Transumanar

Religion, Spirituality and the Avatar

Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon: Religion, Spirituality and the Avatar

From the announcement on Soph’s blog: Next week’s Salon kicks off a cycle of several months of absolutely fascinating guests. On Saturday, March 15, from 1-3pm at the Central Nexus in Extropia Core, our Salon Spotlight Guest will be Soren Ferlinghetti (Robert M Geraci). Robert M. Geraci is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College in New York City. He studies the interactions of religion, science and technology with particular emphasis upon robotics, artificial intelligence and (more recently) online gaming. he has conducted fieldwork at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute and in Second Life through discussions and interviews. In addition to publishing a number of essays on religion and robotics, he has just finished a book on the subject (tentatively titled _Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality_) and is planning a new book about religion and online games.

Soren and I have spoken occasionally over many months about spirituality and identity in the digital world. We have profoundly different perspectives, and attitudes towards technology in general, but I’ve always found him curious, open-minded, warm-hearted and fascinating. Soren’s work was recently covered in New World Notes:
The Soul Of Second Life: In SL Spirituality Survey, 48% Open To Mind Upload, 62% To New SL-Based Religions
Thanks to Hamlet Au, we not only got Soren’s remarkable conclusions (more people go to church in SL than have sex, what?!), but the raw data supporting them. At the Salon we’ll discuss Soren’s research, the interplay between spirituality and identity in the digital world, the evolution of religion, and many more fascinating topics sparked by his work. This one’s a must-see!

I could not stay until the end but added Soren / Robert to the friends list and will get in touch with him soon. Until I left, there were two parallel talk / discussion threads. One about sociology: Second Life as a communication and outreach tool for traditional religions, Second Life as an incubator and breeding ground for new religions or spitirual movements, the attitude of SL users towards spirituality, the interfaces and communications between new religions born in the metaverse and traditional ones, the impact that new spiritual trends facilitated by VR worlds can (and should?) have on traditional ones. Robert thinks that the appeal of Second Life ("I think that SL is popular in large measure because it is a sacred space, one that has been separated out from the profane everyday… people are finding _meaning_ not just entertainment, in SL… an astonishing fact that demonstrates how attractive this world is for people… that very clearly means it is something a good deal more than escapism” may facilitate the creation of and hold together new movements that will have an impact on brickspace churches: “people in SL want some real influence upon their world. This is going to upend traditional religious hierarchies”.

Another discussion thread was about religion and spirituality proper (the sort of things discussed in last year’s Seminar on H+ and Religion in SL), and digital life in Second Life (and tomorrow much more sophisticated virtual realities) AS a spiritual experience. Robert says: “there’s a sense in which practice in VR is becoming all by itself a religious experience for people”, and “one aspect of this is the idea of mind uploading, which answers many of the same questions as do other religious groups. I was actually suprrised to find that more than 1/4 of respondents believe that uploading definitely or probably would be an attractve alternative to earthly life. That’s a lot of people! and I think it represents a kind of general mindset in which virtual life is more meaningful than earthly life”.

This was well received by the audience. We must of course acknowledge that yesterday’s audience is certainly not a representative sample of SL users, let alone the population at large. In particular, there were many “Digital Persons” like Soph, Khannea, Extropia and Galatea (I haven’t seen Argent, but there were more than 50 avatars and perhaps she was there): those ~~who identify with a SL avatar instead of the person behind the avatar~~ for whom SL is a primary reality and, while acknowledging a relation with a “primary” (Extropia) or “atomic person” (Soph) in the brickspace reality, think that this relation is tenuous and irrelevant (Soph) or even temporary (Extropia). Argent’s article Taking a Stand is often considered as a DP manifesto. I like and respect my Digital Friends and try to accept them on their terms instead of speculating about ~~their life stories~~ the life stories of their “other personalities”.

In a comment to Gwyneth Llewelyn’s Immersionism and Augmentationism Revisited, Extropia says: “an avatar is a particular pattern of information and there are no end of technologies in the pipeline that could copy and run that pattern. So long as A) the pattern of information that describes us is deemed valuable enough to preserve and B) there is some kind of information processing capability in place to seamlessly take over the job of modelling our thoughts and feelings, each and every avatar would have a life that went way beyond some meatbag’s”. A reply to her comment, with which I basically agree, says “As things stand at present, and for the foreseeable future, the avatar will simply be a superficial representation of a person - a means of communication, no more embodying the individual’s personality than her or his telephone or pen… Your vision may indeed come true in the extreme distant future (or, alternatively, it might not), but the theoretical possibility of such a distant advance in technology is not by itself something that has a significant effect on a significant number of people’s behaviour in virtual worlds”.

I am more optimist - I would say “far away” but not “extremely far away”, and I think we may see some significant development in the first half of this century - but basically agree. At the same time I defend the right of my sweet Digital Friends to exist and think Digital Persons are pioneers who are taking (or at least considering) the first baby steps towards decoupling lives from bodies. I am not too persuaded by the current experiments in “extreme lifelogging” as a means to generate mindfiles than can be later brought to life by human-equivalent computing (this is the most interesting experiment that I am aware of), in such a way as to ensure the continuity of consciousness. I am not persuaded by these experiments because I think the volume and texture of information that can be practically acquired and stored with today’s primitive and low bandwidth interface technologies is much too low. But things may change quite radically with fully immersive VR worlds able to generate a complete sensorial experience, and high bandwidth interface technologies based on direct neural coupling. The current brain to computer interfacing (BCI) experimental technologies, which are already finding their way to consumer videogames (see also First steps to neural interfacing for consumers) and even to Second Life, demonstrate the plausibility, and perhaps mid term feasibility, of very high bandwidth BCI technologies able to transfer high bandwidth, high volume mental information (thoughts, memories, emotions...) to machines for storage and processing. High performance BCI-based lifelogging could conceivably permit saving enough information about a person to convert the digital personhood dream to reality.

As far as the continuity of consciousness is concerned, I think after uploading (like after every significant change), I am still me if and only if both the previous me and the future me are willing to accept the future me as a valid continuation of the previous me. This is the most convincing approach that I can think of and, I think, is the reason why we think we are still ourselves when we wake up.

Posted by G.P. on 03/16 at 07:36 AM
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