> > Our only understanding of and access to reality is a simulation. Period.

Nobody ever died of simulated starvation. Alimentation (eating, drinking, 
sensual enjoyment) is a form of access to reality, although not a form of 
understanding (compare T. Eliot, top bard: "poetry should be enjoyed before 
it is understood").

Only a mind without a body could dwell entirely amongst simulacra: what is 
more, without a body it is far from clear what they would be simulacra *for*, 
what the terms of reference of the simulation would be (the simulacra in "The 
Matrix" map the bodily needs and desires of real bodies in the pods: if there 
were no real bodies anywhere, the Matrix would not have the physical 
constraints that Neo learns to violate. Somewhere in the world of "The 
Matrix" is a world that is not the world of the Matrix. It's difficult to 
know where the "Period" should go, as we could just as easily slip into an 
infinite regress. But it's a dumb action movie, anyway: read Husserl, 
Merleau-Ponty, Levinas if you really want to think this stuff through).

I think of "Naked Objects" as avatars of objects: proxies you can do business 
with. The same goes for the various glyphs and diagrams floating around in 
Morphic-space. For that matter, the same goes for the "raw" code you write 
and inspect in the browser. And objects themselves are useful abstractions of 
processes carried out within the VM, itself an abstraction. Objects are an 
abstraction that allows an embodied human to meet the machine on terms 
embodied humans find relatively congenial; avatars such as Morphs are there 
to make things more congenial still. They're all about friendliness, 
familiarity, lowering the impedance between one interface and another. 
They're not really about epistemology at all.

Dominic