Words&Dirt

“The level of accuracy and believability exhibited as a matter of course by the virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary––at the most profoundly saturative level of manufactured-environment manipulation––to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind the subject that what appeared to be real really wasn’t.

Even at far less excessive states of illusory permeation, the immediacy and vividness of the standard virtual reality adventure was sufficient to make all but the most determinedly and committedly corporeal of humans quite forget that the experience they were having wasn’t authentic, and the very ubiquity of this commonplace conviction was a ringing tribute to the tenacity, intelligence, imagination and determination of all those individuals and organisations down the ages who had contributed to the fact that, in the Culture, anybody anytime could experience anything anywhere for nothing, and never need worry themselves with the thought that actually it was all pretend.

Naturally, then, there was, for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually, an almost inestimable cachet in having seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or generally experienced something absolutely and definitely for real, with none of this contemptible virtuality stuff getting in the way.”

––Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 351

“If the ethical life that we have is to be effectively criticized and changed, then it can be so only in ways that can be understood as appropriately modifying the dispositions that we have.  Indeed, only a dispositional view, it seems to me, can give a socially and psychologically realistic account of ethical criticism and its effects, an account that gives enough weight to the fact that we can actually explain and understand the occurrence of ethical attitudes that we find variously prejudiced, limited, confused, barbarous and so on.  Those views, on the other hand, that see the basic ethical characteristics as more like purely cognitive powers need a theory of error, and they do not have one.  Without a convincing theory of error, they are bound to find that large-scale ethical criticism is either impossible for them, or doomed to be purely moralistic.”

––Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, by Bernard Williams, pg. 75