Technology and the Ontology of the Virtual

This chapter offers a critical analysis of the current impact of digital technologies on the ontology of the virtual. In particular, it investigates the potential challenges to traditional metaphysics and ontology raised by the ongoing digitization of reality, which promises to increasingly result in the creation of new virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. Such realities have a profound impact both on us and on our world, since they augment, enhance, re-engineer, or subject to judgement our experience of reality. It is thus worth reflecting on how the real and the virtual currently interact and influence one another, and how they may eventually evolve into a supervening, mixed dimension.