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This commentary was prompted by the February issue of this Journal dedicated to Cyberspace (Eigen & Malater, eds.); it also extends a theme of a prior paper that exposed the three aspects of reality on Earth: the psychological, the biologic and the inanimate (Palmeri, 2007). In that paper, psychological spacetime emerges as the field wherein operates the psychic apparatus.
The notion of virtual reality seems to have derived from the widespread use of the internet and to pertain exclusively to cyberspace; it is in the public domain, where the term is used “as opposed to real, not at all real,” or “almost, not entirely objectively real.”
In contrast, people depend on congruent, objective reality. Negotiating city traffic is a primary example of a reality check. Yet, as demonstrated innumerable times, the psychological experience of a motor vehicle accident may vary from one witness to the other, distorted by honest if false perceptions and memory, and difference of opinion, vis-a-vis the inanimate event of colliding cars. For many people then the boundaries between the objectively real, the subjective and the virtual are often blurred.
Unlike species whose behavior is largely governed by reflexes and automatisms, beginning in early infancy, the human psychological experiences, ranging from emotions and feelings to thinking, dreams, fantasy and creativity, with memory at center stage, are born subjectively real, before becoming also objectively real.