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We are living in a time of the transient hypothesis, the infinitely mobile point of view, the flexible, transformative text, in which a permissive paradox prevails and incompleteness is the form. We fly on the wings of aporia, where everything may be what it seems not to be, bathed in a negotiable semiosis. We are living in the time of the transient self, embodying the identity of ambiguity — actually multiple identities — acting in a variety of realities, which are themselves incomplete and generative. This is perhaps the most hopeful time in our assumed evolutionary ascent, leading us beyond dumb sentience to an expanded consciousness. If the metaverse has achieved anything in the short time span of its forming, it is the interrogation of the nature of consciousness that it provokes. Where is the mind located when identity is as much bound up in an avatar, or across a group of highly differentiated avatars, as it is in a material body? Where indeed is the self located in the network environment?

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-211-78891-2_4

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