Naghmeh Rezaie

Do we expect the virtual reality advancements in the AI age to take us way beyond what we have already experienced on earth as human beings, or to revolutionize our understanding of any fundamental concepts, such as the meaning of life or the essence of consciousness? Carrying so many unanswered questions about reality and truth on our historical shoulders, we are collectively migrating into a new blurry phase of augmented virtual realism in the digital era, exemplified by Metaverse, where the concepts of truth, reality and human identity will become more evasive than ever. In this new chapter of a “Brave New World”, we need new epistemological grounds to redefine our identity, and in order to do that, we must go beyond the existing terminologies and frameworks to re-articulate the meaning of our existence as human beings. This paper approaches T-Consciousness Theory by Mohammad Ali Taheri as a gateway to the “hard problem of consciousness” and explores the alternative discourse and terminology of Taheri’s theory, marked by the prefix Fara as a key-component rather than Meta, to go beyond the common definitions of virtual reality, truth and consciousness and revisit human stance in the actual and virtual worlds. The paper situates Taheri’s theory in dialogue with Chalmers’ Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy (2022) to offer a critical approach to philosophy’s incapability of proving or rejecting whether the world we live in is itself a virtual one, a simulation, a Matrix, or not, and provides new answers to such fundamental questions. In this framework, the internet itself will be approached as detection, a replication, and adaptation of the Cosmic Consciousness Network, and the CCN Theory introduced by Taheri will provide new explanations of how the cosmos operates like a super-computer, as questioned by Chalmer’s and other philosophers. We will reinvestigate the virtuality of the world, Majaz, by examining motion, and revisit the interrelationship between reality and truth through Taheri’s approach, which also addresses the correlation of the hardware to the software, and uncertainty to certainty. Offering a brief overview of a grand theory, we will approach Fara and Meta, charged with notions of beyond-ness, as representatives of not only terminologies but also worldviews. The prefixes carry heavy weights in their epistemological subtexts on the pathways that will direct human’s sense of identity, collective consciousness, and belonging. Fara-worldview distinguishes Taheri’s discourse from the dominant scholarly language, and we maintain that the trajectory of this border-crossing encounter is an epoch-making one.

Naghmeh Rezaie (PhD English, University of Delaware) is an adaptation studies scholar interested in interdisciplinary research areas that engage adaptation theory, theory of intertextuality, comparative literature and hermeneutics, philosophy of languages and phenomenology. She has been working on T-consciousness theory, the emergence of human language and intertextuality, and has presented the video posters “The Word’s Unity of Existence” and “Intertextual T-Consciousness” at the Science of Consciousness Annual Conference in April 2022 and April 2024. As an adjunct faculty member at UD, she is currently teaching courses on academic writing that revisit human language and identity at the AI age and is interested in working on means of implementing the study of human consciousness into pedagogy. As an experienced translator, published poet and editor, Naghmeh is also engaged in translating  T-consciousness theory’s source texts which demand a novel terminology marked by the prefix Fara, instead of meta, to go beyond the limits of the dominant philosophical discourse to explain the interrelationship between truth, reality, and virtuality. Her new article on “Meta or Fara?” investigates the role of T-Consciousness theory in the context of AI age and raise of virtual realism informed by the shortcomings of philosophy to address human identity and collective awareness at this critical historical moment.