Fake Avatars and the Duplicates Paradox: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva
In ‘A Tale Of Two Avatars’, Wagner James Au reports on the discovery that there are two ‘Hamlet Aus’ on the social networking site ‘Avatars United’. Like many things to do with life on the screen, a superficial consideration of this discovery leads to a clear-cut and simple conclusion: There is the real Hamlet Au, and then there is a fake Hamlet Au. However, again like so many things to do with life on the screen, this clear-cut and simple conclusion may not hold true in all cases.
FAKE HAMLET.
Why not? Well, it all centres on what is meant by ‘Fake Avatar’. The purpose of Hamlet Au is simply to provide one more means of getting in touch with Wagner James Au. It is like his telephone number or his email address. Just as a person hopes and expects to speak to Wagner when they ring his number, they also expect to talk to Wagner when they encounter his avatar in SL or any other social networking situation. In fact, it is probably fair to say that hardly anyone communicates TO Hamlet Au, anymore than a person speaks to their mobile phone. No, you speak to the person on the other end of the line THROUGH the phone. Similarly, Wagner James Au is spoken to THROUGH the Hamlet avatar.
Clearly, then, there is a big difference between speaking to Wagner James Au and speaking to some person pretending to be Hamlet Au. That is why it makes sense to talk about ‘real’ and ‘fake’ Hamlet Aus.
FAKE EXTIE?
But in what circumstances might this not be the case? The answer is when an avatar is not used just as a means of communication with a specific RL person whose identity is generally known, but when the avatar is a roleplayed character. If you define a fake avatar as ‘some person pretending to be [insert name of avatar here]’ you immediately run into trouble when talking about roleplayed characters, for they are, by definition, some RL person pretending to be [insert name of avatar here]. What is the difference between some person pretending to be a character, and some other person pretending to be that character?
PRIMARYBOUND.
At this point, I want to introduce a relatively new phrase: ‘PrimaryBound’. This refers to the belief that every avatar is tied to one specific human. ‘PrimaryBound’ was assumed by Wallace Linden in the blog post ‘Will The Real You Please Stand Up’, when he talked about all the diverse online worlds and social networking sites an avatar might belong to, adding:
“[Here is] what all these online “identities” have in common. At the center of them all, the hub that ties all these personae together, is the very real, non-virtual, analog and offline “you.” Whether the connections are public or not, your Second Life avatar, your World of Warcraft toon, your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn employment history — all of these and more are just different aspects of a single entity: the person reading these words. They are all already connected to each other, via you”.
But we have already seen in the case of Hamlet Au that an avatar with a familiar name may not necessarily always have the same RL individual behind it. For ‘PrimaryBound’ to hold in all cases, the following statement would have to be true:
‘Avatar X is authentic only when that account is owned and/or accessed by one particular RL person’.
But, why should that be the case for a roleplayed character? The assumption here is that, of all the people alive today, there is only one that can convincingly roleplay, say, Extropia DaSilva (by ‘convincingly’ I mean the rest of the online community believes they are interacting with the person the avatar claims to be). Surely, though, the billions of people alive today should be broken down into more catagories than just ‘the one who can convincingly act the part of Extropia’, and ‘everybody else who never could pass as Extropia’.
A more realistic way of putting it would be to say, ‘of all the people alive today’:
Some would be excellent at roleplaying Extropia DaSilva.
Some would be very good at roleplaying Extropia DaSilva.
… and so on down a sliding scale towards ’some would be hopeless at roleplaying Extropia DaSilva.
Suppose some person from the ‘very good-excellent’ end of the scale were to login to my account or set up an account under my name in another online world or social networking site, and then they pretend to be me. Would the rest of the online community know this is a fake Extropia? Well, why would they? Here is an avatar called Extropia DaSilva that acts just as Extropia DaSilva is expected to behave. So what conclusion could anyone draw, other than ‘this is Extropia’? Also, remember that ‘somebody logging in to my account and pretending to be me’ is the default situation for a roleplayed character. That is always what is happening. Unlike an avatar used as a tool for communication, where you speak to the RL person THROUGH the avatar, when communicating with a digital person you speak to the digital person aka the character that exists in online spaces. While a person may believe they are speaking to the person behind the character, that is not the case in any meaningful sense because psuedonimity does not allow you to model that person in your mind. Think of Hamlet Au, and you visualize Wagner James Au. But think of Extropia DaSilva and you will visualize… Extropia DaSilva, because that is the only identity you get to know.
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Well. Simplistic “roleplayed” identities may have difficulty at times from impersonation – or more so than other sorts of selves – but that is really more the sort of “roleplay” that comes from somebody quite consciously picking a series of characteristics and impersonating somebody possessing them. Which is to say: somebody “roleplaying” that character is no more valid an impersonator than anyone else. Anyone can play Hamlet (not Au); it takes a skilled actor to then create a *distinctive* Hamlet.
I like your analysis on this, Extropia. You took a simple question about trust and spun it out into a transhumanist philosophical tangent. In the end, you realize you're suggesting very non-transhumanist conclusions? I like the idea of the “mind-child” – did you take this from Orson Scott Card's Ender series?
There's also another issue I think that needs to be investigated. Making a distinct Mind Child implies to me some sort of central location, some root that controls it. This is fundamentally different from the more distributed “Is this really the real Hamlet?” In a sense, Fake Hamlet is the same as Plastic Duck – an icon, a role played by several people, like a character in a play. There is an obvious problem with that residing in the idea that many of us don't roleplay our characters. Hiro is absolutely a brand, a character, and yet, Hiro is intrinsically tied to me. I believe Wagner Au treats Hamlet the same way. You choose to create a slight persona in Extropia.
I might argue that even if one claims an avatar as a persona, it still is inseparable from the core person. But, at the same time, if the character is carefully maintained as separate, perhaps I could acknowledge it as a recurring character role – like Mike Myers and Austin Powers. There could be another Austin Powers, but it is clearly owned by Myers. Perhaps an even more difficult example to analyze is Stephen Colbert, with his TV personality of the same name. I suppose celebrity status is a bit of a character, regardless, and Colbert clearly plays the game of “When I'm in front of the camera, I'm in character at all times.”
Perhaps the matter is as simple as the intent of the creator. If the creator wants to keep his or her intellectual property, than the fakes are just imitators. If the creator acknowledges the character is absolutely separate from themself, and able to be played by other people, then it is a character.
>In the end, you realize you're suggesting very non-transhumanist conclusions? I like the idea of the “mind-child” – did you take this from Orson Scott Card's Ender series?<
No, it was coined by a roboticist called Hans Moravec. Moravec thinks we will one day create robots as intelligent as people. “I consider these future machines our progeny, “mind children” built in our image and likeness, ourselves in more potent form'. It just seemed to me that 'mind child' might be an appropriate name for an upload. After all, it refers to a mind being duplicated; memes being replicated.
Not sure what you mean by 'very non-transhumanist conclusions'? Care to elaborate?
>There is an obvious problem with that residing in the idea that many of us don't roleplay our characters. Hiro is absolutely a brand, a character, and yet, Hiro is intrinsically tied to me. I believe Wagner Au treats Hamlet the same way. You choose to create a slight persona in Extropia. <
Yes. I say that a digital person remains the same individual (taking into account that we all change somewhat over time), regardless of who or what is pupetteering it, provided that people interacting with that character believe it is the same person.
The more prior knowledge a person has about some other person, the harder it becomes to roleplay that part convincingly. To take one extreme, I hardly know you. To me, you are just a bunch of text comments posted on this essay. If anyone else were to somehow login as you, and write a reply vaguely consistent with what you said before, I would assume it was hiropendragon that replied.
ONTH, if I discover that somebody else has posted a reply as Extropia DaSilva, I would know straight away that it was not really me who wrote it. If I login to SL and find my avatar is not how I left it, I would know immediately that someone had been pretending to be me. Similarly, YOU would have no doubt that somebody else was using your accounts, but you might not realize that the person who pupetteered Extropia DaSilva yesterday, and the person RPing me today, are not one and the same.
When talking about this idea of a person retaining their identity despite being roleplayed by several different people, I always stress that I am referring ONLY to digital people, AKA characters created and developed in online communities. The key thing for me is that a digital person, from the off, is a made-up character, a kind of fiction. Someone is pretending to be that person. But, as you pointed out, many people are not pretending, are not faking it, are just being themselves (or they think they are being themselves). There is a difference between someone, and somebody else impersonating that someone. But there far less difference between an actor playing a role, and a different actor taking on the same role. If it were really true that the role becomes intrinsically tied to the first actor that performs it, we would all be crying 'fake! That is not the real Romeo!' at every performance of Shakespeare's play that does not feature the first actor we happened to see cast in that role.
Having said that, there are what I call 'definitives', by which I mean actors who become so identified with a role that you cannot imagine the part played be any other person. Somebody other than Julie Garland as 'Dorothy'? Preposterous. It is quite possible that all digital people are also 'definitives'. That is what all my friends think. They believe they would know I was not *really* me if somebody other than my primary were to pupetteer me. I prefer to think it would not be impossible, but it WOULD be enormously challenging to consistently impersonate somebody in the company of 'their' close friends, such that the friends believe it is the person they know.
I'm happy to see that at least you're still posting comments, Ordinal
I like the implicit paradox
First, that creating a “fake personality”, but to which we get so emotionally and intellectually attached, that we actually don't think twice about “role-playing” it — it comes, so to speak, as a “second nature” to us. Although I always tended to believe that only professional actors could pull that out, after 6 years in Second Life (and some additional studies about the alleged nature of the mind, as seen by modern psychologists, neurologists, cognitive scientists and so forth), I'm not entirely convinced that's really true. Years ago I wrote about the “plasticity of the mind”, the way we can subtly rearrange patterns of our self to present ourselves differently, in the presence of stimuli — those could be, say, being around a certain group of friends, with family, at work, etc., or, of course, logging in to Second Life. While this doesn't really lead to a split, different personality, it might render that personality sufficiently different for others to identify that person successfully; I've seen this happening, to a very moderate level, when a spouse calls the beloved one at work and is surprised by their behaviour at work: cool, detached, professional, instead of warm, loving and caring. An advice I read somewhere was for young girls to meet a guy's friends and see how he behaves among them to figure out his “real personality” before committing to a serious relationship (the flaw in that reasoning, of course, is assuming that the “real personality” only emerges when surrounded by a specific group of friends…).
So, yes, I'll be prepared to assume the possibility of “role-playing a character” becoming as easy as, well, role-playing your 'self' in different characters, and in that case, the word “role-playing” becomes a mere concept.
The paradox, of course, comes when the mere actions and words during a “role-playing session” (let's assume, for the sake of the argument, while logging in to Second Life) define a specific individual so completely that just by emulating those actions and others, different (physical) individuals can co-opt that specific personality. Merely by assuming that this could be possible (let's assume it is, for the sake of the argument), reveals a very intriguing thought: the notion of 'self' — in this case, as an interdependent relationship between an individual human being and others — does not reside physically embedded in one's brain, no matter how much we 'believe' it does. If the notion of 'self' were physically 'attached' to the gore-and-blood grey mass we call a 'human brain', this “behaviour emulation” would be impossible (even as a thought experiment).
If that doesn't reveal something fundamental about the nature of the self, I don't know what does
No wonder, thus, that anyone taking SL seriously will soon reflect on this and try to figure an answer to the paradox…
I've found one, about a year ago, but I can only recommend everyone to give a deep thought about it on your own. And no, shrugging it off by stamping on your foot and crying “this is not real, I'm just a virtual character, SL is fake” hardly solves the paradox — it's just denial of facing something we strongly fear of being true: that the 'self', as we define it, doesn't really have an intrinsic nature physically bound to our flesh-and-meat body. And that's simply too scary to contemplate for most
I came across this news item which is relevant to the idea of digital memories, and automated cues:
'IBM researchers have developed a system called Catchup, designed to summarize (verbally) in almost real time what has been said at a business meeting so newcomers can quickly catch up.
It identifies the important words and phrases in an automatic speech recognition transcript and edits out the unimportant ones.
To improve the quality of audio conference calls, MIT researchers have developed “Meeting Mediator,” which measures how much time four people in two separate locations participating in an audio conference spend talking. If one of them hogs the conversation, all four see that in graphical form on a screen in front of them'.
Perhaps in the future, when 'I' am asked 'what did you do yesterday', what did you think of our meeting' type questions, a descendent of the Catchup automated summary technology will enable a replacement primary to give an answer that is consistent with what others expect of 'me'.
What is the difference between some person pretending to be a character, and some other person pretending to be that character?
Great question you made there, pretty philoshopical, nice article
Reminds me of the movie Avatar. It really looks real human beings.. Good job…
Reminds me of the movie avatar. It really looks real human beings…Good job!