* Baudrillard's ideas on the hyperreality, which is basically a simulation that doesn't actually relate to any underlying reality. He argued that a lot of the signs and symbols in our postmodern society have become hyperreal, purely manufactured artifacts.
* Deleuze's concept of virtuality which he defines as something isn't actual, but is nevertheless real.
Is a virtual reality any less real than physicality? If sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then sufficiently advanced artificial reality might be indistinguishable from reality.
I think as we go along, a lot of Baudrilliard's ideas that seemed radical in the 1980s are becoming inert, as they are so ingrained in our everyday experience (eg, hyper-reality, the simulacra, etc). At least in this iteration of the technology. Moving into mass-scale mixed reality environments will be an entirely different proposition.
Amount of CO2 in the air. Number of Rohingya killed. Amount of crude in Cantarell at this moment. Etc etc etc ad infinitum.
What are the answers to those questions? What are the physical implications? (ie-what will the Earth physically do with all the CO2? There is definitely an answer to that question which is non-ideological and unbiased, and, unfortunately, only really known for certain by Mother Nature.) All such questions, in fact, have answers that are, very much, non-ideological, and unbiased. Unfortunately, they are not really perceptible by humans without help. Sometimes our science can help, sometimes our knowledge of psychology can help, etc. But that's where our ideologies will come in. Only human perception of these very physical states, and their implications, are ideological. Because the ideology is augmenting the base reality with something we can understand. Something comfortable and intuitive for us.
Sorry for rambling. I think someone else might be able to explain it better. But it's my best shot at explaining why I think AR is a pretty good analogy for ideology.
Sure, there are groups that impugn these most basic shared truths — e.g. flat-earthers and crpyto-financiers — but for most of us, the foundational nodes in our cognitive perceptual framework are boring, ie common.
The problem is most Americans politics had a unified ideological understanding of the world for nearly 3 centuries (at least if we count the WASP america). This division is new, and America's distaste of any post 1850's western continental philosophy (as it was mostly dominated by Marxists) means they lack the vocabulary to discuss these concepts, or understand their long tail implications.
I think the point is that "bemoaning" that is an ideology in itself. So your own reality is "augmented" with a belief set that is, likely, not terribly representative of reality. You've simply filled in the gaps in everyday experiences with something that you can, at once, understand, and is comfortable to you.
so you have it exactly backwards. or maybe not, who the hell knows with hegelians.
But you can approach religions as a topic in countless ways, so I think it is fair not to reduce it to the lowest (albeit maybe most common...) approach people have
Religion has elements of ideology, some ideologies are derived from, related to, or specifically opposed to religious belief. That last might be an XOR.
To save you even more work:
"The internet of things is fundamental to free will"
"The unexamined life of Self driving cars"
"How seq2seq networks are marxist"
