> what would the Staff of Westfall be in a virtual coworking space? Could you beat up people with it?
You’re still limiting the question to the plane of content: the object’s physical (virtual) characteristics.
Consider the staff as it exists in the plane of expression: what is the person expressing by displaying the item? It would express that you play WoW, are an Alliance player, and play a caster of some sort. That might be a valuable ice breaker or conversation starter; a thing that helps people identify a shared experience or facet of their shared identity.
You have to see through the object’s simulated characteristics and into what the object’s existence means for it to have value. If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.
> If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.
Again, that's if you consider that the only value that exists is showing and signaling. That's, in my opinion, a really limited view of things. Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something. In fact, that's the main point of most objects. If your objects are only here because they mean something, they could very well just be a list of facts. Linking a list of facts to your identity, even if it's decentralized, is trivial. But it's not the everything you can do. I have a pickaxe in Minecraft. If I could use it to break rock in <cool metaverse stuff>, that would be great. If I can just show a pickaxe, what's the point of the pickaxe?
The whole thread is that taking an object from one simulation to another is not really the opposite of having distinct simulations: it just forces us to reconcile with what an object is.
The only way you can have separate simulations is if a person can define their own simulation. If you can't define "I won't let you bonk your coworkers on the head with a stick" then you're not in control of your simulation; you're not defining your own simulation, you're just running another instance of some agreed-upon single simulation. At that point, those are the same simulation. So a person setting up a space has to be free to define the behaviors of the objects in that space, otherwise it's not really their simulation.
If you take an object from one simulation to another, and it does not behave the same way in the two simulations, they're still the same object.
> Objets are not just here to mean something, but also to do something.
The fact that they do something does not identify them as objects. A pickaxe in Minecraft doesn't truly break anything. It plays a sound and deletes a cube. If you're in creative mode in Minecraft, it doesn't even increment your inventory. You can also delete a cube in a voxel editor like Magica Voxel. Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the delete button in Magica Voxel? Is the pickaxe in your Minecraft game the same object as the pickaxe in my Minecraft game? Obviously no. They all do the same thing, but they're not the same object.
The only thing necessary to satisfy "moving an object from one simulation to another" is that they be provably of one distinct identity and not be duplicable.
> The only thing necessary to satisfy "moving an object from one simulation to another" is that they be provably of one distinct identity and not be duplicable.
That would mean that you don't have money. Many objects are fungible. If our two pickaxes have the same properties (same name, enchantements, durability, material), then they are the same. A big part of our experience in the world is fungible. Most of the time when I want a pen I only want to be able to write on paper. I don't care if it's your pen or my pen or anything like this.
You’re still limiting the question to the plane of content: the object’s physical (virtual) characteristics.
Consider the staff as it exists in the plane of expression: what is the person expressing by displaying the item? It would express that you play WoW, are an Alliance player, and play a caster of some sort. That might be a valuable ice breaker or conversation starter; a thing that helps people identify a shared experience or facet of their shared identity.
You have to see through the object’s simulated characteristics and into what the object’s existence means for it to have value. If the object doesn’t mean anything, then there’s not much point in moving it from space to space.