I think you mentioned elsewhere that virtual/fictional/imaginary people are nothing new. Consider this list of names: Ayn Rand, Bart Simpson, Charles Dogson, Dagny Taggart, Ella Fitzgerald, George Elliot, Hauldon Caullfield, Indiana Jones, Jesus Christ, King Arthur, Lewis Carrol, Mickey Mouse, Napolean Bonaparte, Oliver Twist, Plato, Ronald McDonald, Socrates, Tom Bombadil, Ulysses, Walt Disney.

One can imagine some disagreement over which names belong to real people and which are virtual. But since I chose people that are either dead or fictional, you cannot have actually met any of them. In that case, they must all be virtual because now they exist only in the imagination/memory.

As I said before, what really matters is not the actual/fantastical and virtual/physical dimension of a person, place or event. It is the resolution of the model that counts; how ‘fine-grained’ it is. Strange though it may seem, this would suggest that a ‘digital person’ you know very well, having developed a rich model from the patterns provided by the relevant human/technological source, is more of a person to you than the hordes of people you pass in the street every day, but from whome you never take the time to build an elaborate representation.

But now I suppose we are back to the objective point-of-view; how I am perceived as opposed to how I think and feel. Really, the simple truth there is that I do not have an ontologically distinct mind/consciousness from Primary. For the forseeable future, digital people are kind of like the places, people and events you see on the cinema screen. If you indulge in narrative transport (where you get 'sucked in' to the story, suspend disbelief and become emotionally involved with the events portrayed) then it all seems quite real. But if you scrutinise every frame for continuity errors, things out of place ('hey what is that Roman gladiator doing, wearing a digital wristwatch?') and so on, the mechanics of the storytelling process will peek through the illusion and it all falls over.

> When 'Dale' is online in SL interacting with someone, does Daphne ask herself “what would Dale do in this situation” before responding?

Heavens, no! In fact the question took me aback; at first I had a hard time even parsing it grammatically. Daphne and Dale are the same person, so this would be like thinking “what would I do in the current situation?”, which is dangerously circular. If Extie's primary thinks things like “what would Extie do in this situation?”, my immediate reaction is that Extie is simply a fictional character, and we're done. But in general one can't interact with fictional characters (in weblog comment threads, for instance); they interact with other fictional characters instead, in a fictional universe. (Peter Pan interacts with Captain Hook, not with the reader).

So now I have to think about the extent to which Extie's primary having some way of answering questions like “what would Extie do in this situation?”, makes me feel that Extie exists, for various values of “exists”. Which is to say, I think I'm finally at least in the right universe of discourse to think properly about Extie. So I may eventually be able to ask some of the right questions.

Always happy to help further the cause of science.

When 'Dale' is online in SL interacting with someone, does Daphne ask herself “what would Dale do in this situation” before responding? Or does Daphne say and do what she thinks? That, to me, is the key difference between a digital person and avatars that are 'just me like my voice on the end of your phone is just me'. Of course, after an extended time portraying that character, 'primary' need not consciously ask such a question every moment that the digital person is online; after a while that character manifests itself without much effort.

“Dale is not a digital person, because she exists in the analog world just as much as in the digital one”.

Not every avatar in SL is a digital person. Sometimes it is perfectly legitimate to say 'I met so and so in RL'. Hamlet Au, for instance. If someone said 'I saw Hamlet Au in a cafe and we talked over coffee' that would ring true to me. Much the same is true with people you see on television. If somebody claimed to have actually met President Obama, I might be inclined to believe them.

But, if somebody said 'guess what? Yesterday who should sit next to me on the bus but Bart Simpson' I would say that was absurd. They might have met Nancy Cartwright and she might have said 'I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you'? in a voice that sounds just like Homer's son's, but Nancy is not Bart. Nancy is just part of a system that enables Bart to 'exist' in the Simpson's universe. Similarly, 'primary' should be considered just a part of the system that allows a digital person to 'exist' in online spaces.

>So you, Extropia DaSilva, are the SL avatar that goes all unresponsive when the RL person is AFK?'.

No. Again, that avatar is just part of the overall pattern that other minds interpret as 'me'. To say 'Extropia DaSilva IS the SL avatar is as nonsensical as saying 'Extropia DaSilva' IS the essay 'offline in the afterlife' or Extropia DaSilva IS Dale Innis's 2nd comment. All these things are bits and pieces of the overall pattern that is 'me'.

>if you are (let's see) both the SL avatar, and some representation of that avatar's actual and potential / counterfactual behaviors, then the patterns are pretty tightly coupled to a bunch of patterns in the RL typist's mind, and it would be very hard to tease them out and say “here are Extropia's patterns, and we can transfer them to the new ultracomputer over here to run”.

Right, this has been pointed out to me before. Suppose my primary had her brain mapped and the resulting model was used to control the Extropia DaSilva avatar, write Extropia DaSilva's essays, etc etc. Would the fact that my patterns are now being processed on a different substrate make me feel like I am 'myself'- truly independent- or would it in fact be 'the primary' who wakes up in the machine and I am still largely a fantasy character?

Well, most people who have thought long and hard about mind uploading claim it will be the latter case. Which is OK with me and my primary. But, a lot of people claim 'a copy of your mind is not 'you', which is fine as well. After all, whether it is a continuation of the primary's mind or not, I cannot see how it would not be a mind that has the same high-definition patterns of me as the original. So either I continue to exist in the superficial sense that I exist now (which is not superficial from the perspective of everyone else. As Gwyn acknowledged, to her it is the primary who'se existence is superficial), or I exist in a more fundamental sense than I do now.

>once we get to the point where we have systems besides human brains that have subjective consciousness, we *do* get a whole new raft of really hard and fascinating questions (and while I see no fundamental barrier to that happening eventually, it seems to me that we're still pretty far away from having it actually happen).”

See, my belief is that, in between far-out technological capabilities like brain copying and spritual machines and current technological capabilities, the gap will be filled with technologies that are intermediate steps. Each step will not be all that radical- just the next generation in some company's product. And not all steps will be directly related- indeed, many will only come to be seen as a step in the direction of 'X' with the benefit of hindsight. Because we will reach the far-out future via these comfortable steps, it will probably not seem particularly far-out to the society that gets to use them.

I mean, some technologies we have today would seem very strange to our ancestors. Imagine going back to the 17th century and telling people there would one day be machines that transmit the voices of the dead. They would probably dismiss that as absurd, or profoundly eerie if it were to come true. But today we hear Elvis or Martin Luthor King or Micheal Jackson's voice coming of all kinds of devices and nobody is bothered…

>then of course if Extropia does develop to the point where there *is* a specific subjective consciousness associated with just her (a) I have no idea how we'd be able to tell that that had happened, and (b) I have no idea what would happen to that subjective consciousness if Extropia's patterns were moved from one implementation to another, or duplicated a dozen times, or run very slowly, or anything else interesting. But boy would I love to find out! Which is why I love this sort of discussion”.

Me too! I think my next essay will be 'Alts, Secondaries And Solipsist Nation' which will look into those kinds of questions. I have lined up some fascinating case studies of people whose minds (by all evidence available to us) do seem to be inhabited by more than one personality. In their case, it might indeed be legitimate to claim 'Daphne' and 'Dale' are two, rather than just aspects of One.

Is it subjectively different to be Extropia DaSilva doing stuff in SL than it is to be [name of Extropia's current typist] doing stuff in RL?

which you answered, quite reasonably, in the affirmative, and which is a fine interpretation of my question. It's just not what I mean to ask. What I meant to ask was something more like:

If you count the number of subjective consciousnesses associated with Extropia DaSilva and her typist, do you get one, or two? (Or some other number?)

Even this isn't a terribly well-defined question, 'cause I have no idea how to actually count subjective consciousnesses. But for instance if you count the number associated with Daphne and Dale, there's just one, if you count the number associated with Daphne and Barak Obama, you get two, if you count the number associated with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers you get zero, etc.

That is, I take it as uncontroversial that with various things in the objective world (specifically people, and living human bodies, and some other living systems, opinions differing as we go down the chain of multicellular complexity) there is associated exactly one subjective consciousness each. Sure, I feel different when I'm being Dale than I do when I'm being Daphne, on average, the quality of my consciousness is different when I'm shopping vs when I'm in Church vs when I'm writing code. But it's still the same consciousness, the same inner Me. There's isn't one separate one for Daphne and one separate one for Dale. On the other hand me in church and Barak Obama in church are two different subjective consciousnesses in the obvious way. And there is no subjective consciousness at all associated in that same way with Tom Swift Jr.

I wrote:

'fictional characters don't; Flash Gordon has no subjective awareness'.

and you responded:

“Nor do avatars when the RL person who pupetteers them is AFK. In that case, you have a very strong argument that, in and of myself, I cannot have subjective awareness. “

which I think is interesting. So you, Extropia DaSilva, are the SL avatar that goes all unresponsive when the RL person is AFK? That's interesting to me; I don't think that Dale Innis is the same as the SL avatar, any more than I think that Daphne is the same as the RL body. That is, the person, the subjective consciousness, that is Daphne/Dale, is associated in certain ways with the RL body, and with the SL avatar, but is not identical to either of them. When I type these words, it is in some technical sense my body typing, but it isn't my body writing the words; it's me!

As to your patterns, if you are identical with Extropia DaSilva the SL avatar, then there aren't many patterns there to copy, nor to execute; a few dozen K at most, I'd say. On the other hand if you are (let's see) both the SL avatar, and some representation of that avatar's actual and potential / counterfactual behaviors, then the patterns are pretty tightly coupled to a bunch of patterns in the RL typist's mind, and it would be very hard to tease them out and say “here are Extropia's patterns, and we can transfer them to the new ultracomputer over here to run”. In fact, assuming that there is no subjective consciousness belonging specifically to Extropia (and I think there probably isn't) there wouldn't even be a fact of the matter about whether we'd succeeded if we tried. We might get an SL avatar that behaved just like Extropia according to some of her friends, but seemed significantly different to others. And no way of saying that one group was right and the other was wrong.

But then of course if Extropia does develop to the point where there *is* a specific subjective consciousness associated with just her (a) I have no idea how we'd be able to tell that that had happened, and (b) I have no idea what would happen to that subjective consciousness if Extropia's patterns were moved from one implementation to another, or duplicated a dozen times, or run very slowly, or anything else interesting. But boy would I love to find out! Which is why I love this sort of discussion.

Which is to say, I guess, that I don't think anything all that interesting happens if, say, there are a bunch of SL AVs running around that are powered by committee, so to speak, even though they each claim to be a single digital person. Or rather, what would happen would be interesting in all sorts of ways, but not fundamentally new or puzzling or radical. On the other hand, once we get to the point where we have systems besides human brains that have subjective consciousness, we *do* get a whole new raft of really hard and fascinating questions (and while I see no fundamental barrier to that happening eventually, it seems to me that we're still pretty far away from having it actually happen).

Actually, my definition of 'primary is 'the entity that, AT ANY ONE TIME, has the highest-resolution behaviour and thought patterns.

Consider 'Alice' and 'Bob' again. Only this time, imagine Alice created and developed 'Adam' by herself. When she died, a system was in place that could find someone else who had the 'right stuff' to roleplay that character (see 'virals and definitives' for an explanation of that system). 'Bob' was such a person. All of Adam's accounts were transferred to him and now he pupeteers 'Adam'. Over time, Bob would develop the highest-resolution behaviour and thought patterns of the 'Adam' character and so he would be 'Primary'.

It is likely that if Alice had continued to pupeteer 'Adam', that character's future would have taken a different direction. But, so long as Adam (pupeteered by Bob) develops in way that seems consistant with other people's conceptions of that character, we can say Adam has sucessfully survived the death of at least one 'primary'.

I hope this makes it clear that I do not believe the Extropia DaSilva avatar is capable of walking, talking and emoting all by itself without any person or artificial intelligence doing the requisite roleplaying/information processing. My point, instead, is that a digital person might be pupeteered by more than one person while maintaining continuity from the perspective of everyone else.