BOTGIRL: (UN)REAL.
Botgirl Questi has a post on her blog called “For Those Who Say Avatar Identity Isn’t Real”. What could possibly be meant by a statement like ‘Botgirl isn’t real’?
If we equate reality with existence, then the statement seems to be saying ‘Botgirl does not exist’, but is this statement expressing a truth? If Botgirl is a sort of fiction we can ask if fictional characters exist. In some sense, yes they do. Take Harry Potter, for example. He definitely exists as part of our collective consciousness. He is as much a part of our culture as Paris, or the Brandenburg Concerto, or the Statue Of Liberty, or the Bible. All of these exist only because humans created them. If, when people say ‘Botgirl is not real’ they mean she was dreamed up by some human, then hardly anything in our real lives is, well, ‘real’. Ours is a world of the artificial; the imagination made physical.
Sticking with this concept of something or someone existing in the collective consciousness, you could argue that Harry Potter’s existence is more definite than that of my fellow blogger, Christopher Hutchison. The reason why has to do with the remarkable success of the Potter franchise, which has familiarised Harry to millions of people. You could ask people “Is the name Harry Potter familiar to you? Can you tell me what he is like?”. Many more people would say ‘yes’ to your first question and provide a psychological profile that was consistent with other people’s description of him, compared to the number of people who can honestly say they have heard of Christopher and know what he is like. In fact, as far as most of the world is concerned, Christopher does not exist at all.
But there is another way of looking at this, one which emphasises Christopher’s existence over Harry and, I would argue, Botgirl. Everything artificial requires humans to exist, but not everything artificial requires humans to persist, once created. Take Stonehenge, for example. The society that built this monument has long since disappeared from the Earth, but the stones still stand. If the entire human race were to just disappear, this megalith would still exist. But, at the same time, there are some aspects of Stonehenge that do not persist to this day, not least of which is the reason why this monument was built at all. What was it for? What rituals, what customs, what myths and legends did its original creators build up around it? We can guess, but we will probably never know for sure. Such intangible aspects of the monument are lost, along with the people who built it.
If the human race were to vanish from the Earth, some of what they created would disappear with them. Not gradually, as the pyramids will gradually succumb to erosion, but immediately. Churches would persist, but Christianity would not. Books would exist; stories would not. Cds, MP3s, Vinyl records, sheets of music would exist; music would not. In short, anything existing exclusively in our minds would necessarily vanish along with the human race. I suppose you could argue it all still exists in principle, only awaiting the reappearance of minds capable of interpreting the information locked away in physical media. But, barring that eventuality, our virtual cultural artifacts cannot persist for even an instant without minds being aware of them.
Imagine the entire human race- except Christopher- were to disappear. Does he still exist? Of course! Maybe not for long because, after all, a human being is a highly social animal. Being the last person left alive may be a fate nobody would wish to endure for long. But Christopher could persist for a while, all by himself.
Could Botgirl Questi be the last female left alive? No, because she is one of those virtual parts of our culture. She cannot persist for any length of time after human imagination ceases to be. Neither, for that matter, could I.
When thinking about the question “is avatar identity real”? many people answer “yes, because I am real”. No! It is not entirely correct to attribute Botgirl’s continued existence to one specific human being. One specific human being should be given credit for having created her in the first place (assuming she is not the product of some team effort) but, in principle at least, why should she need to rely on just this individual to persist? Stories can be ghost-written so why can’t there be ghost bloggers? Characters can persist through a succession of actors, so why can’t an avatar persist through a succession of users? If we assume Botgirl is a kind of fiction, why differentiate between her primary pretending to be her and anyone else pretending to be her? So long as Botgirl’s social network evolves in a way which is roughly consistent with our mental model of ‘what she is like; what she is likely to do’ there is scope for her existence to persist through a succession of primaries.
This is where Botgirl exists; this is the source of her reality: She is a pattern existing in the abstract space between the social networks and the minds connected via the Internet. She can, in principle at least, outlive any individual. It’s just a matter of her patterns being interesting enough to be worth maintaining by anyone capable of evolving them in a consistent manner. But without the collective imagination, her existence is nothing. She is dependent on us believing she exists in a way that Christopher is not. Dependent, that is, until artificial intelligence is creative and imaginative enough to run her patterns in a convincing manner. Until that day,
BOTGIRL: (UN)LEASHED.
The Unlimited Dream Company 
My personal feeling is that there are two quite orthogonal issues here, Extropia. The first is ontological–does the entity named by the character string Botgirl Questi exist in some possible world? and the second is in effect linguistic–is the proper name a referring expression or not?
Let’s maybe kick off with the issue of whether fictional (mythical, folkloric, literary, etc) entities in any sense exist. We can posit that, for example, unicorns, phlogiston, God, fairies, Sherlock Holmes, hobgoblins, Santa Claus, and such like exist, relative in each case to some universe of discourse, a model (in the mathematical sense) of a possible world which just happens not to be the actual world.
Thus Gilbert Ryle:
A set-theoretical semantics would simply say that in the actual world a referring expression such as ‘hobgloblin’ quite simply names an empty set.
Equating the bona fide existence of an entity with its degree of presence in the ‘collective consciousness’, on the other hand, seems to me a tad spurious. Existence is, like being pregnant, a polar rather than a scalar category: one can no more exist just a little bit than can a woman be just a little bit pregnant. So be assured that Christopher Hutchison exists; and in virtue of the fact that, when kicked, a foot will meet greater resistance from Christopher than from an insubstantial Harry Potter, exists in a way that Harry does not.
My personal feeling (and this would seem to pretty much your own expressed view, Extropia) is that Botgirl Questi exists in much the way that, for example, James Bond exists, initially in the mind and novels of Ian Fleming and subsequently in the cinematic performances of David Niven, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and so forth. So far as you or I know, Botgirl Questi may not have a unique primary, may for example be a team of puppeteers much as Tim Guest’s Second Lives reveal the avatar Wilde Cunningham to be a collective with, perhaps, the composition of that collective fluctuating over time.
Ryle, G. (1957). ‘The Theory of Meaning’, in C.A. Mace (Ed.), British Philosophy in the Mid-Century. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Pp.239-64.
You say one can no more exist just a little bit than can a woman be just a little bit pregnant. However, as I mentioned in a reply to Ron Blechner, it is not unusual for people to attribute personhood to infants whose brains are too immature to generate much in the way of self-awareness. For instance, a parent might say aloud ‘what baby is thinking’ like ‘oh, look, Tom is thinking “my feet are tasty!”‘ when they see baby Tom put his foot in his mouth. But this is not really baby Tom’s thought. Rather, it is an imaginary person the parent projects onto the infant. At this point in Tom’s life, a self attributed to Tom definitely exsts, but arguably not in Tom’s mind. But it will gradually develop and this gradual development does mean there are degrees of subjective existence. Right now Botgirl has no self-awareness and is an imaginary self that others project onto her avatar.
Wilde Cunningham is actually the opposite of what I am talking about. He does not have his own personae, he is many people in one avatar. For instance, he says “we are pleased to meet you” as opposed to “I” and during conversations it is obvious that many people with many different tastes and opinions are communicating to you through him (I never met Wilde, I am just going on what I have read in Tim’s book and also Wagner James Au’s). What I am talking about is one digital person pupetteered by more than one person IRL, with enough continuity of behaviour from one day to the next to ensure it always seems like ‘the same person’. Wilde does not seem like the same person from one SECOND to the next!
I think, Extropia, we’re probably talking about different things; and consequently not necessarily in disagreement (mea culpa … I got carried away by my own enthusiasms). I’m talking about existence (and hence personhood) per se; you, about third-party perception and attribution of existence and personhood. This in fact recalls for me the controversies around the Turing Test and its implications for ‘doing’ AI. Turing’s view was that if it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and shits like a duck, then to all intents and purposes it’s a duck; he’d have been unconcerned as to whether it actually is a duck. This is consistent with your observation that Botgirl “is an imaginary self that others project onto her avatar“.
This is also consistent with your requirement that an avatar display “enough continuity of behaviour from one day to the next to ensure it always seems like ‘the same person’”. Thus, too, in your original post: “She is dependent on us believing she exists in a way that Christopher is not”, a point well made.
The social construction of reality and, in particular, the social construction of others’ identities is a topic I’d like to see pursued further in this blog.
As a postscript to my above comment I now find myself also musing why we might consider it important that we perceive an avatar as a unitary personality rather than, as may be the case, a possibly inconsistent multitude of voices, as with Wilde Cunningham. Why should it matter to us that a unique individual is perceived to emerge? I find that’s a question I am unable to answer (though unsatisfactory answers spring to mind).
Re-reading your post, Extropia, I now suspect that–at least initially–we are indeed talking about the same thing:
So I guess I’ll have to stick with my original response on this: Botgirl either exists or doesn’t exist. Partial existence is not an option; though indeterminacy in the minds of third parties with respect to the actuality of her existence is an option (which is, I think, what you have in mind in your following paragraph). And I suspect it all hinges on the manner in which she might (or might not) be said to exist. So I’d then want to go back to my Sherlock Holmes and hobgoblins: the question is not whether she exists (is ‘real’, whatever we’d wish ‘real’ to mean) but whether or not she exists in the actual world rather than solely in some subset of the infinite set of all possible worlds.