This book, as the author himself points out, brings together two topics: 1) the virtual and 2) relativity. Adding the virtual to the study of relativity gives a different perspective to philosophical analysis. It extends the classical range of issues under research and, at the same time, provides a new direction and a new interpretation.
The category of relativity has been giving a hard time to philosophical absolutism since antiquity. In the age of post-modernity, this category has been neither neglected nor underestimated, but rather occupies a prominent place on the scene and has even stepped into the limelight. This book draws a strict distinction between the sober approach to relativity and a relativism incapable of seeing the limits of relativity.
The virtual is defined in relation to the real and is said to include all artifacts. The virtual does not live - it is not born and does not die; like Plato’s ideas, it is a pure form with no matter; the virtual determines the life form - the real is formless and senseless without the virtual. The real is the life process within which we are born, live, and die. We cannot be born, live, and die in a computer simulation, but always “here-and-now.” This is the moment of speaking from where we can only virtually return to the past or travel into the future. This is one of the main characteristics of the realits time is irreversible unlike virtual time. On the screen, we can see how a broken glass, whose parts are dispersed, is restored to its original state and the spilled liquid pours back into it; but this is possible only as a computer simulation, by reversing the reel, etc., and not as a process developing in real time where past and future are not interchangeable. The link between the real and the virtual is not symmetrical and reciprocal. The virtual itself is an aspect - a very important aspect - of the real life process. It is imaginative, conceptualizable, ideological. The book argues that the sense of life is always a certain ideology. But although life overcomes any sense, it cannot be lived without sense. Let me quote in this context Ortega-y-Gasset who claims that we think in the world of ideas while in the world of reality, we abide. Gerdjikov stresses that we cannot live without thinking nor can we think without living, but these are not two independent, although interpenetrating, worlds because the virtual itself is a moment of the real life process. It is true that we have to pay attention to the fact that being a part of a process is especially important here. If we continue to follow Ortega, he will unfold for us this not simple connection between the world of ideas, of our thoughts, on the one hand, and the world of belief, on the other, where we abide being convinced of its real existence - beliefs are old ideas transformed into reality. If we translate Gerdjikov’s book into the language of Ortega, this would mean that when people start to credit the virtual they can begin to want to embody it in something.