Abstract

The opposition between “in real life” an “in virtual life” is often used of, in order to distinguish between two parts of the world. We are supposed to live a virtual life on the Internet, behind the lightened screen of our computer, while we are supposed to live a real life in the real world. I claim that the Internet is not a virtual world, and that it is a part of the actual world for there are causal links between the Internet and the so-called real world. According to David Lewis, worlds that are causally linked to each other cannot be different worlds. The only way to conceive of the Internet as a part of the actual world is to adopt Maurizio Ferraris’ hypothesis about documentality because, under such a hypothesis, what one writes has a causal power.