ABSTRACT
This chapter is broken up into four sections, each of which examines controversial axiological claims that various thinkers have made about specific types of human experience that qualify as simulated under the criteria provided in Chapter 1. Philosophers (and others) who have developed ethical critiques of Virtual Reality technology, live theater, role-playing games, and Dissociative Identity Disorder have exhibited certain uniform prejudices that derive from an insufficiently examined and ultimately unsustainable notion of personal authenticity. These assumptions, it is shown, are widespread enough and stretch back far enough in history to deserve characterization as a fundamental blind spot in Western thought about the human good.
