The digital age introduces a radical transformation in symbolic construal: imagined worlds are no longer confined to text, image, or performance but instantiated interactively in virtual environments. Simulation and virtuality extend the epistemic and imaginative capacities of the collective, allowing possibilities to be explored, manipulated, and co-experienced in real time.
Digital cosmoses—ranging from immersive video games to virtual realities and algorithmically generated simulations—render the act of construal itself reflexive. Possibility is no longer merely proposed; it can be navigated, tested, and modified by participants. These worlds operate as relational fields: agency, structure, and feedback loops co-define what can occur, while the symbolic frameworks of earlier imaginative systems are recast as dynamic, interactive, and malleable.
Virtuality also reconfigures temporality and scale. Histories, futures, and alternative presents coexist within the same simulated space, allowing relational potentialities to unfold non-linearly. Ethical dilemmas, social structures, and ecological contingencies can be explored as situated experiments, revealing both constraints and emergent possibilities within a designed cosmos.
In short, the digital cosmos exemplifies the co-evolution of symbolic worlds and human construal. Possibility is no longer a matter of interpretation alone but of interactive, participatory negotiation. These new worlds do not simply mirror reality; they shape the very horizon of what can be imagined, experienced, and actualised. Simulation and virtuality thus extend the genealogy of imagined worlds into a reflexive, relational, and technologically mediated field of possibility.
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