“It is a pair of goggles through which you see a totally different world where the story is all about you and you are in it.” If you read this text in 2017, you may have assumed it to be the advertisement of the latest virtual reality, or VR, headset.  However in 1935 people read a similar text in Stanley Weinbaum’s scientific fiction Pygmalion's Spectacles.  Amazed at the eye-opening imagination, few would have imagined it to become reality in the near future. We live in such an age that things that appeared in scientific fictions merely a few decades ago have been making themselves part of our everyday lives. Ecstasy, first, then anxiety ensues — in the face of VR technology where is the boundary between the real world and the virtual world? Are we still authentic human beings if one day we spend more time in the virtual world than in the ‘real’ world?

Such anxiety is actually nothing new. For thousands of years, human beings have never stopped examining the meaning of life, what is reality and what is nihility. If there is something new this time, it is the unprecedented speed of technology developments which cast a dazzling spotlight upon the ancient questions. The spotlight is so conspicuous that we almost feel we have to focus on it in order to find an answer.