Discovering a Threshold: A Novel Approach to the Ontology of Virtual Realities

This paper advances a phenomenological account of the ontology of virtual reality, arguing that virtual worlds must be understood on their own terms rather than reduced to the physical hardware and digital processes that sustain them. Its central thesis is that a fundamental ontological divide separates the virtual from the non-virtual, and that this divide is visible within the lived experience of users. The author develops this position primarily through a critique of David Chalmers' "virtual digitalism," which grounds virtual objects in underlying digital structures analogous to the way water is grounded in H2O. The paper contends that such reductive grounding fails because a user cannot discover the hardware basis from within the virtual experience, and that claims about virtuality made from outside it do not capture what the experience itself is.

The argument rests on phenomenological analysis of immersion, illustrated by a video game archery example, and on the breaks in immersion that reveal the boundary between virtual and non-virtual. Drawing on Heidegger and on empirical work such as Slater and Wilbur (1997), the author characterizes the virtual as a second-order domain that remains irreducible to non-virtual causes. The paper also engages game studies concepts, including Huizinga's "magic circle" and Blackman's (2022) claim that VR worlds are not separate spaces, which it reinterprets as supporting a virtual/real distinction.

The final section complicates the picture by arguing that immersion is never a clean boundary but is repeatedly interrupted by "emersive effects" that refocus players on themselves, which the author, following Kubiński and others, treats as enjoyable rather than defective. Drawing on Vella's "I-in-the-gameworld" and Mosselaer's distinction between fictional and real-directed emotions, the paper proposes an ontology that preserves the game-world/real-world distinction while recognizing the reality of virtual experience. The work is primarily theoretical, offering no original empirical data, and it draws on presence and distraction studies such as Nordahl and Korsgaard (2010) and Oh et al. (2019) as contextual support.