Enacting Virtual Reality Francesco Parisi University of Messina (Italy) What is it like to be a virtual body? This paper will offer a tentative answer to this question. For those to whom this question sounds familiar, it may be because it echoes a more famous one, asked almost fifty years ago by Thomas Nagel: What is it like to be a bat? (Nagel, 1974). The answer to that question advanced the idea that if we want to experience the point of view of another form of life, all the information calculated by our big brains will be inadequate if not supported by a body. In other words, the phenomenal consciousness of another animal is not merely replicable by the computational brain machinery: to be a bat, we need wings, echoloca- tion, and all the remaining features that make a body a bat body. Before that, Hubert Dreyfus (1967), grounding his conceptual observa- tions on existential phenomenology, suggested that any disembodied intel- ligent behavior (i.e., artificial intelligence) unavoidably lacks something that can be provided only by possessing a body. “Being embodied creates a second possibility: an active, involved agent can build up skills and assimi- late instruments as extensions of his body. Thus, an embodied agent can dwell in the world in such a way as to avoid the infinite task of trying to formalize everything” (Dreyfus, 1967, 30–31). During the 90s, this idea was strengthened through Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana's work, who made a simple but revolutionary move: they stated that life is cognition (Maturana and Varela, 1980). By ar- ticulating the concept of autopoiesis, they offered a precise conceptual ap- paratus for studying cognition as something that emerges in a temporally extended relation between an organism and its environment. It is acknowl- edged that these can be considered the epistemological roots of what is now known as embodied cognition (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Gallagher, 2005; Shapiro, 2010). The autopoietic system works while inex- tricably immersed in a specific environment in the way that its structure (self-production) remains intact despite the environmental pressures (self- distinction). So, what an autopoietic system actually becomes is the result of this constant negotiation. 241