Once you can be any body, the physical world does not stop mattering. It becomes the expensive server — high latency, terrible bandwidth, and the only one everybody is already on.

Navigation:The Biosphere Grows a Technosphere · The Subtle Art Of Not Blowing Ourselves Up

Be any body

The phrase is be any body.

Not anybody. Not another person's memory layer. Not possession, replacement, theft, or impersonation. Any body: any interface through which a self can meet a world.

That distinction is the whole movement in miniature. Bodies are interface. Selves are memory layers held by inferential boundaries. If the boundary can be maintained through another interface, then the body becomes a choice of world-facing equipment rather than the metaphysical seat of identity.

That does not make bodies trivial. A body is how a world arrives. It is the shape of possible action, sensation, cost, risk, pleasure, and surprise. Change the body and you change the world available to the self. But that is exactly the point. If a migrated person could choose bodies, they would be choosing ways for reality to reach them.

A human body for exploring a human environment.

A synthetic body for zooming through the vacuum of space.

A swimming body for taking a dip in Jupiter's atmosphere.

A virtual body for a virtual world.

Not costumes.

Interfaces.

The physical world as one venue

Once bodies are understood as interfaces, the distinction between physical and virtual worlds changes.

It does not disappear. It becomes logistical rather than ontological.

A virtual world is computed for the interface. A physical world must be reached, endured, fabricated into, and paid for in ordinary thermodynamic ways. If you want to visit a simulated ocean, the server supplies the ocean as signal. If you want to swim in Jupiter's atmosphere, someone has to build or print a body that can survive there, route your interface into it, manage latency, protect the channel, and pay the physical cost of putting that body where the atmosphere is.

The physical world becomes just another world you can visit.

But it is the most expensive (and risky) one.