Transumanar

More on Digital Persons, Immersionism vs. Augmentationism

I participated in this interesting debate on Immersionism vs. Augmentationism. Topic: These deep thinkers, all fairly well-known for their positions on immersion vs augmentation, will have an energetic debate about their differences in opinion. Expect the conversation to touch on issues such as avatar rights, voice verification, and avatars as legal entities. See ORANGE EXPLORES SL CULTURE! for background.

This discussion is always interesting. I was representing the attitude of “augmentationists”, for whom Second Life is a videoconferencing environment (a better phone call). Sophrosyne Stenvaag concisely states the issue as “is SL for you a place or a tool? Everything else, from standards of identity and trust to “A/S/L,” follows from that”, and quotes a post by Argent Bury on Digital Persons for whom SL is a place different from the atomic world, aka RL. In the debate Soph said “Giulio and I share a “live and let live” approach, the only difference between us really is the locus of our identities, I’m *here*, and he’s visiting from elsewhere”. And Gwyneth asked me “did you ever cry or laugh out loud when you read a book?” and welcomed me to immersionism when I answered yes.

Well. I can have emotional reactions to _good_ books, but I don’t consider Second Life that good yet. I don’t consider SL as a place because, for example, places have a distinctive smell and SL has none. Miami is hot and humid, Amsterdam is cold and humid, Madrid has hot dry summers, it is very nice to walk in the snow in Budapest. These are all places where I have _lived_ and know well. In Napoli, the city where I was born, the characteristic smell in the air is actually one of rubbish (!!!) but the food tastes like nowhere else. The point I am making of course is that the atomic world is sensorially rich while in Second Life the sensorial environment is very poor: pixels on a screen and poor audio with statics.

This will change with better virtual reality technology. Some day VR will offer a fully immersive environment, with stimulation of the five senses via direct brain to computer, brain to network and brain to brain links and sensorial experiences indistinguishable from physical reality. In my interview on The Future and You podcast I speculate on immersive neural interfaces to VR worlds and place them 20 years in the future. At that moment I will take virtual worlds as “places”, but now I see them only as advanced communication tools.

But I think the mini-trend toward immersionism and digital personhood is very important, and positive. Those who are psychologically able to really _be_ in a VR world even with the primitive VR technology of today are doing terribly important experiments with the very concept of identity, and I think we will soon need the results of their experiments and some practical guidelines for managing personal and social relations in a world that becomes more and more complex. One of the first results is there is room for more than one person in a brain.

One very important thing that digital personhood can facilitate is tolerance of diversity. Diversity is GOOD - how boring would be a world where everyone looks, thinks and acts the same. Let millions of flowers bloom, in virtual and real worlds. Live and let live, everyone should be free to do absolutely whatever she wishes as long as she does not do concrete harm to anyone else, victimless crimes are not crimes, and one should enjoy his own favorite lifestyle instead of criticizing the lifestyle of others.

Transhumanists talk of augmenting life in very radical terms. We want to merge biology with technology and eliminate disease, suffering, aging and death. Yes, death. Our generation may be among the last mortal generations, and by the end of the century our children may live in the Metaverse as disembodied software beings. Let’s call this Life 3.0: escaping the prison of the flesh and moving on. This will be a _very_ radical change of the nature of the game, and will bring much more diversity in human societies. It is important that we learn, now, to live with it. Of course there will be those who will prefer to stay in the old comfortable game instead of embracing change and moving on, but many others will run at full speed toward a speciation with the full range between organic humans 1.0 and conscious software beings in synthetic realities. It is going to be interesting, dangerous and fun. Let us consider our tiny, primitive and unstable SL as a workbench for first experiments and baby steps toward future humanity. To Gwyn, Soph and Argent: I will be an immersionist and a digital person (or many digital persons) then.

Perhaps the most interesting observation in the debate, by Aldon Huffhines, was about “the self as existing at the intersection of our inner neural networks and our external social networks”. Aldon Hynes/Huffhines has then expanded this very interesting point in his blog on The Virtual Self and R.

Posted by on 03/01 at 07:50 AM

Giulio -

It was a delight and an honor to share the stage with you. I agree with your comment to my post, that the fact that there wasn’t any radical disagreement or moral outrage was a positive sign.

I’m fascinated by your perspective, that immersion is triggered by a certain level of fidelity, and that we all have different thresholds. I know Argent and dandellion live in a richer SL than I do: they can supply even more fidelity from within, and could probably inhabit a living world on even less bandwidth than I can.

Scent for you is critical, where my atomic body has chronic allergies - it wouldn’t be a factor in building my world. Sound plays a similar role for me, despite my issues with processing the spoken word: visit the teahouse on Tycho Peninsula sometime - you’ll hear surf, dolphin cries, and Australian birds and insects timed to the night/day cycle. For me, that’s where my world is most alive.

I look forward to the level of fidelity that brings you over: your warmth and humor and openness enrich our world.

Posted by Sophrosyne Stenvaag on 03/01 at 05:07 PM
Wow thanks, you are a darling!

I am probably biased because I was involved in professional VR since much before SL, and had seen much more immersive VR environments before experiencing SL for the first time. But the huge merit of SL has been making massively multiuser online VR available to and interesting for the public. With numbers and popularity come the money, with the money come new technical developments, and then more popularity in a positive feedback loop.

OpenSim, OpenCroquet and Sun’s Java platform have started a race where each will surpass the others every few months. Without forgetting online advanced videogames like Crysis. I often think that perhaps the first real AIs will emerge from the VR videogame industry, and maybe also neural interfacing (actually this is already reaching the market) and the first steps toward uploading. I look forward to “real” VR environments perhaps even sooner than my 20 years prediction. We live in interesting times.

G.

Posted by on 03/02 at 05:51 PM