Abstract
In recent years, the world we live in has been changing dramatically due to the rapid development of technologies such as AI, metaverses and humanoids. This paper focuses on a worldview that may emerge in the future amidst such radical changes in the world we live in.
Until now, our common worldview has been that no matter how elaborates the experience in cyberspace may seem, the true reality lies within the experience in the physical world. Today’s technological situation, however, holds the potential for the emergence of a very different worldview. It is a worldview that finds the essence of humans not in the bodily self in the physical world, but in the self as a kind of mental existence detached from the body, and that the self as mental existence is understood to emerge in the actual world as a physical body, a VR avatar in cyberspace, or a remote-controlled robotic avatar. This mental existence will be called tulpa in this paper. The human consciousness and thought still belong to the physical body, which is centered in the brain. Nonetheless, people imagine that the physical body does not give rise to tulpa, but that tulpa appears as a physical self. Here, the physical body is imagined as just one option, along with numerous avatars, for the tulpa to be
embodied in the actual world.
This worldview certainly seems strange to us today. However, in the near future,
there may be more than a few people who accept this worldview. We need to be prepared now for any problems that will arise at that time.
