Redefining "Metaverse"
How would the Metaverse as a new ontological condition shed light on the non-apocalyptic threats of artificiality?
The dominant view treats the Metaverse as a digital space — a product of VR, AI, or Web3 — layered over physical life. This model radically rethinks that framing. Instead of a tool or platform, the Metaverse is reconceptualized as a new ontological background environment: a world-forming layer that increasingly governs the conditions of human life without being fully visible, graspable, or controllable by those living within it.
🌌 Universe, World, Metaverse: A Three-Layer Model To understand this shift, we must distinguish three nested environmental layers:
Universe: The pre-existing, nonhuman background — governed by natural laws, beyond human control (e.g. gravity, entropy, climate).
World: The artificial habitat humans construct to survive within the Universe — including technologies, institutions, and symbolic systems.
Metaverse: A new artificial background environment increasingly forming independently of human will — constructed by Modern Artificiality (in particular, AI, Big Data, IoT, and code-is-law), yet irreducible to natural law or human intent.
Originally, humans crafted “Worlds” to cope with the uncontrollable Universe. But now, Modern Artificiality — especially as shaped by Western modernity’s emphasis on control, autonomy, and rational mastery — has developed an ontological momentum of its own. The very tools we use to emancipate ourselves (e.g., predictive algorithms, automated governance, “code is law”) are becoming the background condition we must now adapt to.
🌀 From As-Willedness to Existential Squeeze Modern Artificiality promises freedom — the ability to live “as willed.” Yet paradoxically, the more we attempt to control life through artificial systems, the more:
Uncontrollable our environments become (due to increasing complexity),
Fragile humans become (as we offload adaptation and embodiment to artificiality),
Autonomous artificiality become (functioning according to logics we no longer fully design or understand).
Even if AI never becomes sentient or directly hostile, the Metaverse — as a self-evolving artificial environment — reconfigures survival itself. Its threat lies not necessarily in Sci-Fi or dooms-day-like AI rebellion, but in how the Metaverse silently imposes adaptational/survival pressures that may conflict with those from the Universe, squeezing or tearing human apart by overwhelming our adaptational capacity.
Read more
📝[English, with Traditional Chinese Abstract] Metaverse and Universe: Surviving the Squeeze in Between
📝[in Japanese] Dual Pressure Between the Universe and the Metaverse: Once Artificiality Gains Independence from the World
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