I was mulling over the implications of Second Life Shared Media – the ability to place media on a prim in Second Life…to embed clickable Web pages, Word documents, videos or Flash. But it occurred to me that I’d written about this before, or written about a concept before which I think bears repeating.
So instead of something new, I give you a reprint of an old post.
Welcome to the Strange Loop
A friend asked whether I thought people acted “more real” in a virtual world than they do in real life. This on the theory that the avatar mask is a distraction – what looks like a ‘disguise’ may in fact be a better way to represent the “real you” than, well, the real you.
I was sent a link to a research paper that assessed queer identity against the backdrop of post-Cartesian thinking where the mind/body duality is challenged with a separate duality of person/environment. The author, Donald Jones, quotes Pierre Levy who says that “the virtualization of the body is…not a form of disembodiment but a re-recreation, a multiplication, vectorization and heterogenesis of the human.”
Rather than losing the body, says Donald, it is instead “rearticulated within virtual space as the boundaries of body/self are extended through the mediation of technology.
The concept brings to mind the strange loop, epitomized by Escher:
In his book, I Am A Strange Loop, Hofstadter takes a stab at defining a strange loop:
And yet when I say “strange loop”, I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by “strange loop” is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.
He uses Godel’s incompleteness theorem as a starting point for the examination of whether mathematics lends any clues to the possibility that systems, including systems of thought and “being alive” are self-referential in some way – strange loops, in other words, where systems are products of themselves.
I’ve started to wonder whether virtual worlds constitute a manifestation of the ’strange loop’ phenomenon.
Reflective architecture, which I’ve written about previously and is covered in detail at The Arch may open one doorway to strange loopiness. The idea that our virtual selves might enact a response from objects which then adjust our own responses to those objects – and the further idea of the tracking in time and space of motion, start to leave us with the notion that in persistent worlds the absence of our avatars may not be the same as our absence.
The idea of the recursive city – a layering of the virtual with the real and back again, was covered in a paper examining a virtual London by the thinkers at CASA.
Our message is that digital representation opens a cornucopia of possibilities in representation and communication through a variety of devices which in turn can be embedded in the city, Escher-like, and which indeed are rapidly becoming the city.
Replace the word city with “self” and the concept of the recursive self, the strange loop, starts to take on heightened meaning.
Escher also captured the strange loop phenomenon in Escher and the Droste Effect:
In this case, replace the picture of the city with a simulated city, and insert an avatar within the ‘real gallery’ and the strange loopiness of virtual worlds starts to become more evident.
Batty et al comment that “effective recursion where the experiences are meaningful imply some strictness of control over these strange loops, tangled hierarchies they may be but hierarchies are structured, not random.”
I’m not trying to turn the emotional response to virtual worlds into math. But both Godel and Einstein found debates in the incompleteness theorem and quantum mechanics that went beyond formulas and into the question of whether God exists.
Maybe the writers, thinkers, and individuals who live in virtual worlds are grappling with a strange loop that is manifestly more apparant than Godel’s incompleteness theorem. These are just the early days for understanding how strange this loopiness really might become. At some point in the not so distant future, our avatars WILL exist without our presence. We will feed extensions of ourselves with desires, time, direction….and those extensions, our avatars, will start to feed things back – dreams, emotions, activities, concepts and information, which will in turn…
My ears perk up when someone talks about balance, identity, the difference between the real and the virtual, because I think these questions are important not just related to our task of being human and to understand how our human-ness might change because of our lives in synthetic spaces….but also because I think we’re asking these questions because deeper and more profound truths and patterns are being explored that were not so easy to grasp or identify when our common social tools were more limited.
Random thoughts, maybe and hardly a school of philosophy or anything new, but I’m struck by the implications of examining synthetic worlds as a new manifestation of the strange loop phenomenon, and by the idea that we’re quickly coming to grapple not just with the idea of the recursive city, but perhaps the recursive self.
Yes, I like this a lot.
I have often been amazed at the vigor with which some people cling to the idea of an ‘integrated’ identity, it has seemed like it is born out of a fear of losing one’s identity, (which in fact most people know amazingly little about to start with).
This concept of a recursive self is enough to create this kind of fear in some people, but actually relates quite well to how it really feels to live a virtual life as well as a “non virtual” life.
Homelessness was always seen traditionally as a starting point for the esoteric Seeker, and the recursive self would equate well to this sort of psychic homelessness. The idea is that the true self hopefully manifests then as a non-attached secure and centered being, spanning all worlds.
I can has slsm?
Perhaps strange loopfulness or strange loopage would be more elegant neologisms. Or if you really wish to surprise your friends you could try xenagkulasia with the convenient adjective xenagkulomatic.
What I like about avatar experience is that it is a way to live such questions rather than merely think about them.
I wrote about the “strange loop” back in 2008 (http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2008/03/botgirl-in-botland-strange-loop-that-is.html) in reference to an experience I had while viewing myself with an identical alt.
Another way I’ve found to experience a bit of the weirdness of existence is through creating characters and letting them speak through comics, videos, etc. My latest animates a RL mask who speaks on the topic of the mask of virtual identity: http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-video-of-preeminent-authority-on.html
“INTERFACE” IS the moderating LOOP of Technology/HUMAN culture.
REflective Arch–is really just Interface Design.
and speaking of reprints.. this one lives and loops every 4 years….since i wrote in in 97, but its content is reflective from many before.
i let you fav new website
reprint. they asked, its good info- still valid. —
http://www.pixelsandpolicy.com/pixels_and_policy/2010/02/rosenthal-post.html
oh and all that meta avatar without us stuff– sounds like the adult/ to child/children. If so. be afraid. be very afraid.
Loop- the number of abandoned pets – dogs/ cats in civilized? western culture.
Repeat – eat them, eat us.cube
Cube:
While I agree that interface is a mediating loop, I’m not so sure it’s between technology and human culture. But let me get back to you – I’m following a thread here and we’ll see where it goes.
And I read your article elsewhere already thanks…context is everything….genius at the circus still looks like a circus. The interface of white noise makes us forget that the ideas might be surfable.
Get your car started it’s a long ride.
exactly…
welcome to the realization of the circus.
Why do you think they formed 3 rings.?;)
they were very meta .
[...] I was mulling over the implications of Second Life Shared Media – the ability to place media on a … [...]
Fascinating idea, this. I read through and saw many things I agreed with but what struck me is I don’t really feel like I relate in this way to “objects” per se, but rather to the presence (apparency or actuality) of other living beings. My self is reflected back and given qualities it might not otherwise have in the way an other perceives me. This is where the fascination lies for me, because in a virtual world I have greater control over that perception. On the other point of the idea of an avatar taking on a life of its own, that just seems like a different path that doesn’t have much to do with people at all, it’s rather where the questions of imposters and pretenders to life start to intrude. The avatar that’s an “other” ceases in that moment to be an avatar and is merely an automaton.
[...] Maybe the writers, thinkers, and individuals who live in virtual worlds are grappling with a strange… [...]
Well…yes, of course! But why chatter about this in such an abstract fashion? There are simple applications of the concept that some of us use literally every day: we come into SL to learn and practice skills that we may not have a chance to practice in RL and consciously allow ourselves to be changed. For instance, how many SL real estate moguls, club managers, performers, or agents have not yet dipped their toe into those realms in RL? How many may function at some level in those areas in RL and are using SL to build more skills? How many have actually used their SL experience to invent a whole new realm of RL possibilities? (Joel Foner comes to mind in that last category).
And then of course there are the RL psychologists who have realized that VR has tremendous potential for behavior modifications of various types: http://tr.im/PYHW , http://tr.im/PYKS and even http://tr.im/PYLl . And there are many more.
So no need to muse about “strange loops.” Just consider Goedel and Escher brilliant individuals who used their particular technical languages (mathematics and art) to describe a concept that ought to make most SL residents say “duh!” They just hadn’t yet seen an everyday application of the concept that we experience so intimately and often apply consciously.
Dusan,
just wanted to share a memory with you; Darren and I had just finished our “Tribal One” concept world in which you logged on to facebook, and thru that landed in an OpenSim world consisting of other facebook avatars; one of its features was the ‘home world’, a sim generated from your facebook profile – one feature was that you could frame and hang pictures from your facebook photo album on a picture wall. The weird situation was, when Darren, Jim and I stood as avatars with our ‘real’ (facebook) names in front of my photo wall, looking at a picture of Me and Jim standing together IRL, looking into the camera. Now, everybody has had that eerie moment with a real-world photo in a virtual world, but this was also weird on a social connectedness level.
I guess, if you really want to push it, that it was also a strange loop on another level, as Darren and I were also the authors of the system harboring and generating the experience.
I have to chuckle at all the cogitating you do, Dusan, to try to come up with some exotic theory that would make these worlds sound more than what they are.
The mind is always generating images and maps in real life in organic nature, and adjusting them. So the same “machine” goes on working in a virtual world exactly in the same way. Nothing magical happens. When you put a mirror in front of a cat, the cat thinks there is another cat there and paws at it. When you are put in a virtual world, and something flies up at you, you startle, just as if it were real.
In many cases (not all), people automatically map their sense of body/soul/self to the avatar — this is what Will Wright called “investing your consciousness in a toy” i.e. the avatar. So you begin to say “I’m flying” or “I’m sitting” or “I’m going over there now”. While of course you are deprived of smell and touch, you have sight and sound and even a sense of pressure that can feign touch because there is physics in the world. So you just mapt it all automatically, without thinking, you don’t deside to make an exotic new transposed self — just your ordinary self with its automatic reactions in the automatic nervous system maps, in even in a faulty way, so you begin to feel as if you are walking, picking up stuff, and even feeling depressed if you are in a dark and rainy place, feeling uplifted if the sun is shining, and so forth.
I’ve always been the first one to say that there is something more essential about avatar communications, but as time goes on, I’ve come to see that what seems magical and special about it isn’t that prejudices are stripped away due to the removal/change of the physical body, or that time and space are reduced or something utopian like that, but merely because people sit and listen more. They have conversations. They sit and listen. They are so unused to doing that in real life — with their TV, TV dinners, Internet surfing, i-phones, commutes with Kindles, etc. etc. that the shock of sitting down and listening to another soul while sitting on the bank of a river under a weeping willow in a virtual world is so great, so stupendous, that they they have a transcendent experience. That’s all — but that’s ok, that’s worth working for.
Prok – I just can’t seem to stop cogitating, although I’ve tried.
I totally agree, by the way, that it’s not so much that virtual worlds are different from anything else, which is also Cube’s point really about interfaces (I think).
But what’s interesting to me is the opportunity to re-interpret our beliefs about self and experience because we have a visible domain, presence and specific tool sets through the lens of a virtual world or, more broadly, technology.
The truths we learn aren’t new, but the fact that we can learn them again because we have a new window to look through (excuse the PC metaphor) might shed light on transcendent experience.
“because we have a new window to look through….”
one point is “the amount of dirt on the window…. and what that does to any of your observations of the truth”
dusan..
the dirt is the interface.
the fact that virtuality isnt new, or our reactions to it…ask any lucid dreamer, or TV producer.
the other point is meme, the medium that youll find any transcendence… other than just a faster more seperated culture that can onli interact with each other though a machine…. havent we done such a “good” job” communicating through fashion and language?- oops maybe not , in a historical view.
better we learn how we interact with each other from the examination of past mediums, than hold up any new ones as “special”
unless were selling the tech.– been there done that. you end up looking like Jobs on stage…something creepy there,
c3