On the Problem of Ontological Status of the Virtual

Abstract

There are various ways to conceptualise the virtual in contemporary philosophy, yet they all seem to boil down to reaffirming classical binaries such as potency-act or possibility-reality. Even Gilles Deleuze, who to his credit tried to emphasise the realness of the virtual to avoid reducing it to something simply untrue or nonexistent, ended up contrasting the virtual with things that have been  realised or embodied, which tacitly implies that the concept of the virtual works perhaps too similarly to potential or possible. Possible worlds concept postulates hypothetical or conceivable versions of the perceived world, providing us with an opportunity to talk about the virtual as a co-possible presence of, say, various future timelines. Still, the virtual (and its various contemporary understandings) enable us not only to speak of the actualisation of the possible or co-presence of different possibilities or modelling and realisation of thought experiments, but also of de-actualistion of all that has been realised. In this sense, the virtual has to be understood as a kind of complex that embraces and unites an infinite variety of potential possibilities at different stages of their realisation as an inescapably limited set of what is actually embodied in various forms, which assumes  degrees of freedom of their mutual effective conversion. The proposed approach provides tools and methods for conceptualizing the virtual, making it possible to coherently describe not only technical computer models, but also works of art, not only various manifestations of the psyche, but also the diversity of sociocultural practices and humanitarian technologies.