtuality. The latter were introduced into scientific usage as virtual events in the activity of the test pilots in 1986 by N. A. Nosov and O.I. Genisaretsky. «Computer virtuality» emerged together with other ideas of virtuality in other areas: virtual particles and so on. The modern TVR deceive the human brain! The person's ability to fall into the virtuals, to experience virtual psychological states has met with the technological capabilities to «present information» faster than the 25-th shot and give rise to the phenomenon of «indistinction». It is important to know that, historically, it has been reproduced without computers (!) during a special experiment concerning modeling pilots’ errors: the aircraft landing on the fuselage. Of the same type of errors is «forgetting children» on the back seat of the car by parents. Technologies, knowingly deceiving the human being, should be taken under the humanitarian supervision of the society. In this paper, we carry out problematization of this situation through the challenges to the world outlook of the TVR developers, the philosophical, ethical, legal and other consequences of what is happening in this area are revealed, the necessary arguments, reasoning and references to the works of the «Virtualistics» research group of the Institute of Philosophy of RAS are presented, which are designed to provide an understanding of global paradigmatic turn in the sciences about human being: «Homo virtualis», the virtual person comes to the forefront of his actualization along with Homo sapiens, erectus and others. Finally, there is given a futuristic prosept (a termby OI Genisaretskogo) of staging of the virtual evolution of the human being in the TVR environment. This work is a bridge over the chasm between the «conventional scientific understanding» of virtuality and the postnonclassical worldview, according to which the «Homo virtualis» will finally come to the world!