Who Controls the Puppet? I Do.

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.

Read More...

Summary only...