Extropia DaSilva recently posted an interesting article on existence in regards to avatars and their controllers. I started to type a reply and realized I could just turn it into a blog post. Please read her article on her blog for context.
In response:
More philosophical musings. Okay, I'll take a stab, as usual.
Overall, the meta-topic is "does technology control us or do we control technology". With AI advancing in the next few decades, this will become a literal question, but for now, it's more figurative. Ultimately, the compelling that you speak of is, in fact, not an external force at all. The cause / effect is really just an illusion, in that the motivation for someone to keep logging in is from within the human being. And beyond that, if we were to look at more root-ward causes, we'd have to consider community and the draw of interaction, entertainment, need for doing business, etc; ultimately, this string of logic devolves into an endless search for initial cause - a philosophical debate that's been going on a long time. Instead, I'd rather cite proof by induction that none of the causes external to the person really matter - the decision is still weighed by the person and they have their own responsibility to make decisions or make the decision to allow decisions to be made for them. ("If you choose not to decide / you still have made a choice." - Rush, "Free Will")
"flowers are superb at manipulating the behaviour of certain other life forms, one of which is the bee."
I think this is a projection. We humans are constantly seeking to find human traits in things, but that is a statement about our behavior, not the things. Dawkins, who you quote, essentially doesn't believe in individuality. I suppose from that perspective, it is possible for the AV to be part of a larger living organism. The problem is that perspective makes the larger question moot, as there are no individuals at all to worry about cause and effect. I personally find universal connection a great concept to fuel compassion and understanding between myself and other people, but ultimately if we choose to have any purpose in life, we need to choose to recognize individuality.
"One possibility is that GP will cancel all accounts for online worlds ... Gwyneth Llewelyn is not seen or heard from again. ... It would mean Gwyn had died. OK, I admit nobody (probably including myself) would actually think of it in those terms. Gwyn is not dead; she is simply doing something other than participating in online worlds and social networking sites."
Nice try. You set up what appears to be contrary views, but they both are equally guilty of what I pointed out with the flowers - projecting human traits onto non-human entities.
A problem with "existence"
"But if, like me, ... GP’s act of cancelling them would completely cut you off from any further contact with Gwyn. So, regardless of the health of her primary, Gwyneth Llewelyn would have ceased to exist by any practical definition."
I find this logic flawed. In a practical sense, by this logic any friend you haven't spoken to in a long time no longer exists. That doesn't make sense. We know people exist, and arguably - a person's identity is greater than their corporeal state. But the logical flaw actually isn't even in this practical dilemma. The flaw is such: "How long does it take for someone to 'cease to exist'." If GP disconnects on Thursday, do they cease to exist immediately, or only when people realize it? If GP reconnects to the web via her previously established identity, does that mean she suddenly re-exists? I find this definition of "existence" to be far too fleeting and indefinite. Even more flawed it becomes when you realize that simply logging off and going to bed for the evening is a form of completely disconnecting from the web. Do you cease to exist then online because you're not *immediately* available? If we were to assume this, then "not existing" has no practical use - it becomes a devalued, unusable term.
So, with this dismissal of your early assumptions, your conclusions that follow are no longer founded. The idea that one needs to be "drawn back" to maintain existence is no longer valid or sound as it depends upon an artificial definition of existence as merely "attention". As you pointed out, as a person competes on multiple instant message windows, by your logic the person is constantly ceasing to be and re-establishing existence. It becomes even more convoluted when we grant that this implies that existence is relative to the person you're speaking to; for this is the only way a person could simultaneously exist to one person and not exist to another.
Not to say that a person doesn't need to be drawn back. Certainly technology and community draws us in. But it is internal desires to interact with these, regardless of how we might perceive and label them otherwise.
It's not like an author and his/her character in the wild
"For some people, the relationship between the person and the avatar is not so much akin to ‘Mary Anne Evans and George Elliot’ (the latter being the pseudonym of the first), but more like ‘George Elliot’ and ‘Silas Marner’ (the latter being a character invented by the former)."
I've heard this argument before, and I can't agree. The problem with a character like Silas Marner is that once one publishes a book, the character is out there, and is interpreted and modified by the audience reading it. If you're in an ongoing control of an avatar, it's strictly you. Until one releases that identity into the wild, so to speak, I can't see that relationship as true.
Gwyn's Terrific Job At Protecting Her Personal Data
"Gwyn, though, has taken post-immersionism to a whole other level. Googling her name fails to bring up sites that also reference her primary. Seemingly, as far as the Web is concerned, Gwyn just IS Gwyn. Her ‘digital self’, the blog posts and replies she submits, the groups she belongs to, the business negotiations and online friendships she develops, her Flickr snapshots, tweets and the avatar we identify as her, are not just content created BY Gwyn. Collectively, it IS Gwyn. A grand pattern made up of many parts, ensuring she exists in the mind of others; persists in the mind of the primary, as compelling an influence on that mind as the pattern of a flower’s shape, color and scent is to the mind of a bee."
Well, no. It's still GP, in the same vein Mary Anne Evans is George Elliot. An alias, just because it's got digital footprints on the web, doesn't make it anything more self-aware and/or independent from the original person. Gwyn is very good at hiding her real name. But one's identity is made up of what one does and says. And plenty of people keep home life separate from work. There's no difference.
"GP, the primary of Gwyn, is not just lured back to the login screen by the tractor-beam effect of digital self’s patterns, but also because it is rewarding."
Here your argument is based on the assumption that GP is not Gwyn, that they are separate. Therefore I can't accept it based on my previous counter-arguments.
Compelled by family
"... a woman who ‘wanted to take down her MySpace page, but was pressured by friends and family not to do so, because they depended on her for the archiving of photos and some other information”.
So, here we see an example of how the ‘Ubuntu Web’ (which, recall, refers to networks of varying degrees of relationships that a person builds up as a consequence of online social interactions) evolved in such a way as to almost bring free will into question."
It doesn't mean she has less free will. It means she has family and friends with concerns and needs and she wants to tend to them. By your logic, a mother has no free will in concerns of her child. But just because a person has *responsibility* to another person or group doesn't remove their free will. They still choose to be responsible, even if that choice doesn't feel "like a choice" - it just means that you're a mature adult who fully appreciates the value of being responsible.
RE: The doll example - I think this was a weak argument to use at the end. It's far less compelling than living human beings. I've already addressed humans compelling another person to do something, therefore I see no need to specifically address a *weaker* force.
Conclusion
Free will cannot be negated by outside influence. Certainly, we can be compelled by things, but when those things are simply extensions of ourselves, there's simply no way to classify this as an external force. At the same time, I think you're touching upon a fundamental and important issue in our time: In the philosophical sense (and later in the literal sense), are we masters of technology or does it master us?
Ultimately, it's a question of master ourselves. And even if technology demands something to keep us alive - as medicine, modern farming techniques, transportation, and so on, do - it is the conscious awareness of the technology and ourselves that affirms our free will. It is for this reason that discussion of these topics is important.
8/10/2010
Who Controls the Puppet? I Do.
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You have encapsulated my gripe with extropianism and that whole 'I'm in love with the singularity' movement.
Basically it's in more love with the future than the present, and seeks to rid itself of tools to use to measure the extent of this problem.
Puppets always have people behind them; that's what a puppet IS. If your avatar is puppeteering *you,* then it's time to wonder whether you should be doing the virtual worlds thing at all.
>We humans are constantly seeking to find human traits in things, but that is a statement about our behavior, not the things.<
Pointing this tendency out does not necessarily debunk the idea that genes in some plants employ a strategy based around advertisements that appeal to bees, encouraging (maybe even compelling) them to perform tasks favourable to the flowers' reproductive success. If I were Richard Dawkins, I would have put quotation marks under words like 'appeal', 'encourage', 'strategy' and I would certainly make it clear that, where natural selection is concerned, we mean we can talk AS IF flowers employed these methods and strategies but this was NOT an act of deliberate intent.
Similarly, I can imagine various factors coming into play that conspire to influence a person's behaviour so that they act AS IF their online self exerts an influence over them that favours its own continuation.
>If GP disconnects on Thursday, do they cease to exist immediately, or only when people realize it? If GP reconnects to the web via her previously established identity, does that mean she suddenly re-exists? I find this definition of "existence" to be far too fleeting and indefinite.<
I discussed this in another essay, 'Offline In The Afterlife'. Humans are social animals and one of the things our minds evolved to do is 'person permanence'. In other words, it is intuitively understood that, just because you cannot see or hear somebody, they have not ceased to exist. They are 'somewhere', doing 'something'. However, for various reasons our minds did NOT evolve to update 'person permanence' to take into consideration the fact that, when a person dies, they really do not exist anymore. Some may rationalise that 'the deceased is gone' but there is always an aspect of ourselves that believes the deceased is 'somewhere' doing 'something, and the better you know that person, the more vivid this picture of them continuing to exist 'somewhere' becomes.
Similarly, when I log off I STILL EXIST because person permanence makes it very hard for my friends and aquaintances to adopt any view other than one in which I am 'somewhere' doing 'something'.
There is now compelling evidence that a person's 'I' does not exist only in the mind of that individual. It is a pattern that is copied (to varying degrees of fidelity, and never at equal resolution to the individual) into the minds of people we meet. So, in a real sense you can say that, when a person dies, the pattern of their 'I' does not abruptly cease to exist, but gradually fades away as these lower-resolution copies installed in the minds of friends and aquaintances are lost.
Applied to Gwyn, she certainly does not cease to exist as soon as GP disconnects. She would gradually cease to exist as memory of what she was like fades from people's minds, either through death or memory loss. Clearly, if Gwyn makes regular re-apperances and acts in ways vaguely consistant with how others expect Gwyn to behave (based on their internal model of her past behaviors) than she continues to exist in a real sense- regardless of whether or not GP is the same person.
An interesting question, though, is what would happen if GP logged off and, in the interim period, every one of Gwyn's friends and aquaintances quit SL. When Gwyn returns, it is to a world where everyone is a stranger. Well, Gwyn still has GP which is a major source of her own identity (the primary stores the highest-resolution pattern of an avatar's personae, after all) but her future self must surely be very different to how it would have evolved if her old friends/aquaintances had remained inworld. So, in some sense, we can say a version of Gwyn has ceased to exist and another version of Gwyn is now in development. Or, maybe Gwyn would naturally seek out people similar to those she knew before, thereby ensuring she develops in ways fairly true to how she would have evolved if her original ubuntu web had not been lost.
> If you're in an ongoing control of an avatar, it's strictly you.<
No. Cory Ondrejka once said 'SL is communication through shared experience'. Other people react to one's avatar and one's next course of action has to be at least partly influenced by the behaviour of others. The 'story' of Extropia DaSilva is not authored by one person (my primary) but is a collaborative phenomenon that naturally arises through the social complexity of SL.
I understand that you have decided that 'Hiro Pendragon' and 'Ron Blechner' are the same person, and so probably your behaviour in online contexts reflects this attitude, and is amplified back at you in how people react to the way you act. But if you were to perceive Hiro as a person in his own right, and especially if you kept info about 'Ron' to an absolute minimum (such as acknowledging 'someone' is behind Hiro but giving no details about name, age, sex, etc etc), that would amplify people's perception of Hiro as his own person, and their reactions would reflect back at you (that is, Ron), enforcing your belief that Hiro is somewhat seperate from your own self.
>But one's identity is made up of what one does and says. And plenty of people keep home life separate from work. There's no difference.<
Yes there is! Whether you are at home or at work you do not see yourself from a third person perspective, and while you may change your wardrobe you do not swap into a completely different body.
But, in SL, both are possible. Maybe when Gwyn logs in, it is to a virtual home that is an exact copy of her RL one. Maybe she walks around SL using a first person perspective. Maybe GP looks exactly like Gwyn?
But, it is equally plausible that, when Gwyn logs in it is to a place very different to her home, and that GP uses a third person perspective. This provides scope for seeing the avatar as 'someone else who is somewhere else'. And, obviously, one can invent an avatar with any degree of difference between the physical appearance of the primary that one desires.
These factors- perception of a place different to the one the primary is currently in; a third-person perspective of one's avatar; the reactions of other people to your avatar- can be manipulated to convey an impression that the digital person is a person in its own right, going way beyond the limited scope for roleplay in your home/work comparison.
Hey Extropia, thanks for commenting. :)
"Pointing this tendency out does not necessarily debunk the idea that genes in some plants employ a strategy based around advertisements that appeal to bees..."
Yes, it does, because "employ a strategy" implies willful causation. Bees and plants evolved together, and the plants prettier to bees got pollinated survived more easily. Again, I think Dawkins' arguments essentially negate individuality; the other way to look at it would be that he was making a lovely metaphor about how interconnected we are.
"when I log off I STILL EXIST ... etc"
"[GP] would gradually cease to exist as memory "
Okay, so you believe the process is gradual, based on memory loss. But this still fits into what I was saying - that you've stated that "existence" is based relatively on the connections with other people. How can a person both exist and not exist? I think the problem is that "exist" is being equated with "exist in the mind of someone else". They are two wholly different things. (Though certainly living a healthy social lifestyle, the prior requires the latter, I'll grant.)
But your reasoning hinges on the fact that "exists in the mind of someone else" is the same as "exists". You assert a human need to continue to reconnect, as if existence depends on the connections. Maybe I misread you - certainly I agree that people are driven to these social connections, but when you essentially give an avatar its own separate identity and will, as you've written, that to me puts plain old "existence" and not simply "existence in another's mind" as the central part.
"> If you're in an ongoing control of an avatar, it's strictly you.<
No. Cory Ondrejka once said 'SL is communication through shared experience'. Other people react to one's avatar and one's next course of action has to be at least partly influenced by the behaviour of others. The 'story' of Extropia DaSilva is not authored by one person (my primary) but is a collaborative phenomenon that naturally arises through the social complexity of SL."
What you say is nothing different from how we live our lives. My own story is written by other people that I interact with, as well. But that is still "the story of me" and not simply "me". And while "the story of me" is definitely something that may be more permanent than "me", "the story of me" does not have willpower of its own. It's like - the memory of Albert Einstein and his work inspired millions of people, but that's not Albert Einstein's will, it's people reacting. This is very similar to the author / character in book scenario.
So the avatar is still the avatar's controller, as I've said, because "the story of the avatar" exists in parallel, but without consciousness or will unto itself.
">But one's identity is made up of what one does and says. And plenty of people keep home life separate from work. There's no difference.<
... Whether you are at home or at work you do not see yourself from a third person perspective, and while you may change your wardrobe you do not swap into a completely different body.
....
These factors ... can be manipulated to convey an impression that the digital person is a person in its own right, going way beyond the limited scope for roleplay in your home/work comparison"
I disagree. These are relative changes. When I'm on the phone with someone at work, who may have never met me or seen a photograph of me, or know my age, may equally visualize who I am very different from what my physical body reflects. It is, in fact, the same. Yes, a virtual world allows for a more radical change in appearance, but it still boils down to an expression of oneself.
'SL is communication through shared experience"
shared interference would be more accurate....
and its dosent take AI for technology to "control us"
i just spent 6 hrs in a DMV...to get a new state drivers license...
the robots workign there were only as able as their given technology/machines sold to the state by some private organization.
>Yes, it does, because "employ a strategy" implies willful causation.<
Well I am not writing an essay on natural selection. If I was, I would explain the difference between 'designs' and 'designoids', the former being purposefully conceived and the latter being a powerful ILLUSION of being designed. I would also explain how such illusions can come into being. But to go into such detail for the purposes of THIS essay is just overkill. It is enough that, on a simplified level, we can say flowers have patterns that influence bees to work for them.
Oh, yes, I think Dawkins was making a point about being interconnected.
My comments about the necessity of connections was not regarding humans per se, but digital people. The latter are imaginary. If everyone stopped imagining you exist, it would not mean you somehow disappear. But if everyone (including my primary) stopped imagining I exist, then I really would NOT.
>may equally visualize who I am very different<
Telephone analogy fails because, once again, this form of communication does not provide a perception of somebody else who is somewhere else. The chances of everyone forming a consistant image of your telephone self is small. But, if you were to ask people who interact with me inworld 'what does Extropia look like?', the descriptions would all be consistant.
>it still boils down to an expression of oneself.<
It is an expression of A self. For you to believe you are corresponding with me, it requires somebody to respond in ways consistant with your mental model of 'me'. The original essay (available at Gwyn's blog) included an examination a single online self distributed among several offline selves.
Under what circumstances would you consider Hiro a person in his own right?
"on a simplified level, we can say flowers have patterns that influence bees to work for them."
No, I don't believe we can say this. You're simply replacing one active verb done by the flowers with another. The flowers, nor the pattern on the flowers, actually "influence" the bees. They are stimuli, for certain, and I know I'm splitting hairs. However, this is an ontological topic, and so it's important to remove colloquial terminology - such as inanimate objects having power over sentient beings - if they aren't precise.
"My comments about the necessity of connections was not regarding humans per se, but digital people."
Okay, I understand where you're coming from. *thinks* Okay, I see two possibilities from this:
1. Humans can disconnect (not lose) their digital identity if they don't maintain them. This may happen in the case where someone has separated their identity from themselves and let the identity alone, or consciously given it up for collective use. (Plastic Duck)
2. The digital identity persists, as part of the human identity, regardless of atrophy.
"But if everyone (including my primary) stopped imagining I exist, then I really would NOT."
Neither one of my scenarios really agree with your statement, here. So I don't think I can grant this idea.
"Telephone analogy fails because, once again, this form of communication does not provide a perception of somebody else who is somewhere else. The chances of everyone forming a consistant image of your telephone self is small. But, if you were to ask people who interact with me inworld 'what does Extropia look like?', the descriptions would all be consistant."
Ah, but here you're wrong. Most people who just read me or have talked to me on the phone assume I am older than I am. This very definitely creates a different image in their mind. It has to do with how I consistently present myself in my speech and writing. How is this any less valid than consistency presenting a visual aspect - such as an avatar?
"For you to believe you are corresponding with me, it requires somebody to respond in ways consistant with your mental model of 'me'."
Yes, but my mental model of you is based around a physical person using a pseudonym online. Earlier on when I first met you, I made less assumptions - "Extropia" could have been a collective character piloted by different people. However, I've found your writing too consistent, and I get ... well, a gut intuitive feeling that's not the case.
But not knowing who you are is not a problem for me. We're not in any business relationship, and you're not a close friend. And I don't suspect you of being anyone else I know - in which case I might be curious and dig for proof.
"Under what circumstances would you consider Hiro a person in his own right?"
Well, "Hiro" is a nickname for me for those who know me strictly through Second Life. When I'm at a virtual worlds convention, and I see other veteran Second Lifers. But "Hiro the avatar" is clearly an extension of me. Perhaps back in 2004 through 2005, when I was still new, and everyone was just a stranger, and there were really no businesses using Second Life, Hiro was partly an experiment of character - the kind that one could essentially release into the wild, so to speak, and treat solely as a character. But by the first SLCC I realized there were business opportunities, and I made a conscious decision to just be myself on Hiro. The process was a bit gradual, likely, but I'd say by late 2006 or early 2007 it's just me.
That said, Hiro could still be a person in his own right. In the colloquial sense, I could start role-playing Hiro again, and let people know it's not really "Ron" - that it's a character. Eventually, I could this Hiro-character out in the wild, and he would be a person as any fictional character is. Alternatively, in a more literal sense, should AI get to a point of near-sentience, I suppose I could allow Hiro to emulate me, and then essentially free the avatar to live separately.
I just discovered your blog, and will be closely following it from now on.
Very interesting posts. We seem to have some very similar thoughts. :)
Be well, my friend.
-Pathfinder
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