Dreyfus uses the lack of an actual body to state that virtual reality can never become a way to replace actual reality. This, of course, is essentially one of the eventual goals of the entire telecommunications industry - to eliminate the need to physically be someplace in order to be there.
This is actually the focus of the attraction at Walt Disney World's EPCOT park, the Spaceship Earth (the big golf-ball looking thing). Already there are technologies that begin to overcome the more obvious issues of not being someplace that are raised (namely visually seeing someone in real time and hearing them in real time). In addition, there are some more sci-fi style technologies that are also in development that could further aid. For example, there is a technology that has been developed to aid with surgeons who want to practice their surgery that allows them to physically feel what the VR headset is showing them. So while there may not be an actual person in the room that they're operating in, inside their headset, they do see an actual person, and with their high-tech gloves, they can even *feel* that person. Given a few years and some interest, this could easily be extended to full-body suits which fully digitizes your body (like the suits they have athletes wear when digitizing their bodies for video games) and then also allows feedback and manipulation with a digital world as if it were a real world.
My main question is that while technology may be able to continually update to make online-life more and more similar to real life, Dreyfus still claims that a virtual-world will never be as effective as a person-to-person real life meeting. Why?
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