Bees And Flowers: An Essay By Extropia DaSilva

April 18, 2009 - in Homepage, Mind Child's Musings by: Extropia DaSilva
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SHUFFLING BITS AND PIECES.

Shuffling bits and pieces around in novel ways is the essence of invention. It is not often portrayed that way. Think of the cartoon image of a man with a light bulb floating in the air above his head, turning on to signify a great idea coming from nowhere. But, as James Burke explained in the documentary, ‘Connections’, “at no time did an invention come out of thin air, into somebody’s head. You just had to put a number of bits and pieces that were already there together in the right way”. This essay is an example of what he meant. In order to write it, I gathered research material from other books, pod casts, blogs, videos etc. From these I extracted relevant facts, analogies, visualizations and so on that helped clarify my thoughts regarding the themes of the essay. These bits and pieces were then shuffled around, put together in new ways and sometimes changed slightly in order to make them more relevant to whatever point I was trying to get across. Each of the authors whose work was used by me as research material, in turn, did pretty much the same thing. Each one took bits and pieces that already existed in other sources and recombined them in the right way to represent his or her own ideas.

You can imagine taking this essay and surrounding it with the reference material used in its development, with whatever was most influential placed nearest and the least relevant placed furthest away. Imagine, also, that the same thing applied to each source of reference: it too was surrounded by whatever was used to research its ideas. As you traced the ideas I explored in this essay to their sources, you would find that what I call ‘my’ ideas are really a bundle of fragments of other people’s ideas put together in a new way. You would see that this essay is a consequence of the shape of neighbouring research material, just as any one piece of research material is, in turn, a consequence of the shape of its neighbours. As you follow one fragment from my essay at the centre to works far out on the periphery, ‘my’ ideas would become more and more different as it is altered slightly by each individual author tweaking it in order to better suit the point he or she wants to get across.

Later on, we will encounter this image again, albeit in a slightly different form and attributed to another author. Before we get to that, though, we need to consider that ‘selves’ come into existence much like inventions or essays do. That is, by collecting bits and pieces that already exist and putting them together in the right way.

The notion of constructing a self feels more literal in an online world like SL. After all, pretty much the first thing anyone does after logging-on for the first time is to start editing their avatar’s appearance so it looks less like ‘Ruth’ and more like whatever they had in mind. For the majority of people, it becomes apparent that sculpting your avatar into the ideal representation is no easy task. And what do people do when a task turns out to be too hard or time consuming? They pay someone else to do it for them.

So you hit the stores and you grab a pre-designed body, prim hair, maybe a new pair of eyes, walk and posture animations and whatever else takes your fancy. This collection of other people’s designs is then put together in whatever way seems best to you, maybe tweaked a bit if the ‘modify’ option permits. And there you are, a walking, talking, posturing ensemble of other people’s bits and pieces. But after only a short while, it all stops feeling like a collection of other people’s prims, textures, and scripts and starts to feel like ‘you’. This is re-inforced by the people you meet, who also identify your avatar as ‘you’ regardless of whether you designed it all yourself from scratch, or just pieced together bits and pieces that already existed.

In RL you don’t exactly get to fiddle with options to change your body, so what sense does it make to say your self is constructed from pre-existing bits and pieces? We can get an idea of how such a thing might come about by looking at an experiment used in developmental psychology, known as the ‘visual cliff’. A child aged about 12 months is placed at the edge of what looks like a sheer drop, but is in fact traversable thanks to a glass bridge. Whether or not the infant crawls over the glass depends on its mother. Whenever small children encounter a situation they are unsure of, they look to a trusted individual’s face. If that face looks fearful (actually, during the visual cliff experiment the baby is in no real danger) the child will not cross. On the other hand, if Mother looks encouraging, the child is much more likely to traverse the glass.

But, whose fear or confidence is it? The child looks to a trusted individual and adopts the action that mirrors whatever emotion was evident on that face: the child’s actions copy the mother’s emotions. Developmental psychologists call this sort of thing ‘Social Referencing’. AI researcher and philosopher Doug Hoffstadter describes the human brain as ‘a universal machine’, saying, “our neural hardware can copy arbitrary patterns… beings have the capacity to model inside themselves other beings they run into, to slap together quick-and-dirty models of beings they encounter only briefly, to refine such course models over time”. People are prolific imitators. We observe each other’s styles, habits and postures. We absorb each other’s jokes, accents, catchphrases, analogies, metaphores, tales, memories and sometimes we incorporate such things into our own lives. We retell jokes, we adopt a style or a walk or a catchphrase and use it as part of our own repertoire until, after a while, it feels as much like a part of ourselves as our own limbs do. As Hoffstadter said, “we are all curious collages… each of us is a bundle of fragments of other peoples’ souls, simply put together in a new way”.

This notion of a self as ‘a bundle of other people’s souls’ was turned into an abstract painting called ‘I At the Centre’ by David Oleson. Hoffstadter’s description of it may sound familiar: “‘I’ is a consequence of the shape of all its neighbours. Their shapes, likewise, are consequences of the shapes of their neighbours and so on. As one drifts out towards the periphery, the shapes gradually become more and more different from each other”.

The fragments from which ‘I’ is made need not come from people someone has actually met. Humans, after all, are the storytelling animal. People are influenced by folktales, myths, legends, biographies of people they never met and historical accounts of events they did not witness. When photos and movies came along we no longer needed to embellish in our heads those people and places we only read or heard about in stories. We can see them directly, or rather we seem to. What a TV, cinema screen and computer monitor really show are ever-changing 2-D arrays of pixels, but the mind interprets it as coding for 3-D situations evolving over time. Such images could be of people, places and events that do exist and are currently happening; that did exist but no longer; that did not exist but might do in the future; that could never exist at all.

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http://gwynethllewelyn.net Gwyneth Llewelyn

Whew. Lots to think about I should say, right from the start, that your use of my own poor little self as some kind of “personality” to make a point is a bit skewed. As I keep repeating, about only 200 human beings read my blog every day (the rest are ‘bots gathering statistics). My blog rank on Technorati keeps falling. The number of regular readers has declined over the years, continuously so. And so on… but alas, it’s your essay

I have to admit that this is one of the most interesting essays you ever wrote, for lots and lots of reasons. One is clearing out the idea of human beings as “narrative beings”, a concept I only had from Terry Pratchett’s books, and which I did mostly disregard as “fiction”, even if on his partnership with Ian Stewart and Jack S. Cohenon on Science of Discworld II: The Globe, this thought is echoed over and over again. It’s interesting to see someone tie this concept — that we humans are, mostly, storytellers — with the notion (or “illusion”, as some oriental philosophies would say) of the self as an invented narrative, which, of course, fits quite well in the overall concept that reality is a perception of our senses — in a way, we tell to ourselves the story of the perception of reality (and of others). I definitely favour that argument, too In fact, it has strong and powerful consequences, and, ironically, it is a “theory of the universe” (and not only of the mind!) in the sense that “the universe is a collection of stories about what we perceive”. Science is a story, too.

Even more intriguing were the quotes from scientists explaining the notion of self as “fragments of stories” that we assemble to, well, become “ourselves” — but that those same fragments can quite easily be assembled to create imaginary characters in fiction. Or, well, on virtual worlds. Eons ago, I wrote something not unlike that: the notion that our self is a dynamic thing that is assembled from several personality traits and that it can get “reshuffled” pretty easily when you’re younger, less so after your teens — except, of course, if you’re under the influence about some kind of drug, narcotic, stimulant, or, well, through brain damage and/or surgery. In fact, although I didn’t realise that at the time, it’s exactly because of this ability of the “ever-changing self” that drugs are able to deal with mental disorders like bipolarity or the more common depression — we can artificially “shut down” some areas of the brain, and become “different” in that way.

Granted, if you start reading oriental philosophy or anything the classical Greeks have written 2500 years ago or more, this won’t be news. They always said that the notion of “self” was purely delusional — just a story that we tell and share with others.

Starting from this assumption, it naturally follows that if someone can tell your story well enough, they become you. This is, in fact, one of the most worrying aspects of electronic identity theft: creeps being able to impersonate your self as good as you, and, well, use that for illegitimate (or criminal!) purposes. This is a serious crime. One that is hard to prevent. So, if the authorities already worry about identities being stolen, and incorporate that in the body of law that protects our societies, it’s obvious that “identities can be copied” (or, well, roleplayed, since that word is quite well loaded). I missed some typical examples on your essay: e.g. things like Sherlock Holmes or even Charlie Chaplin’s Charlot that became stereotypes, but whose “stories” will be immediately recognised by anyone — and we can, of course, use many more examples. Are vampires real? No. So why can anybody (in the Western world at least) define what a vampire is with excruciating detail to the point that everybody in the audience will immediately know what they’re talking about?

So, I’m obviously not “surprised” by your essay — just surprised, in fact, about the many ties you found between (apparently) different research areas, all of them pretty much saying bits and pieces, but you managed to bring them all together under a consistent idea. Gosh, I just realise that this is exactly what you said that an essay actually is — bits and pieces, floating around, gathering into the same “story”. Nothing is new, just recycled — “newness” comes only from the insight of saying which pieces should be assembled together, and which should stay out of it. Uncanny. Very nice work, Extie

Lastly, I always find your ideas about “immortality through avatars” amusing. Oh yes, they’re not so “obvious” — the transhumanists and extropians are usually more worried about the “mind uploaded to computers” issue. You, on the other hand, minimise the importance of the technology by itself, and point to a far easier route for “immortality”: having other people roleplaying your self (and, after all, what better “machine” to upload your mind to — a human being, which are the best known examples of “mind-running” computers that we know about? And hooray, they already exist, work fine, and we have 6.3 billion of them around!).

The issue you always arise is the “why would someone like to roleplay me?”, and, of course, this is where we get religious — or perhaps mystical would be a less loaded word. You seem to imply that only “famous” people would likely be roleplayed by others — thus preserving their immortality. In real life, this is, to an extent, true. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, is probably the archetypal detective that has been mostly roleplayed ever, just because, well, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was famous and his stories became even more famous. A minor detective on an even minor book of an unknown author might never be picked up ever again. Similarly, Plato has roleplayed what Socrates might have said, because, well, Socrates, even if he hasn’t ever written a single word (that we know about), was “famous” — more famous than Plato at least. Examples abound.

On the other hand, of course, you make a good argument that “unknown” people (in the sense of “less famous”) might be “easier” to roleplay because there is little known about them, and fewer friends to “fool” (in the good sense). That argument is definitely true; the question, of course, arises:

If you have unlimited abilities to create your own self — either in real life or, well, in virtual worlds — why should you be compelled to roleplay someone’s self? That’s something I still don’t get I might imagine one scenario: claiming to be “Charlot” in 2009 might be far better for a performer to get an audience, than, well, claiming to be himself. Elvis impersonators are more “famous” than the real persons that impersonate them — just, well, because they impersonate “Elvis”. So there is some good argument to say that famous people (whatever “famous” might mean in this context…) will be good candidates for roleplaying. After all, mentally deranged people are keen to say they’re reincarnations of Cleopatra or Napoleon, but never of John Doe, anonymous goat keeper of a rural dwelling on the highlands

And finally, of course, I might add some things of my own If I’m personally not that keen about releasing so many information about my real self — and God knows I give enough hints — does that mean a) I have something to hide; b) I’m aiming for immortality, as you suggest, by forfeiting the link with my real self, so that someone else might pick up the mind-patterns of “Gwyneth Llewelyn” in the future; c) I’m just having fun roleplaying someone; d) none of the above.

Ha! I wish it were an easy answer And, of course, the answer is different depending on the year you ask me It might make a whole essay one day, but suffice it to say that by disconnecting my virtual self from my real self, I’m just making a simple statement: human beings are worth by what they say and do (you might say: “the story they tell”), not because of who they are, where they’re born, how old they are, what they’re studied, what cool friends they’ve got. If there is a simple lesson I’ve learned is that I, as a person (and that is true of every human being on Earth, even if most will disagree with me ), am worth very little. It’s just my ego that makes me think otherwise. Everybody else is way more important than me. However, we tend to “tag” people relatively to our social status, wealth, friendship, knowledge, studies, and, well, colour of skin, age, gender, religion, whatnot. I dislike “tags”. I’m just another one of the 6.3 billion human beings in existence — nothing else, and nothing more. My virtual projection into Second Life, the cute-ish red-headed avatar that walks around with a smile, a glint in her eyes, and a flower in her head (has nobody ever wondered why?), is just tabula rasa — take me for what stories I spin about myself, not for my, uh, “credentials” or “authority” that comes from immaterial and transitory things that I might have accumulated elsewhere in real life. These are completely irrelevant to what makes me a human being. And by voluntarily discarding all those “real life tags” I allow everybody in SL (and elsewhere) to tag me from scratch based on what they experience.

Granted, this might have been my reasoning, but it has a major flaw: as time passes by in SL, I accumulate new tags That runs, of course, against my original intentions (just an hour ago, I logged in to OS Grid, and the first guy I met there just asked: “Hey, are you the same Gwyn that blogs a lot?” *sigh* There goes my theory!). I’m sure that there is a lesson to be learned there, too. The good news, of course, is that as SL grows and grows, I become less and less relevant, and that is a Good Thing.

And of course, there would be an easy way out, e.g. getting different avatars, different names, all the time, so that I could avoid the tagging. Alas, that doesn’t work at all. Imagine a tourist visiting a nice, peaceful, fishermen’s village at the coast. She won’t make an impression if she stays just a few days around and talks to people. She will be quickly forgotten once she leaves. But if she remains in the village for years or decades, she will be accepted by the community, and, even if they remember that she might once have lived elsewhere, she’ll be “part of it” now, and will be treated according to the way she presents herself. In a sense, that’s my idea of Second Life, strongly influenced by Philip’s own idea of “SL as a country”. I’m an immigrant here in SL, but after so much time has passed, I feel that I’m accepted now, and can contribute back to the community as well. Starting afresh every day — juggling among alts — defeats that purpose.