Embodying Metaverse as artificial life: At the intersection of media and 4E cognition theories

Media theory and cognitive science have both studied how media environments shape human perception and cognition, yet they remain largely separate disciplines. With the rise of virtual reality and the Metaverse, the physical body becomes increasingly intertwined with virtual spaces. This paper argues for an interdisciplinary approach to understand how immersive environments affect sensory-motor capabilities and warns against uncontrolled growth of the Metaverse. It introduces the concept of the "Dry Body"—a virtual entity that shares cognitive resources with the physical body but is not physically part of it, evolving a new form of corporeality adapted to synthetic surroundings.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In the last decades of the 20th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, mature and reach their pinnacles by analysing, each from their own disciplinary perspective, two of the same core phenomena: that of media as the environment, transmitter and creator of stimuli, and that of embodied human mind as the stimuli receiver, interpreter, experiencer, and also how both are affected by each other. Even though treating a range of very similar problems and coming to similar conclusions, this still has not brought these two disciplines closer together or resulted in their interdisciplinary approach. They did coalesce in regards to traditional media such as film, but more points of connection are needed for untangling interactive and immersive media environments and their effects on human cognition, action, and perception. With the rise of VR and VR-like systems, especially as they start to evolve into the Metaverse as their main platform of interconnectivity, the tissue of the body becomes almost physically intertwined with that of the virtual surrounding it inhabits through immersion. Simultaneously, the interest in these disciplines arises anew, and especially the need to use their concepts in an interdisciplinary way. This paper?s main interest is to bring these disciplines together in problematising the position of a physical body and its sensory-motor capabilities and their development within synthetic surroundings as Metaverse and anticipate potential downsides of Metaverse?s uncontrolled growth. We will do so also by looking into Metaverse as an artificial-life-like phenomenon, following artificial-life rules and evolving a completely new ?corporeality?, a body which is completely adapted to virtual spaces. We call this body the Dry Body, an entity sharing cognitive resources with the physical body it is not a physical part of, but has to extend to.