Identity and Virtual Reality: A Uchronic Approach

And what if the only reality in existence was virtual reality? The individual identity in virtual reality has always been studied with regards to individual identity in reality. Indeed, the individual in virtual reality is considered as a real individual to whom we removed fundamental features: spatial unity (Leibniz) and temporal identity or sameness (Ricoeur, 1990). In other words, a virtual individual seems to be less than a real individual: it has neither spatial unity, nor temporal identity (Nannipieri, 2009). The purpose of our work is to try to understand virtual identity itself, as a stand alone entity, a concept and possibly an experience, thus not considering virtual identity to be a lack of real identity. That is the reason why it seems interesting to study individual identity on the basis of a uchronic approach. A uchrony is an alternate history. It is a narrative process which consists in proposing a hypothesis: “and what if such an event had not taken place?” or “if it had taken place in some specific way” and deduce the consequences (social, political, economical, psychological, etc.) from the hypothesis. For example, in The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick proposes a uchrony: the German and the Japanese people won World War II. The hypothesis of the current work is the following: reality does not exist (Baudrillard, 1981) and the only reality which exists is virtual reality. What would the consequences be on the identity of the individual? Consequently, it is necessary to study the identity of the individual in virtual reality according to the features of the space and of the time in a virtual environment. In down-toearth terms, the virtual space can be multiple, can have two or three dimensions and can be perceived from several perspectives at the same time. Concerning virtual time, it can be multiple, intermittent, reversible, and it can go by at different speeds (cf. Figure 1). If the spacio-temporal aspects of reality are withdrawn from our world because of a strong thrust of virtual reality