In the first article I wrote for this blog (Virtual Sex and the Gorilla), I tried to find answers to the following question: Why is it that sex in Second Life can be appealing, despite the fact that the mechanics of it are decidedly unerotic? I thought I might return to that question with some more ideas.

THE POWER OF WORDS.

Recently, NewScientist revealed some interesting studies about the affect words have on the brain. The written word also plays a central role in SL sex. As Wagner James Au explained in his book, ‘The Making of Second Life’, “any genuinely erotic heat [is] passed along through private instant messaging”. Forget movie sci-fi images of people in body suits cavorting with avatars in fully immersive virtual environments, what SL sex most resembles is impromptu co-authored erotic literature. The extent to which the encounter can be called great sex is determined by how well the two halves of the story (one part written by you, the other by your partner) fit together. When two people are really tuned-in to one another’s emotions, desires, intentions, etc, the two halves of the narrative will fit seamlessly together, sometimes to the extent that it almost feels like your partner is inside your head, able to read your mind. On the other hand, when two people fail to communicate, the two halves may seem disjointed. You could almost say that bad sex in SL is determined by how often you have to delete and revise what you were thinking/typing, because what your partner just sent is in total contrast to what you thought you were doing, and where the encounter was at this point in time (for example, in your mind the two of you were kissing each other’s lips, whereas he describes this moment as involving toe sucking). 

Anyway, that study. According to NewScientist, “every time we hear a word, the brain seems to simulate the actions associated with its meaning. When someone hears the word ‘climb’ for example, it activates the same neural regions that trigger our muscles to pull our weight up a tree”. This reminds me of another study I heard about a couple of years ago, in which people’s brains were scanned while they read descriptions of disgusting things. This triggered activity in areas of the brain that would light up if that person was actually experiencing something disgusting.

If the first study applies to words we read as well as hear, and the second applies to all sensations and emotions and not just disgust, that might further explain the appeal of SL sex. When you think about it, this makes sense. How else could one grasp the meaning of words–the actions, sensations, and emotions they convey–other than by recreating those actions, emotions and sensations in your mind? I am not suggesting that this would be a perfect recreation, for if that were the case then presumably it would be impossible to distinguish between a story we read and an event we experienced. But I do suggest this elevates SL sex beyond placing your hands on a cold, plastic, impersonal keyboard and staring at animated avatars.

WHAT IS A MEMORY?

I do not want to say more about that. I want to move on to how memory might play a part. The thing with memory is, it is quite common for people to misunderstand how it works. This was shown to be the case in a national survey of 1,500 people, conducted in 2009 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (the same guys responsible for the ‘Invisible Gorilla’ experiment). Respondents were asked to read various statements about memory and rate them as being either ‘true’ or ‘false’. Here is a couple of examples:

‘Once you have experienced an event and formed a memory of it, that memory doesn’t change’.

‘Human memory works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later’.

47% of respondents believed the first statement was true, and 67% thought the second was correct. However, what we know about how the mind works from neuroscientific and psychological studies shows neither statement can be true. The brain does not devote energy and space to storing every detail of our lives. Memory relies on other tricks.

We can get a sense of what these tricks might be by looking at an experiment designed to reveal how human memory really works. This experiment was conducted by two psychologists, William Brewer and James Freyens. Subjects were asked to wait in a typical student office for about a minute. This, they were told, was because the previous participant had not yet completed the task. About thirty seconds, the person waiting in the office was lead to another room, where they were unexpectedly asked to write down a list of the contents of the office they had just come from. 30% recalled seeing books, and 10% believed the office contained file cabinets. But this office was rather unusual in that it actually contained neither. 

So what does that tell us? It shows that memory does not entail encoding everything in detail. Instead, it takes what we have seen or heard and associates it with what we already know. Simons and Chabris put it like this:

‘What is stored in memory is not an exact replica of reality, but a recreation of it… each time we recall a memory, we integrate whatever details we do remember with our expectations of what we should remember’. What is most relevant for our purposes, though, is that this shows the mind can recall details that were not actually present at the time. So, in principle at least, when you recall sex in SL the mind may add details, perhaps including sensations and feelings that the VR technology of today cannot simulate.

But where do those details come from? Well, another thing about memory, is that it is rather inaccurate to talk about ‘a’ memory. Anyone who has read a book about how the mind works has probably encountered the slogan, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’. The technical term for this is ‘Long Term Potentiation’ or LTP. If a neuron should fire strongly and frequently enough, this will affect its neighbouring neurons. It might be an inhibitory effect- the neuron might tell its neighbours not to fire. But, at other times, neighbouring neurons will fire in synchronised bursts. Provided this synchronous firing is rapid, energetic, and sustained, it will enter your conscious experience as a sensation, thought, or emotion. And, particularly energetic activity will cause physical changes in the neurons involved. These alterations strengthen the links between simultaneously firing neurons, making it more likely that when one neuron fires, the others will fire too. According to Rita Carter, “a memory, then, is a pattern of neural firing that the brain produces easily because it has done it before”.

INTEGRATED INFORMATION: ONE MEMORY MADE FROM MANY.

The brain encodes memories in a web-like way. That is why I said it is inaccurate to think of individual memory. Each element of a memory can be thought of as a node connected to others. The connection strength can vary: some nodes are very strongly connected, whereas others are not directly connected at all. But, so long as they are all part of the same network, whenever you jog one memory, other memories connected to it also get jogged, as will the memories that connect to them, and so on. The further you go from the initial recollection, the weaker the jogging effect is, but there is always a chance that one memory will bring to mind another, so long as they are part of the same web. This tends to be the case when one memory has something in common with another. 

Dr Joe T. Tsien uses a different visual image to describe memories, but the essential details remain the same:

“The brain relies on memory-encoding cliques to record and extract different features of the same event, and it essentially arranges the information relating to a given event into a pyramid whose levels are arranged hierarchically from the most general, abstract features to the most specific. We also believe that each such pyramid can be thought of as a component of a polyhedron that represents all events falling into a shared category”.

Regardless of whether you imagine memory as a node in a web, or a component of a pyramid that is itself part of a polygon, the point remains that every recollection relies on integrating information from other experiences. For that reason, no two people can have the exact same memory of a past event. Their unique life experience colors such events in unique ways. According to Dr Tsien, ‘because the memory code is categorical and hierarchical, representing new memories might simply involve substituting the specific cliques that form the tops of the memory pyramid”.

5 INGREDIENTS OF GREAT SL SEX.

So, let us suppose that Christopher lets Khoisan have a virtual honeymoon with Lydia following their upcoming wedding. If the sex was recalled purely in terms of what actually happened  (we are assuming this takes place entirely in SL), the memory would be rather dull. However, we now know this would not be the case. Instead, the mind would be integrating information from other experiences, other memories, ranging from the most general, abstract features we can associate with intimate encounters (‘close’, ‘warm’, ‘soft’….) to more specific details, such as the way a woman’s lips taste or how firm a man’s biceps are when flexed or relaxed. In ‘Khoisan’s’ case there is an extra advantage in that Christopher and ‘Lydia’ (or whoever puppeteers her avatar) have actually met and have a relationship in real life. That means a virtual sexual encounter could integrate some really specific information, such as the particular way Lydia herself kisses.

In conclusion, then, it is possible for SL sex to transcend its rather dull objective qualities thanks to various factors that I have talked about here, and in other essays. These factors are:

1: The extent to which the encounter is part of a loving relationship developed within SL. In short, the more you mean to one another, the more meaningful intimate acts will seem (my ‘Lovegame’ series has more to say on this).

2: The mind’s ability to fill in missing details by integrating information from associated, or partially associated, experiences.

3: The mind’s ability to edit out details you were distracted from at the time (see ‘VR Sex and the Invisible Gorilla’).

4: ‘Avatar Projection’. This is part of a general ability the mind has; the ability to expand one’s ‘body map’ to include objects outside of the body. This typically happens when there is a noticeable correlation between an intention and a change in that object. You desire to turn left, which is translated into various actions by your body, which in turn results in the car turning left. The mind comes to believe that the car is your body. Psychologists point out that we tend to say ‘you hit me’ rather than ‘you hit the car I am driving’. Same thing applies to avatars. Many people (among them the cognitive psychologist Jeremy Bailenson) have noted that people tend to stand more or less the same distance apart in virtual worlds as they normally do in real life. We are taking ancient social rules and customs and applying them to the brave new world of virtual places. When one avatar enters the private, personal space of another and that entry is welcomed and invited rather than invaded without permission ( and, btw, ‘private’ and ‘personal’ have meaning in the context of pure virtual relationships and do not necessarily relate to anything ‘RL’) that act carries with it as much meaning as it would if it had happened ‘for real’. 

5: The power of words to simulate actions, sensations and emotions in our mind.

I believe these 5 things combined are what elevates the subjective quality of SL sex. Elevated to the point where it is better than the real thing? No, I would not go that far, although I did once see a documentary in which a woman all but abandoned a real marriage in favour of a virtual love affair within SL (she eventually met the man with whom she had a virtual affair, whereupon disappointment set in because the real guy did not quite live up to the fantasy of his avatar).  I guess, though, that most people would suppose the marriage had some real problems, rather than believe anybody could prefer an SL-based relationship over a successful marriage. But, anyway, we were never asking if SL sex can be better than the real thing (unless the real thing is very dissatisfying, which is certainly possible, then no), we were asking how and why it can be good at all. I have met people that are sceptical that this could ever be the case (‘what is the point of SL sex? Lol!’). Hopefully, this essay explained how and why it can be appealing.

Uploading is often seen as a form of immortality. The body may succumb to decay, but the mind–now independent of any one substrate–can copy/transfer itself to a replacement body. However, we know the brain’s neural net undergoes changes as novel experiences accumulate. This lead Vernor Vinge to question whether such change was compatible with immortality:  “A mind that stays the same cannot live forever; after a few thousand years it would look more like a repeating tape-loop than a person…To live indefinitely long, the mind must grow…and when it becomes great enough and looks back…what fellow-feeling can it have for the soul it was originally?”.

How might such a mind grow? One way would be to incorporate aspects of others’ identity and experiences into its own self. People already do this to a limited extent, with mirror neuron activity enabling one individual to model the mind of another. Indeed, the very process by which babies develop personalities involves a kind of ’construction’ in which  aspects of others’ behaviours and mannerisms are copied and eventually come to feel like aspects of one’s self. It should be possible, in principle, for virtualized minds to blend together. This act of fusion throws up questions of identity, just as the fissioning of one mind into several does. Wouldn’t a fusion of two minds result in one who is neither, and wouldn’t that mean the original two no longer existed? One might question why two souls would choose to effectively destroy themselves and be replaced by somebody else. Surely, each mind would take care not to incorporate too much of another’s self, thereby retaining a sense of its own identity? However, any one mind must be limited in what it can experience. Eventually, to avoid the ’repeating tape-loop’ effect, the desire to experience things outside of the boundary of one’s identity would become overwhelming. The mind would seek to dissolve the boundaries that both define and confine it, gradually shedding its identity in order to encompass experiences outside the scope of its prior self.

Neuroscience research into happiness and meditation reveals an increase in synchrony in neural activity. Because pattern recognition requires one set of neurons rather than another being active, large scale synchrony and reduced frontal activity (also observed during functional scans of meditating subjects) leads to a diminishing sense of identity. So, we can either say that a drive toward reduced neocortical activity relative to the baseline state and higher than average synchrony among brain regions is a pursuit of pleasure, or see it as a drive towards self-annihilation. If pleasure is desirable, then so is a transition to a state where the self no longer stands out as a subjectively unique and distinct identity. Bruce Katz argued: “the real opposition is not between the pleasure principle and the death instinct (as Freud supposed) as the survival instinct and both of these taken together. Survival requires boundaries between concepts and especially the self and other; pleasure delights in the breaking down of barriers, and the reduction of specific thoughts in favour of a more distributed buzz of activation”.

Perhaps, then, minds that seek to grow beyond the confines of the self will seek each other out, merging together to form something greater. To a limited extent, individuals do this already. Emile Durkheim spoke of a collective effervesence that emerges when large groups of people congregate at a concert, sports even or some such collective experience. “This energy holds the group together; it makes each individual feel as though he or she is an element of something greater than the sum of its parts”.

As post-human selves seek ever-more sublime states of collective effervesence, Katz argued that the result would ultimately be to “manufacture Buddha. A being without division…It would not seek to look beyond itself for intellectual satisfaction, for it is truly self-contained…Perhaps, though, in its inner core, among the many thoughts it has amalgamated, would be the smallest realization that without differences, its perfection is marred. Perhaps it would choose to fracture. Perhaps we ourselves are the product of an earlier such fracturing”.

The informal poll did not check against gender, age, occupation, age of account, time spent per week in SL, and such like, so is obviously not scientifically reliable.  It does, however, offer an interesting snapshot of attitudes.

152 people responded to the poll, as follows:

Some people take to Second Life like a duck to water; some just don’t ‘get’ it. Such, at least, has been my observation from working with adult learners, both university students and corporate learners. Working in the education sector, I was unsurprised that more than one in five respondents selected “SL is a great educational medium”; teachers and students are likely to constitute the largest constituency reading this blog. In retrospect, I should possibly have sought to avoid this bias.

Slightly surprising is that no one selected “I find SL compulsive, and I probably spend more time in-world than I should“.  Several residents have, however worded, told me this time after time; and the evidence from heterogeneous sources points to a frighteningly large number of users for whom SL has become a very serious addiction, impacting destructively on their real lives.  But my 152 respondents is a very small sample; and perhaps the real addicts don’t read blogs.

“That’s why it’s called the web: because you get stuck in it”

I’ve been hearing about Jason Spingarn-Koff’s Second Life documentary, Life 2.0, for probably close to a year now, watched the trailer a couple of months back, and was reminded of it again yesterday.  Made in 2009, premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, and winner in the Best Documentary Feature category of the 2010 Philadelphia Film Festival, Life 2.0

… follows a group of people whose lives are dramatically transformed by the virtual world, Second Life. They enter a new reality, whose inhabitants assume alternate personas in the form of avatars – digital alter egos that can be sculpted and manipulated to the heart’s desire. The film is foremost an intimate, character-based drama about people who look to a virtual world in search of something they are missing in their real lives. The results are unexpected and often disturbing: reshaping relationships, identities, and ultimately the very notion of reality. Mixing high drama and quirky humor, the film uniquely explores the promise, perils, and implications of virtual worlds for society at large.

I’ve not watched the full documentary, nor yet persuaded myself that I want to spend $25.94 to pre-order the DVD to be released on 10th January 2012.  Consequently I can comment only on the short trailer, below (please watch it and read on).

The promotional blurb, blockquoted above, not only establishes the tone of the documentary (we can expect that it will veer more towards the sensationalist than to the augmentationist mundanity of, for example, teaching and learning, or of virtual office working) but also touches issues germane to this blog:

… lives are dramatically transformed
… in search of something they are missing in their real lives
… reshaping relationships, identities, and ultimately the very notion of reality
… explores the promise, perils, and implications of virtual worlds for society at large

The final sentence, in particular, is a matter of especial interest and concern in light of very plausible predictions by Kurzweil and many others that virtual worlds will mediate a significant percentage of all social communication by mid-century.  The astounding success of Facebook in recent years has already profoundly changed the way many of us spend our leisure time, how we shape and maintain our social lives, how we think of friendship, how we do business, how we reflect on our lives and share those reflections with others; and yet its social and psychological impact is still little understood.  Transition to a three-dimensional avatar-centric medium will inevitably bring with it even more dramatic social and cultural transformation.

Ever agnostic about the Second Life experience as in any way ‘real’, I was struck by Philip Rosedale’s succinct observation in the documentary that “Things are real because they’re there with us and we believe in them”.  Or, perhaps better, that we willingly suspend disbelief.  I’d welcome comments below from anyone who has seen the full-length film.

Technology is becoming ever more prevalent in human affairs. Social networking sites are increasingly seen as viable alternatives to singles bars as a way to meet prospective dates, and of course there is the phenomenon of people conducting romantic relationships exclusively in virtual worlds.

How far can technology’s influence in the area of sex and love grow? Will it become more than a mere facilitator of human relationships? A logical outcome of an increase in the importance of technology in our lives would be ‘technophilia’, loving technology itself. The idea of loving technology is a concept that science fiction writers have thought about, most obviously in the form of lover bots like ‘Gigolo Joe’ (the android played by Jude Law in Steven Spielberg’s movie AI: Artificial Intelligence). The prospect of robots becoming our companions and lovers seems to be one that people anticipate. In 2003, a Marketing and Opinion Research Survey of children in Britain found that 34% of adults and 37% of children believe that, by 2020, computers will be as important to them as friends and family. South Korea intends to put a robot in every home by 2020, and in Japan companion robots have been proposed as a means of enticing young people away from cyberspace, re-connecting them with the physical world.

Prototypes of humanoid robots exist. These include Japan’s DER 01 and Korea’s EverR-2. Having watched demonstrations of these machines on YouTube, I think it’s fair to say the technology has some way to go before these robots are convincingly humanlike. Their movements are still not fluid enough; their conversational abilities too obviously pre-canned. The technology is going to have to show dramatic improvement, and become much cheaper. And there is a psychological factor to consider: Will we accept machines as lovers? And, if so, how far are we willing to go in accommodating any possible deficiencies the technology may have?

MATERIAL POSSESSION ATTACHMENT

Earlier in this series, we saw how love grows out of attachment. ‘Material Possession Attachment’ extends this to physical things. As a result of repeated use, what began as a mere commodity becomes more important to its owner. Even though it is probably mass-produced and there are therefore many other objects identical to it, an object you own acquires a sense of uniqueness. It becomes ‘my car‘; ‘my computer’. Milhay Csikszenthmihlyi and Eugene Rochberg- Halton call this special meaning ‘Psychic Energy’ (although they don’t mean anything mystical). The more psychic energy an owner invests in an object, the more it is interacted with, the more it takes on a subjective aura of uniqueness and personal meaning.

Because they are so interactive and play an increasingly important part in organizing and managing our lives, computers and networked devices are particularly liable to trigger powerful feelings of attachment. From various studies, Bryon Reeves and Clifford Nass have concluded that people subconsciously treat computers as though they were people, applying “social rules and expectations”. They point out that:

“A) Both humans and computers communicate with other humans using words.

B)  Both humans and computers are interactive. They respond to social situations based on prior ‘inputs’ from the person with whom they are interacting. 

C) Computers have filled many roles that have traditionally been filled by people”.

Through popular science, people are becoming familiar with the ‘computational theory of mind’, the idea that the brain is, in some way or other, a great big powerful computer. We are acquiring an increasingly materialistic view of human life, including such seemingly spiritual qualities like falling in love. The roboticist Rodney Brooks argued that emotional states are “basically just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain. Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic?”

Along with this belief that computers are, or could be, a kind of person, we see computers and the Web becoming increasingly personified. This serves to ramp up attachment yet further. Consider how the various components of attachment theory apply to our relationship with networked devices:

Proximity maintainence: We like to keep our smartphones close at hand.

Safe Haven: Having your computer near enough for you to access it when needed feels comforting,

Separation Distress: Because it plays such a crucial role in organizing and managing our daily lives, an inability to access your computer can feel stressful.

I would imagine many people could identify with the business executive who admitted to the psychologist Sherry Turkle, “when I lost my blackberry, I felt like I had lost a part of my mind”. In short, all of the symptoms of attachment manifest in our relationship with computers and networked devices.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC TENDENCIES

Still, you might argue that, yes we are increasingly dependent on computers but that does not necessarily mean we treat them as though they were people. But many experiments have shown that (on a subconscious level, at least) there is a tendency to anthropomorphise these machines. It has been shown, for instance, that people apply stereotypical attitudes to gender to computers. These attitudes include the assumption that men know more about certain topics than women (and vice versa). In experiments where computers are given a male or female voice, people tend to carry over stereotypical views on human gender.

Another example is ‘reciprocal self disclosure’. In general, people tend not to discuss innermost feelings with anyone other than their nearest and dearest. However, quite often people will open up to strangers if the stranger first discloses secrets about themselves. Experiments have shown that if a computer first discloses something personal about itself before asking a question, the participants’ response is likely to be more intimate in terms of the depth and breadth of self-disclosure.

In considering why we anthropomorphise computers, Bryon Reeves and Clifford Nass attribute it to the fact that our minds evolved in a world where only humans did humanlike things. Therefore, there was no selection pressure working on distinguishing between humans doing humanlike things, and non-humans doing humanlike things. This tendency ramps up considerably when the computer is specifically designed to mimic a person. The endeavour to successfully build such machines is often considered to be a goal of artificial intelligence, which of course it is, but I would argue that it is much more to do with learning how to push our ‘evolutionary buttons’ so that we cannot help but attribute qualities like mind and emotion to the machines. 

This might sound as though androids (robots designed to resemble human males) and gynoids (the ‘female’ equivalent) are machines purposefully designed to deceive people. Maybe so, but it does look as though people are ready and willing to be deceived. From studies of people’s interactions with the ‘Eliza’ chatbot, psychologists have found that people are willing to go to some lengths to maintain the illusion of a ghost-in-the-machine. Eliza is fascinating to psychologists, not because bot itself is complex or smart (it’s just a bunch of cheap tricks, really) but because of the way people engage with it. As Sherry Turkle explained in her book ‘The Second Self’:

“I often saw people trying to protect their relationship with Eliza…They didn’t ask questions that they knew would “confuse” the program, that would make it talk “nonsense”. And they went out of their way to ask questions in a form that they believed would provoke a lifelike response”.

Such observations strongly suggest that people are willing to meet machines more than halfway in attributing personhood. It seems likely, then, that if lover bots are in any way preferable to people in certain respects, quite a few of us might go out of our way to maintain the illusion of being in a relationship with a fellow human being.

ADVANTAGEOUS LOVER BOTS 

When considering possible advantages lover bots might have over actual people, the first thing that pops into people’s mind is usually the prospect of fantastic sex, whenever you want it. In terms of physical appearance, the lover bot could be custom-built to the client’s personal preference. One can imagine the lover bot coming pre-installed with expert knowledge in seduction techniques, foreplay, sexual positions and methods for prolonging orgasm. As for the prospect of the lover bot turning away from its human and saying “not tonight, I have a headache”, such behaviour need not be a part of the machine’s repertoire (“God, no, men would never want a sexbot that behaves like an actual female”, reckoned Price Bailey at Thinkers). In 1985, the Guardian newspaper reported that prostitutes in New York “share some of the fears of other workers- that technology developments may put them out of business… as one woman groused, “it won’t be long before customers can buy a robot from the drug-store and the won’t need us at all”.

At Thinkers, Elizabeth Spieler reasoned that this aspect of a lover bot’s repertoire was not something that would interest women. “In considering the woman’s nature, why would she use a robot? Isn’t it males who require porn?”. Other participants pointed out that, since sex toys like vibrators have been successfully marketed to women, maybe lover bots will also find female buyers. In support of Spieler’s view, just about all humanoid robots I have seen are designed to resemble women with the attributes of youth and beauty known to be particularly appealing to the male gender. 

But I think it’s worth remembering that we are not just discussing sex bots, but lover bots, what Cupidon-Pepin described as “a sex bot that will promise conversations at midnight in the kitchen about the kid’s future”. In short, a robot that can offer emotional as well as physical comfort. Another likely advantage that such a robot might offer is the certainty that your partner would remain faithful and would always place you at the centre of its world. In his book, “Love and Sex With Robots”, David Levy argued that, since men are able to get sex more easily now compared to decades ago, they have been more hesitant to commit to long-term relationships. One might imagine that easy access to gorgeous (artificial) women always willing to offer fantastic, no-strings sex might further erode men’s willingness to commit. Perhaps, then, the prospect of taking on an android as a partner- “always willing to please and satisfy, and totally committed” in Levy’s words- might be a great selling point for the female market.

There is at least one more advantage that a lover bot may have over a human partner. Because its mind would be a sophisticated software program, your lover bot’s personality and ‘self’ could be regularly backed-up and downloaded into a replacement body if the current model should malfunction. In other words, you would never need face the prospect of grieving over the death of your spouse. 

WHAT IS BEHIND THE PERFORMANCE?

Both proponents and skeptics of lover bots agree that a major obstacle to be overcome is the suspicion that ‘it is just a robot’. Elizabeth Spieler summed this up with her comment, “without intimacy I see no point in the relationship…no intimacy can occur in the robots [because] it’s not human”. Both proponents and skeptics agree that progress in ‘affective computing’ is likely to result in robots that are as good as humans (if not better) at inferring people’s emotional states. Also, there is agreement among both groups that future generations of humanoid robots will perform humanlike behaviour in an increasingly realistic way. Where the opposing camps split is on the issue of whether there is anything behind the performance. When a robot responds as if it is having an emotion, is there really something going on, subjectively?

In some ways, this question is similar to that facing people engaged in romantic relationships via their avatars. Some feel the need to question whether the person behind the avatar actually feels what they apparently project through their online personae. Is it real or is it performance? Sherry Turkle spoke of how many of her colleagues believe “performance is the currency of all social relationships…a robot may only seem to care and understand…people, too, may only seem to care and understand”.

My own attitude is that if the other person never gives any indication of trying to deceive me and consistently behaves as if their emotions are genuine, then I might as well accept them as genuine, given the complete lack of evidence to the contrary. David Levy reckoned the same argument should work with respect to robots. “If it behaves in every way as though it does indeed like you, then you can safely assume that it does indeed like you”.

Is that a watertight argument, or is there a flaw somewhere? I think the best argument against emotions in machines was the one Spieler touched upon and which Turkle also put forward. That is, that the robot cannot feel human emotions because it never had a human life. Recall from previous instalments how the attachment that forms between mother and child can be considered the ‘common ancestor’ of the many aspects of human love. But the robot was never born and never had a mother. It was built in a factory. As Turkle said, “a love relationship involves… looking at the world through another’s point of view, shaped by history, biology…computers and robots do not have these experiences to share”.

Now, for all I know, given sufficient knowledge of developmental psychology and methods of translating that into machine-readable code, we might learn how to make lover bots whose behaviour is complex and naturalistic enough to warrant a belief that one can achieve a meeting of minds through shared experiences. People can have false memories that feel as real to them as any actual past experience. So why not robots? In ‘Blade Runner’, Rachel’s false memories of childhood made her less likely to be identified as a Replicant via the Voight-Kampf test for human empathic responses. Maybe one day there will be robots as convincing as Rachel, but is that really what we want? It seems not. On the basis of many interviews, Sherry Turkle noted how people’s “fantasies about robot companions…return, again and again, to how robots might…be made to order”. People fantasize about robots offering risk-free relationships in which the possibility of heart-break need not be considered. They want, in other words, companionship without the demands of friendship.

WHAT WE WISH FOR

In previous instalments, we saw how online social games/ networking/worlds all ask us to project an identity and how, by giving us the ability to write, edit and delete what we present to our contacts, what we project becomes (perhaps knowingly, maybe subconsciously) a performance of a kind rather than the ‘real me’. Comforted by the ability to re-invent ourselves as comely avatars with less flattering sides to our nature edited out of the performance (if not completely at least more so compared to real life) perhaps it is a short step to expecting made-to-measure friends and lovers where we can take what we want and caste aside the rest?

If that is what we wish for, then we may end up in simplified relationships. But that too may be what we want. Back in 1998, a survey of people’s attitudes to friends (‘Friendship and Intimacy in the Digital Age’) revealed how “many people…would say they are too busy for friends, given the increasing demands of work, commuting, consumering, childcare”. In today’s world of permanent connection to an ever-expanding web of wall posts and tweets, discovering one has little time for friends unless they are online is a familiar complaint. Perhaps it is little wonder, then, that studies of Internet use and real-space socializing tend to find a rise in the former corresponds with a decline in the latter.

Quite often, when I am chatting with someone via messaging, my conversational partner will go offline. No excuses, no apologies, just gone, mid conversation. In the past, behaviour like this (turning your back on someone, putting the phone down on them) was considered the height of bad manners. But such rules of conduct don’t apply to messaging, which is meant to be engaged in, interrupted and resumed when…well whenever it is convenient for the individual. Our networked devices serve not only as portals through which we access our contacts, but also as shields that isolate us from them. If it is not convenient for me to have any interaction with you right now, I can press a button and be rid of you.

But, while individuals can be dealt with in this way, the social network as a whole keeps on expanding. You find yourself in more groups; with more friend recommendations, more wall posts, more comments and pingbacks. It can easily become overwhelming, and constantly monitoring all that activity can lead to a state-of-mind known as ‘continual partial attention’, characterized by a sense that everything is connected via your peripheral vision, as though you are looking but not really focusing on anything passing by your eyes on the screen.

According to Sherry Turkle, “the text-driven world of rapid response does not make self-reflection impossible but does little to cultivate it. When interchanges are reformatted for the small screen and reduced to the emotional shorthand of emoticons, there are necessary simplifications”. Neuroscience is revealing how the plasticity of the brain is being affected as we live life through the screen. As Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan explained in the book ‘iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind, “the pathways for human interaction and communication weaken as customary one-to-one people skills atrophy”.

Enter the robot, which may well take the convenience of interruptible relationships to new heights. Yes you can terminate an online relationship any time you want just by logging off, but picking up where you left off depends on your partner also choosing to log in. But if that partner were an AI, then they could be summoned at will, running avatars, piloting robots, maybe just being part of the ambience of your surroundings. A lover you can summon whenever you are in the mood for their company. While the emotional range the robot has to offer may not be as complex as human emotions (indeed, may not be an emotion at all but only a performance cleverly designed to push those evolutionary buttons), while we may have to lower our expectations of relationships in order to get the most out of lover bots, maybe our weakened pathways for human interaction and communication would make the robots emotional intelligence (which Daniel Goleman defined as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use that information to guide one’s thinking and actions”) seem sufficient? 

This future is not inevitable. However, I do believe it is possible and that the seeds for its germination have already been planted. However, such a future can only take root if our attitudes, our wants and needs, drive technology in this direction. I think we can hope for better than a future where people live out the fantasy of a perfect relationship with a machine that, actually, cannot truly reciprocate their love.

Coming soon, the final installment of the ‘Lovegame’ series.

I suppose in the end [SL] is no different from a normal internet dating site and nothing much comes from those either, from what I hear from RL girlfriends. SL as a dating site does have some differences as it can be such a sexually charged medium. I do believe that there are quite a few residents who are in SL with the express desire to make RL meetings. I have met some who have said that directly, and I have difficulty in understanding that goal when there are plenty of conventional sites that deal in this function on a serious basis.

I shared this email with my real-life partner.  “Second Life”, she insightfully observed (and here I paraphrase),

is really no different from real life–in both cases, it’s what you make of it, what you want it to be.  Real life itself is not a ‘dating site’.
On the strictly one-to-one web-based dating site potential partners may exaggerate, may lie, may present an idealised and hence somewhat dishonest image of themselves, and one has generally no way of knowing who they really are.
But what for me made Second Life a more telling and more honest platform than a traditional dating site, much closer to real life, was that I was able to observe how you interacted with others, you unaware that I was watching you and listening to you.  That told me a lot about you, far more about you than I’d have learned from traditional internet dating.

I’ve no doubt at all that my email friend is perfectly correct in her assertion that “there are quite a few residents who are in SL with the express desire to make RL meetings”.  Perhaps my partner’s observations will have made a good case for dating in a multi-user social virtual world.  Life, whether real or Second, is not inherently a dating site; and both have the advantage over conventional Internet dating of allowing one to observe a potential partner in a social context with others.

As a post-script I suppose I might add that my partner and I never did date in Second Life, it having been simply the context within which we first came to know each other, became just friends. I have always been, and I remain, sceptical about Second Life romances; even with the best of intentions, the very environment itself, another world, a place apart, carries the risk that the amorous declarations exchanged between Mr Avatar and Ms Avatar may not carry over easily into a real-life relationship between Ms Primary and Mr Primary.

And this, of course, catapults us back to the core concern of this blog, identity.  The more autonomous the felt identity of the avatar, the more problematic the transition into real life.

I’d be interested to hear your own views, your own stories, dear Readers.

During a Thinkers discussion on Google+’s stance on psuedonymity, Laborious Aftermath raised an interesting point several times. “You end up with the same problem of others ending up trying to use the same psuedo”.

In real life nobody has exclusive rights to a name. If your surname is Jackson, there is no law forbidding you from calling your son Michael (although if your son wanted to get into show business, then I expect he would have to adopt a psuedonym. The actor Michael Keaton, for example, is actually called Michael Douglas). When signing up for an online account, though, the rule is usually that only one person can have a name like ‘Laborious Aftermath’ and everyone else wanting that name must settle for variations like ‘Laborious_Aftermath’ or ‘LaboriousAftermath221’.

Of course, this rule applies only to individual online accounts. When it comes to signing up for other accounts somebody else might register an account under the name ‘Laborious Aftermath’ and I do not think SL’s ‘Laborious’ can do much about it (maybe if the name was a registered copyright belonging to SL’s ‘Laborious’ then he could prevent others using it, but other than that I do not think so).

Anyway, lots to say on this subject but really I want to comment on how this has lead me to a new principle of radical digital personhood. Laborious Aftermath asked me directly, “what happens if one day 100 or 1,000 people want to have ‘Extropia DaSilva’”?

This lead me to the realization that when my primary is googling my name to check out instances of my presence on the Web, the question uppermost in ver mind should not be ‘did I post this?’ but rather ‘Is this something Extropia DaSilva would have posted, given my understanding of her beliefs/opinions/ personality now and in the past’. If what is posted is roughly consistent with who I am and what I am like, then why not suppose the post was contributed by me? Maybe I should call this the ‘Duck Principle’ after that saying ‘if it walks and quacks like a duck, it is a duck’.

That is not to say I am comfortable with anyone using my identity in any old fashion. It is not like I would sit back and allow a griefer to go around being an annoyance using the name ‘Extropia DaSilva’. That would, in fact, violate one of the postulates of the ‘Duck’ principle: Whatever is done and said under my name must be reasonably consistent with who I am, what I am like and what I believe. If any of those conditions are broken, I would do my utmost to prevent this person from abusing my identity. But, if these conditions are met, then I would suppose at least part of my ‘patterns’ have installed themselves in that person’s brain, turning their mind partially ‘Extropialike’. It is just another instance of me on the Web, not qualitatively different to another account registered by my primary.

Briefly and uneasily back in SL after my two week break, I told her I felt little urge to return, felt almost reluctant to re-immerse myself in a world that, I realised, had consumed so much of my time for little reward.  But she and I have had such a conversation before, both of us recognising the meagre returns and yet both ensnared like flies in a web.  She confessed:

i wish i could get out of here
every day i feel pain here
and i need to address the holes in my rl, i guess
not escape to a place of broken empty promises
in my rl i am on an endless treadmill of tasks
and i wonder where i am in my life
taking care of so many other people
i think i come here to feel beautiful
get attention, love, intensity
time out
also, i never buy things for myself in rl
i always think, i have enough
here, i can come here and be frivolous
shop a little
i shold do it in rl, but
honestly i cant
i am at a crossroads here
i am thinking to myself
i kow where this road ends
the place it always ends in sl
maybe rl, i dont know
at least in rl
you have seen the person
held them
had coffee with them
touched them
here, its ghosts
i should walk away..
set me free
do what you have to do and then live your life, my dear
if you can, do it
i think sl has a place
you certainly have explored that and know that
with your work, building etc
and with the friends you made
but, i dont know, its easy to hide problematic personalities under the pixels here far too easily

Yes, a depressing perspective on Second Life, one I have myself succumbed to many times, one I’ve many terms heard in some form or another from so many people.  Admittedly I’ve made some good friends there, people I truly care about; and, workwise, I’ve achieved so much; and yet I cannot help feeling uncomfortable about Second Life, that insidiously it’s eroding not only the quality of my real life but also–more damagingly, perhaps–my very ability to recognise the futility of spending long hours in a world of pixelated fantasies.

Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe sprang to mind as I conversed with my friend.  The meaninglessness and absurdity of life, real as much as virtual, prompts us to use our freedoms to create our own meanings.  Yet Second Life, it often seems to me, to the contrary becomes for many an illusory escape from the meaninglessness and absurdity of real life, an “escape to a place of broken empty promises” as my friend so eloquently put it, the inmates eternally condemned to a vacuous joy in re-papering the asylum walls, rearranging the prim furniture, but–like the dinner guests in Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel–never finding, since never truly seeking, the way out.

It’s not a design flaw of the medium per se: I remain committed to the belief that Second Life, as do social virtual worlds in general, offers unprecedented opportunities for communication, collaboration, and cultural and personal transformation.  I know I’m now going to sound a bit of a snob in saying this, but my biggest worry is that social virtual worlds will, for many, become the new “opium of the masses”, a form of escapism more insidious than has been daytime TV and “reality TV”, an immersive and interactive Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer with bells and whistles.  And, like television, ultimately just as compulsive and just as unfulfilling.

So now I throw it open to you, dear Readers.  (You might first want to revisit the poll I posted on 22nd July.)  What, for you, makes SL a qualitatively rich experience? have you ever felt you’d want to quit SL forever? what, more than anything else, motivates you to remain in SL? or are you simply (as I observed elsewhere in this blog) “trapped in a perfect world”?