A bit over a month ago, Andabata Mandelbrot, addressing a Portuguese-speaking audience, launched an interesting challenge: let national OpenSim grid operators join forces together into a single OpenSim grid. Simple as that.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise for OpenSim users and operators. After all, isn’t “joining forces” what OpenSim is good at? I mean the ability to HyperGrid across grids, which works more and more flawlessly as time goes by and newer versions are released. These days, it’s so easy to get some clothes on one grid, then move to another, buy some shoes, return to your own grid… and suddenly you forgot where all the things in your inventory have come from: they might have come from dozens of different grids, and you’ll be able to mix and match them at will (assuming you have permissions for that), and not worry about anything else. Things like The HyperGates keep all the possible links between individual grids together.

Sounds fantastic! But there is a catch. Actually, there are several.

(...)
Read the rest of Towards a National OpenSimulator Grid (3,478 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2012. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: eduroam, hypergrid, opensim, opensimulator

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Neufreistadt. Where not all content was done for free.

By the time you’re reading this, it’s old news: Linden Lab, in an unexpected twist of sudden inspiration, called for bloggers to submit articles to their own official blog.

Unless you’re an avid participant on the LL forums, you might have missed that completely. Fortunately, thanks to people like Chesnut Rau, the message quickly spread among the SLogosphere. And if there is a common trend among all the articles, it’s that bloggers are completely against the idea.

(...)
Read the rest of Working for free for Linden Lab’s blog (4,758 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2012. | Permalink | 18 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

A few years ago, I wrote about models to pay for content creators in this age where everybody wants to share content for free — except for the entertainment industry, of course, that seems to look upon 2012 as the year to come down with a legal jackhammer on top of anyone doing something that can be remotely called “piracy” or “content theft”, even if the Internet is destroyed in the process. Back then, I left the question open on how exactly to achieve that.

Two years later, I pursued this same topic, by showing how Second Life®’s economy model, based on micropayments, might provide an alternative source of income for content creators. Not because I “speculated” that it might be possible, but by just looking at the extraordinary amount of evidence from a virtual world whose economic furnace is driven by the Linden dollar, possibly one of the most successful model of micropayments ever devised. Two years ago, I challenged Linden Lab to extend the Linden dollar towards other non-SL services — not only allowing it to be used on OpenSimulator-based grids, but also to allow micropayments on webpages.

(...)
Read the rest of Paying content creators with micropayments (4,117 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2012. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: content creation, copyright, flattr, micropayments, virtual currency

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Well, the breaking news is that the US Senate has postponed the voting on PIPA. This should give everybody a good reason involved to think twice on this whole issue.

I was replying to Prokofy Neva’s pro-SOPA article but unfortunately his setup tends to eat up my long-winded comments (it’s not his fault — I blame it on the technology). His argumentation is based on a few reasonable assumptions. Second Life creators, exposed to piracy (via CopyBot and similar technologies), should be actually happy with legislation that protects their work even further. This is quite a legitimate assumption, but of course one should question the methods (what Prokofy doesn’t say is that one single disgruntled creator, being unhappy with piracy in SL, could, via SOPA, shut down the whole grid and take Second Life off the Internet by simply filing a claim. This is like killing a fly with an atom bomb!).

The second, and perhaps strongest argument, was that nobody actually cared to read the whole bill and is just copying arguments from left-wing, free-for-all-piracy advocates, and forgetting that the entertainment industry in the USA (worth US$1.4 trillion in 2011) employs 2.2 million workers who suffer most under the current trend of content piracy — or so the SOPA/PIPA proponents claim (one can only wonder how exactly an industry worth about 10% of the US’ GDP but employing merely 1% of its workforce is actually “suffering”, but, again, that’s another story).

Well, I read the bill. And my own conclusions is that it’s actually worse than those alleged left-wing, free-for-all-piracy advocates are saying — pretty much the opposite of Prokofy’s own conclusions.

On the other hand, I’m naturally for defending and protecting an artist’s right to get paid for his or her job. Unlike the more extremist views that believe that artists should work at MacDonalds and do their art for free in the evenings, I defend a different position, and propose a completely different solution than SOPA/PIPA (or OpenACT, which might come in as a handy replacement since SOPA/PIPA were postponed sine die, and that one is nasty as well, even though not so nasty).

(...)
Read the rest of SOPA/PIPA revisited (7,519 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2012. | Permalink | 18 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: pipa, sopa

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Click here to view the embedded video.

While discussing SOPA with Moon Adamant, after reading this nice article from the WordPress gang, we came to the following conclusion: are legislators so stupid as not to foresee that all this will backfire?

Imagine that I’m ruthless Zuckerberg, the kind of guy who kills the animals he eats, and face being threatened to have Facebook shut down by Disney and Sony Entertainment and Warner Bros because some silly user — out of his 800 million users — just posted a link to pirated content from the entertainment industry giants. What will Zuckerberg do?

Obviously Zuckerberg will use his Russian connections and get all Disney forums spammed first with anonymous “users” who will place links to pirated content from their content — and denounce Disney as being uncompliant with SOPA. Before Disney does anything. Then Disney gets their sites down, specially the ones generating revenue.

Disney has no-one to sue: anonymous “hackers” from Russia are impossible to trace — they’re professionals. And will certainly enjoy attacking Disney first of all, and then slowly moving down all other SOPA-supporters. Imagine, a few hours after SOPA is in effect, having basically all entertainment giants’ websites — and their DNS providers, of course — all shut down. Immediately. Before even they know what had hit them, they’re off the net.

In the mean time, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter etc. will swiftly leave their DNS providers and move their precious domains to someplace safe. Perhaps in Europe, or a registry in Australia, Japan, or any other country like that. Disney and friends can “fight back” trying to shut these sites down, but they will only manage to get them “off the air” in the US.

A cyberwar will start taking place, as competitors pre-emptively fill competitor’s sites with links to pirated content and file claims against each other. This will be top-down first. Who cares if a site with 100 visitors per month with one link with pirated content is hit, if the major players are suddenly flooded with millions of links to pirated content? It’s easy to do. It’s not even as if requires advanced technology. For a few hundred dollars, you can engage professional spammers to flood the ‘net with any kind of content — much easier than doing actual spamming. Before technical engineering teams start dealing with the new threats (i.e. updating their anti-spam tools), millions of SOPA claims will be up, and millions of sites will be forced to be shut down first, before their tech teams can get themselves rid of the pirated content. And even then there is no guarantee they will be able to eliminate every single reference to pirated content, thus making any counterclaims hard to prove in court.

Other people have come to the same conclusion:

Basically, the bill will be no good at stopping piracy—what it was apparently designed to do—but excellent at censoring any web site capable of providing its users with the means of promoting pirated content or allowing the process. This includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, and many more. If it’s possible to post pirated content on the site, or information that could further online piracy, a claim can be brought against it. This can be something as minor as you posting a copyrighted image to your Facebook page, or piracy-friendly information in the comments of a post such as this one. The vague, sweeping language in this bill is what makes it so troubling.

What would come next? Well, as many of you know, even though there is no “central” Internet authority, there is the “next best thing”: the IANA, which deals with IP addresses, and its many subsidiaries which hold the root domain name servers. This is the only “weakness” on the whole Internet: a single country (US) has a single institution (well, almost) which “controls” address assignments all over the world — even in China, Cuba, or North Korea. So far, because the US authorities have been “behaving well” for several decades, and in spite of some discomfort of knowing that the central nodes of the Internet are under the control of the laws of a country which can swing so unpredictably, the rest of the world did not make a serious threat to challenge the status quo.

But how will a world with an estimated 700-1,000 million people connected to the Internet outside the United States react when all of the sudden their websites will be pulled down — out of Google’s search engine, out of sight… — due to a law that can be put into practice assuming people are guilty (of piracy) before giving them the right to claim their innocence? How will the whole world face the issue that nasty spammers, with unreachable and untraceable tools, will “force” unwanted content — as comments, links, posts — to trigger the mechanisms in SOPA to pretty much exclude everyone they dislike from the Internet? I think that the rest of the world will very quickly start to question the US’ right to apply their silly laws to everybody else in the world (that’s the reason why many anti-SOPA organisations, unlike similar issues in the past, have engaged so many non-US citizens to aid their protests: they’re aware we’re all in the same boat because the US controls most of the root nameservers which can affect us all).

So probably before the whole world is plunged into Internet chaos, the whole world will pull themselves out of a sinking boat and let the US sink alone. Well, and at the same time, drawing most major US corporations to put their domains and their servers outside the US, too. Sure, the US has 300 million Internet users, but the world has five to seven times that amount. Sure, the US has a huge economy, but the whole world is bigger. It’s very realistic to expect companies to get their data out of the US as quickly as they can (Google runs hundreds of thousands of servers on data centres all around the world) to escape the drama of SOPA. And it’s just a question of time for US citizens to routinely install Tor software or similar technology just to be able to surf the Web like before — assuming, of course, a Web which is not under the control of the US government. In essence, that’s how citizens of China can today punch holes through their country-wide firewall and still get access to a taste of a free, uncensored world.

Let me tell you a short story which might illustrate what can happen. In the early 20th century, when the superpower was Britain and its Empire, the people of Tibet, afraid to be “contaminated” by British culture and civilisation, closed their borders and tried to live in isolation. Nobody could enter Tibet; nobody could leave it; as a result, Tibet’s teachings remained unaccessible to the whole world and mostly unknown and ignored. When China invaded Tibet in the 1950s, they thought they could use Tibet’s isolationism against them: by utterly crushing their culture and civilisation, they could erradicate Tibet’s Buddhists teachings once and forever, and effectively get their taste of religion out of the minds of Chinese citizens. But this backfired. The thousands that left Tibet brought its teachings with them. As a result, they’re now commonly available to pretty much everybody in the world. Things that once required journeys taking weeks or months to obtain are easily available via a search query on Google. By trying to crush Tibet’s Buddhist teachings, China actually did them a favour, by spreading them to the whole world and making them universally available — even to Chinese citizens.

I think that this whole SOPA silliness will backfire similarly. Instead of “fixing the problem of piracy”, what SOPA will achieve is an exile of companies and organisations out of the US and its crazy laws, and a distribution of the single-point-of-failure of the Internet — its root nameservers — outside the US. SOPA might ultimately achieve what we have been waiting for decades to happen: an even more decentralised Internet, independent of the laws and whims of a single country.

What does this all mean for Second Life users? SL – and possibly even LL — has been a target for several DMCA claims in the past, most notoriously by the industry giants who were unhappy about the amount of 3D content using copyrighted content floating around the grid. LL has, in the past, pre-emptively removed content to avoid any potential lawsuits: despite LL’s own Terms of Service, trying not to make them liable for the content their users upload to SL, big industry giants might simply don’t care: all they need is to push huge and expensive lawsuits against LL and wait until they get at least one that goes through — enough to create precedent, demand insanely high compensation fees from LL, and effectively shut them down. But because LL has an opportunity to claim innocence before getting hit by the consequences of those lawsuits, so far they’ve escaped being crushed in court. There were occasional lawsuits around copyright issues which tried to bring LL into court, but all were settled. They also were filed by the “small fry” who can only afford short lawsuits with quick settling.

Under SOPA, all it takes is a disgruntled resident to claim that LL is violating SOPA. They can just create an alt, upload an avatar based on a Disney character and file it as “proof”. Immediately — without even going to court — mechanisms are triggered under SOPA to make LL’s domain names disappear, thus preventing anyone not only to access the SL Marketplace, but to login to SL as well. Even if LL releases a new viewer based only on IP addresses and not domain names — or registers a new domain name outside the US — how will they announce that to the residents, when their own sites are all down? And they will be down not only in the US, but world-wide. LL might eventually file counter-claims proving that they are in no way related to that resident and that they made their best effort to get rid of copyrighted content in their own servers, but that will just take weeks or months of legal discussions. In the mean time, until a verdict is pronounced, SL will be down and unaccessible.

SL is relatively low-profile these days, but it could happen, and doesn’t even take a lot of effort — no need to hire a huge team of hackers and spammers based in Russia to spam LL’s sites with copyrighted content. All it takes is one alt and one disgruntled resident. Think about it.

So even if you’re pro-SOPA — because you have copyrighted content of your own in SL and would like better anti-piracy laws — you should review your position. Your competitors and enemies — the people angry at you for some reason — can very easily shut you down, too. If you have a website where you promote your products and services, it’s prone to attacks — and an attack is just someone that might post a comment on your blog while you’re asleep, with a link to copyrighted material, and when you wake up the next morning, your site and domain name are off the Web, and you have no way to get it back. If you are a non-US citizen but bought your domain name in the US or host in the US, you’re going to be affected as any US citizen. Even if your domain name is outside the US, you’re still not safe — US citizens might be unable to view your site, and thus unable to know about your content for sale in SL. Worse than that: if most people visit your site because you’re used to getting googled for it, Google might be forced to drop your website’s domain name from their database, in effect turning your website and your products unsearchable by anyone on the Web, not just US citizens.

So get in touch with any of the many anti-SOPA organisations which accept contributions from both US and non-US citizens and file your protest. Allegedly there are still a few US representatives doubting the wisdom of this choice and willing to vote against it, if they can be persuaded it’s the Right Thing To Do. It’s ironic that the Internet, designed in 1969 to survive nuclear attacks and still keep going on, is now in the hands of a few representatives which, depending on their vote, will effectively be able to shut down the Internet forever or not, based on their personal convictions — and affect the whole world,  not just the people that elected them.

That’s a scary thought. Somehow this has to be stopped.

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Arriving at Innsmouth

SL Bloggers usually publish their 2012 wishlist (and an analysis of 2011) around this time of the year. Well, I’ll skip it for 2012. Doomsayers might claim that if even Gwyn cannot make predictions, then SL is truly and utterly doomed…

I prefer to see it from the reverse perspective. When something is way too difficult to predict, it usually means that so many things are happening at the same time, with Linden Lab shooting all around themselves, hoping to hit at least one target, then it’s hard to figure out what direction SL will take next year.

There are two things that definitely will have an impact in SL overall during 2012. First, photo-realism is here. No more will SL be seen as a “lesser” platform to create stunning, hyper-realistic 3D sets, as this example from Hamlet Au shows so well. This means that at least for high-end computer owners, SL is going to be remarkably closer to other high-end “games” out there, and this will mean builders will be able to do the unthinkable. For people with computers like mine, it just means being able to do nice snapshots and be content with whatever I can still render at 3-4 FPS

Of course mesh isn’t perfect yet; of course there is a lot of work to be done until it becomes flawless; of course there is a lot of tinkering to be done with Qarl ex-Linden’s mesh deformer, which finally will get at least mesh dresses to fit avatars. But the technology is reaching maturity fast. And this means that yet another constraint on creativity will be lifted, with the result that at least builders will be happy. This is a bit like betting on the ancient formula “if they build it, people will come” — which we all know to be flawed — but nevertheless it’s better than the alternative: being stuck with a 3D environment which looks ten years out of date. No more.

The second thing is this strange push towards “gamification”, or, put into other words, “back to the roots”. When SL was announced, even before the public Beta, it was claimed to be a platform for 3D game designers which would be easy to use, simple to develop, and flexible enough, for both amateurs and professionals. After a few years that whole concept was just laughed at, and people just continue to do what they wanted to do in SL. Nevertheless, the RPG crowd never gave up on SL — the temptation to design your own RPG “just like you always wanted it” was way too high. Games always popped up in the headlines, from the ancient days of SLingo and casino games to chicken breeding. Somehow, the game design spirit in SL never died, even though the platform was hardly appropriate for that.

Strangely, though, the LL board opted to hire an expert in conceptual game design for their CEO, and ask Will Wright to be part of the board. This has consequences. I’m still very, very skeptical about how SL can compete as a “game platform” (compared to, say, Unity 3D) but the truth is that it’s already as close as one can possibly get to an “ideal” multi-user, user-content-generated, generalistic game platform. It’s just, uh, twenty years ahead of time — or behind, depending on your perspective — and the big question is how long LL can keep SL running until it really catches up as a gaming platform.

Nevertheless, the Linden Realms game seems to have attracted some success. I was expecting it to become a complete and utter failure, but apparently, people are playing it. SL game designers are excited to be able to get their hands on the new LL tools allowing things like automatic HUD attachments and the announced NPC programming tools. How all that put together will turn SL into a feasible platform to develop the next Half Life 2 “killer application”, and, more importantly, allow game designers to turn a profit from it (considering the nightmarish cost of leasing hundreds of regions to run a large-scale game able to “compete” with established MMORPGs) is anyone’s guess. Even if LL slashed the costs to merely a tenth of what they charge today this would still be unfeasible (compared to the alternatives) — and no matter how fast your graphics card is, you simply cannot walk into an area with hundreds of avatars and NPCs and lots of meshes and expect SL to provide you with the smooth lag-free experience of other platforms. We’re simply not there yet — not in 2012, and probably not in 2020 or even 2030, at the current pace of LL development.

So what’s the alternative?

Frankly, I don’t know. A professional 3D designer I randomly met in SL the other day told me something interesting: he was just developing content for sale in IMVU, because there are no overhead costs — no need to lease land, no need to build shops, no need to advertise (which is so hard to do effectively in SL). Just publish your content and see the cash trickling in. I wondered why he was logged in to SL at all. He answered: “Oh, this is my sandbox: this is where I have fun.”

Chatting with Zadok Allen

This certainly seems to be the case for many professional artists. When I visited the Innsmouth region (a depiction of the fictional New England city from H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth novella), I got the distinct impression that this was merely a work of love. Yes, there is a store somewhere in the middle of the region, but I’d be hard pressed to believe they make enough money to pay for the sim lease. The donations are less than a regular life performer makes in a good day (or a bad week). So what drove the builders to create such an amazing environment — just one among the hundreds or perhaps thousands that are all over the place? Innsmouth is not even a new region: it has been around since at least December 2009. So someone has been paying tier for two whole years in return for — what?

Probably not much. Probably just for sharing the fun of having built it. And this is something very notable and unique about SL: sometimes, things get built just because people like to build. There is no business model behind the build. There are not even many visitors (actually, Innsmouth seems to always have a handful of people around — better than many other always-empty places). It’s not used for advertising (“hey, look at the cool things I know how to build in SL, hire me!”). To the best of my knowledge, nobody turned it into a RPG scenario — even a simple hunting game would have been fun (there is so much to explore!).

"Arkham" theatre at the eerie town centre

But this never stopped people from building. They just have fun doing it.

You can see from places like this — and there are so many around! — that this wasn’t built by amateurs. Most often, the creators are semi-anonymous, probably known only to their friends and fans, and possibly by some of their items sold here and there. In reality, I seriously suspect them to be professionals between jobs. They might have been hired to do a recent game for Big Fish Games and had lots of ideas on how to do something different… but while they wait to get hired again, they log in to SL and have some fun experimenting with their ideas. What they’ve earned from past jobs allow them to keep paying tier for their sims.

This is obviously just wild speculation… but it’s not just graphical artists that “take a rest” and go have fun on their sandboxes between assignments. Professional writers, like journalists, have their own blogs, too. Or their Facebook pages. And between two assignments, they might be busy blogging. Their articles on their blogs, free from editorial constraints, might even be more interesting than their regular work, but they will still be professionally written, because that’s how they have learned to write.

Similarly — perhaps — professional game designers and 3D content creators might just go to SL to relax, and create fantastic environments as a hobby. SL scripters have done so for ages. Even Qarl ex-Linden didn’t stop tweaking the SL viewer after having been fired by the previous management — of course he could only do it “in his spare time between assignments”, and thus not at the same speed as if under a contract, but the resulting code would have the same quality. How could it be otherwise? A professional programmer writes professional code, either for fun or as their job.

I have no idea if the “future of SL” will rely on these people, or if the overall model is enough to sustain SL forever and ever. Again, I’m just wildly speculating. But with very few exceptions, the major designers in SL are all professionals. We’ve outlived the glorious days of 2005 or 2006, when retired seniors or housewives with way too much empty time at their homes were the major content developers in SL, just because they had little else to do, and were willing to learn the building tools. Since there was little professional content around, they thrived. These days, however, we’re surrounded by professional content — and it’s clear that not all of it (perhaps not even most of it) is made for profit. Most of it is just made for fun.

Perhaps Rod Humble has realised that, and is willing to push Second Life as a “hobbyist platform for professionals”. Like a testbed for new concepts and ideas that can be deployed relatively easily and exposed to a curious audience first, before turned into a “professional” game. I mean, where do game designers test concepts? Developing a game prototype that is actually played by a group of alpha testers is as expensive to create as the game itself; the industry relies on “feeling” to know what will work and what will not (or just copies existing successes and improve them slightly — just like in the movie industry). There is no “playground” to test concepts.

In the early days of science fiction and fantasy — starting with the first pulp stories — writers would publish short stories to magazines with a reasonable audience of fans. If the short story became a huge success, they might be able to sell the idea to a book publisher, and expand a 15,000-word-story into a 200,000-word-novel. At least until the late 1990s, this was a common procedure (I lost touch with the SF&F fandom around that time). This enabled authors (and their publishers!) to test the waters, so to speak, with novel ideas, different styles, new environments, new ways of writing, and see what the public liked. The successes would even get awards (like Hugo, Nebula, and so many others) and often turned into books — or even movies. This model was (is?) not completely stupid: if you’re too innovative, you might have a difficult time pitching new concepts to publishers. Authors like H. P. Lovecraft would have been completely missed if he didn’t try out his ideas first on those magazines of the early 1930s.

Innsmouth inhabitant being turned into a Deep One

So perhaps this is what Linden Lab is after. Will Wright’s Spore, which was announced at some point as a “SL killer” (because you could, to a degree, create your own “critters” and share them with friends — e.g. leverage on user-generated content and its distribution via the Internet), was not a huge success. But perhaps Will Wright noticed something weird: the top “critter” designers were often SL designers, and some of their “critters” were turned into avatars in SL. Why? Because apparently professional 3D modellers and artists like to have fun in SL, and, in their spare time, just log in to upload their amazing content. Perhaps this gave Rod and Will the idea that SL could be used as a testbed for conceptual, creative purposes. Spore II or Half Life 3 might not be designed in SL — because it lacks the smoothness of play demanded by modern gamers — but what stops a company from testing out new ideas, new concepts, new designs, quickly assembling a simple MMORPG from scratch, and see what SL residents have to say about it? It’s not only about MMORPGs, of course; adventure/hidden object games, so popular on Big Fish Games, or things like chicken breeding, are excellent conceptual models that can be very easily tested out in SL with relatively low cost and quickly enough. You can even use near-to-finished designs and shoot a machinima — and get a cheap trailer for an upcoming game in a few weeks, that might take 2 or 3 years to fully develop.

In this era of financial constraints, it makes a lot of sense not to waste too much money on products that the public will not buy. It’s quite reasonable to assume that doing a “test” case for a novel idea first, and see what the public thinks about it, makes more sense. On top of allowing all that, SL also allows designers to get in touch with each other, see each other’s content, visit each other’s builds — and thus get a sense of what others are doing and what inspires them.

Is this the road that Rod (and Will) are planning to take with SL? Maybe. Announcing SL as a “prototype environment” where lots of game designers regularly come to test their concepts might attract a huge crowd of gamers — gamers that will not have the false expectation of encountering a smooth, lag-free experience in SL, but, by contrast, they will be expecting something rough and crude. But they will still come. As the gamer forums and conventions show, these people are always eager to be “the first ones testing a new game”. Joining SL just to be able to see some game designers and modellers at work, and see what they’re coming up with, years before the finished product is actually released, might be a strong incentive to join SL — and to stay.

After all, those professional game designers and content creators already are in SL. They never left. They are still happy building fantastic new environments out there, for us residents to enjoy. And, strangely enough, they don’t seem to be worried about financial issues. Like a journalist happily paying for hosting their own blog — even though they don’t make any money out of it — perhaps 3D modellers are more than happy to pay tier just to have a sandbox to have some fun. And perhaps sell an item or two in the mean time — also more for the fun of it, and less for the eventual profit.

Who knows? All I know is that 2012, like all years before, looks interesting enough to me. The only difference is that, this year, it’s for me very hard to predict what is going to happen.

Then again, I usually failed all my past predictions (with few, obvious exceptions), even though I was far more certain about them In that sense, at the end of the day, what’s the difference?

Innsmouth was created by Darmin Darkes and can be visited by clicking here. It was reviewed on the SL official blog and is part of the Destination Guide.

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

What do I do now? Oops!

In my country, there is still bullfighting. Unlike our neighbours in Spain, bulls are not chased to death; even though there are some similarities, and obviously some things were clearly inspired, there is one thing that is quite different: at some point during the fight, a group of a few forcados will tackle the bull, head on, without any weapons except for their arms and hands — and the skill.

Now picture this: a bull driven to frenzy by an audience of humans shouting and yelling, inside an unfamiliar environment. He’s not happy. He doesn’t know what is going to happen later. All he sees is a group of puny, weak humans taunting him. So he charges — hundreds of kilos of pure primordial force stampeding over the arena, straight into the group of forcados. The rule of the game is simple: they just have to make the bull stop, by whatever means they can, so long as they only use their bodies. The bull, of course, is not bound to any rules — he’ll try to kill a few forcados or at least seriously maim them.

You might be shocked either by the barbarism, the crazyness of the forcados, or, well, about the way animals are still mistreated in this corner of the world. I’ll leave that discussion for the comments, if you wish; I’m pretty neutral to the whole spectacle. The tradition of stopping a bull in their charge is ancient; there have been some written recordings dating it to at least the Romans, but some historians believe it’s a much older, coming-of-age tradition, where men had to prove their worth and courage by doing an insane act of bravery (these days, there are women forcados, too). In Portugal, young bulls are released in the middle of towns for special occasions, and everybody can have their fun playing at being a forcado too (the young bulls will be nowhere as dangerous as a fully adult one, which is only tackled by experts, of course). So there is a tradition behind this which may go back 2,000 or even 10,000 years, depending on what you choose to believe; it’s still harming animals, but at least the animals have a good chance to fight back and get some revenge (In reality, the number of accidents is suprisingly low — most likely because only the people who have some experience will actually tackle the bull, while others will just watch.)

The analogy is mostly what comes to mind when dealing with what we conventionally call the “self”. When we start analysing very deeply what this “self” is, or where it is, it seems to elude us, like a bull avoiding the forcados. But if you start being more aggressive, and insist on looking at the “self” and figuring out what it is, then the “self” fights back. It becomes aggressive in return. It will kick and scream and attempt to defeat any attempts at being so closely scrutinised. And the closer you get, the more it will kick and scream, so our natural reaction is to get scared and give up the attempt.

But like the forcados can train and learn to defeat their own fear of a charging bull, and tackle it, calm it down and finally stop it, we can do the same with our selves. There is just a slight difference: when the bull is subdued, there is still a bull — albeit a very calm one — in the arena. When you examine the self as closely as you can get, you will eventually find something quite surprising: there is nothing there that you can actually call a “self”.

Let’s put some perspective on this, and switch over to Second Life®.

Common stereotyping picture SL residents as being “escapists”. It’s not infrequent that we meet some person in SL which will tell us that SL “allows them to be more themselves”; what this usually means is that these persons will feel somehow that the daily grind of meatspace will somehow constrict them into a specific behaviour which they dislike, and, by logging in, “become” someone different. Others just role-play deliberately, and thus automatically assume they’re completely “different persons” while logged in, but assume it’s merely a game they’re playing and nothing else. Others, of course, are just interested in dating. Most of us might not fall in either classification but are somehow in-between: we might tease a bit, we might not fully reveal our personalities, we might even act a bit, but, in general, we claim to be who we are in real life.

But are we really?

In fact, whatever we tell our friends — whatever we tell ourselves — what we’re actually experiencing is the plasticity of our “self”. Instead of something fixed, immutable, and indefinitely tied to our bodies, we swiftly rearrange facets of our personality while logged in — where we just have a body of pixels — and interact with others differently. Perhaps not too differently, but that’s not the point; the point is that we can, in fact, change something. And for many of us it’s the first direct experience where we realise that what we call the “self”, the “ego”, or even (for the religious and spiritual ones) the “soul” — something immutable and permanent which is always bound to us — is nothing like that. It can, and does, change a lot, and it changes far more easier than we expect, or even admit to ourselves.

However, we don’t think that there is really a change. We think that even though we might present a different image in-world (or even when commuting back from work to home, where we finally relax and put a different “mask”), there is something deep at the “core” of our self — whatever that might be — that does not change. The interesting point here is that we cannot really point out what it is that makes us feel “the same person” when in-world and when off-world, but we still believe that this “same person” exists, intrinsically bound to our neuronal pathways in our brain. Just because we don’t exactly know what it is, we don’t discard it. For instance, I might never been to Australia — or the Moon — but I know that it exists. The same, somehow, we attribute to our selves: possibly it’s just a collection of “masks”, but there is something (or someone) who switches the masks, turns them on and off. This “something” is what ultimately we think as “ourselves”, or, rather, “our self”.

What is so strange about it? Well, it’s the kind of thing that we don’t know where it is, yet we claim it exists. We cannot truly describe how it feels to have a self, yet we still believe it’s something that can be felt. It has no colour, shape, or taste — it defies description, we cannot communicate to others how we experience this “self” — but nevertheless we still believe very strongly that it’s “in there”. Just because we aren’t neurosurgeons or cognitive scientists, and thus unable to describe the brain processes that makes us feel that we have something below all those masks which we call a self, we are nevertheless allowed to have a self, even a self that we cannot describe or communicate the experience to others.

As a matter of fact, honest scientists will also be baffled and say that they have no clue what exactly a “self” is or how it is encoded in our brains; they just know it has to be somewhere in there. Somehow. Well, perhaps it’s just an emergent property of our brain, and thus the difficulty in explaining exactly what it is, but the truth is… brain surgeons or cognitive scientists or even psychologists don’t know what it is. Like all of us, they just know that we have one self, and that it’s connected to the brain: when the brain dies, the self disappears. That’s verifiable

So, some of my philosophical friends, as well as the transhumanists among them, they postulate the following: “we cannot have selves without brains. All human brains have a self [unless seriously damaged]. Thus, the information about that ‘self’ has to be encoded in the brain. If it’s information, we will be able to read it, and, hopefully, reproduce it in a future time. Once we do that, we will be able to recreate ‘selves’ using something different than an organic brain — a computer, either a silicon-based one as we have now, or perhaps a quantum computer of the future, or some kind of artificial brain made of synthetic neurons, depending on what technology we can come up with to ‘encode’ the structure of the brain. It’s just a question of time”.

Now, don’t take me wrong — I don’t believe that the “self” is something magical that is somehow “outside” the brain. It’s just very easy to observe that when you kill the brain, you kill the self. That simple experiment, although perhaps uncomfortable to think about, should give us reasonable proof that the brain is tied to the self, and that the self is tied to the brain. So, using Occam’s Razor, we have to exclude all alternative explanations of “brainless selves” — call it a mystical soul or something similar — just because the simplest explanation which can be proven with the simplest experiment is that the brain and the self are tied to each other. A good hint that the “self” has to be tied to the brain is that you can change the brain, and the self will change too. No, I’m not talking about lobotomy or some similar surgery: I’m just talking about getting drunk :)

This should give us another clue — and we’ll come back to Second Life to a minute — how the interaction between the “self” and the brain occur. Change the brain, change the self. Now this starts to become a bit uneasy. How much can we change the brain so that the “feeling of self” disappears? As we all have experienced — that is, all of us who are adults and live in a society where drinking alcohol is legal — the answer is, not much. A very simply chemical is enough to make us think differently — we might become bolder, more happy, or, in my case, way more sleepy and useless as a conversation partner — and to anyone experiencing our sudden “personality change”, we will seem to be “out of character”, or, well, “out of our minds” if we truly go too far with our alcoholic consumption.

We traditionally shrug this off and say that there is a “base self” which operates deep inside the consciousness of our brain, even though externally we might behave very differently when drunk. But that’s just lying to ourselves. In fact, when we are drunk, we truly experience a difference. Sure, after the hangover, we “return to our normal selves”, but — if we have memories of when we were drunk; many don’t — we have a very distinct experience of what it feels to be “us” during drunkenness. And of course this is why so many drugs are popular, for those hating to be like they are, and so addictive: they allow us to experience a different self, even if just for a few hours at a stretch. In fact, many drug addicts do that because they truly wish to be different persons while under the influence of the drug; many would even make that change permanent, if there were a drug that allows that.

Well, there is… sort of. At least one third of the Western world suffers from depression of some sort — two thirds in some extreme countries — and what do they do? They get drug prescriptions to change their selves, more or less permanently, in order to be able to deal with depression — which often is linked to an inability of dealing with either one’s own self or the circumstances around us that affect the way we react. Whatever the reason — and I’m no psychiatrist! — the simple fact is that people deliberately take drugs to change their selves, in order to cope with “reality” as they perceive it. The drugs not only change our perception of reality, but they change the very core perception of our own self, and thus we can experience a different self — one that is able to cope with reality better, or one that has a different perception of reality and is thus able to cope better with it.

So all of a sudden this “fixed” self which is encoded in our brains can be artificially changed, and sometimes even permanently so. Huh. So how can it be at the same time hard-coded in our brain, and at the same time, we’re able to “reprogramme” it — and sometimes even with simple chemicals?

If we persist in using the computer analogy to describe how the brain works, then we have to consider that the “self” is not hardware, not even firmware… it’s just software, e.g. like an operating system that can allow us to cope with our perceptions (through our I/O devices, that is, the five senses). But like any operating system, it can be changed.

At this point one might argue… well, the brain is an electrochemical computer. So if we change its chemistry — using drugs — it’s obvious that the “operating system” Self changes. It’s only logical.

Here is where we should start looking at other aspects of our lives. When we’re deeply in love, all our perceptions change. Suddenly, rushing out in the middle of the night, when we’re incredibly tired, just to answer a call from our beloved one who is waiting for us, makes perfect sense. Tiredness evaporates just by the thought of being with our significant other; but even more than that, it might be cold and raining, but if we’re burning with passion, we don’t even notice it. From an outside perspective — a friend who knows us well — this behaviour might be described as “insane”. Clearly we’re “out of our minds” if we rush out at 4 AM in the middle of a blizzard just to get a chance to be together with our beloved one. But the experience we have is completely different. We don’t even realise how utterly different our behaviour is when we’re under the influence of strong passion.

Again, there might be a good argument for that. Under the effect of certain strong emotions — passion, fear, hate, and so forth — chemicals are secreted by our body which enter the brain and change the way it works. Most of these reactions — like the adrenalin rush when experiencing fear — have long been established by scientists and we know exactly what parts of our body secrete those chemicals, and what they do to our brain structure, so there is really nothing “magic” about being in love or trembling in fear from something unexpected. Well, yes and no. What this actually means is that we can even change the way we feel, react, and perceive our environment without external drugs — our body can supply us with its own assortment of internal drugs. Put into other words: it’s not just special drugs we take that can change our self, even our own body can do that. More than that: we can do it consciously. One thing is reacting to passion, fear, hate, etc. But the other thing is when we potentiate those emotions just to feel our own self changing. A typical example is playing computer games or watching horror movies to get an adrenaline rush, even if there is no real “threat”. Another, of course, is just masturbation. If we’re paying close attention, we’ll see how our self reacts very differently under the influence of chemicals produced by our own organism, at our own request (but most people don’t pay attention at all).

So, well, we might shrug these “changes of self” as not being very important, since, well, they’re linked to deeply studied reactions — we know exactly (or almost!) what chemicals are produced under the influence of certain conditions, some of which we can do on our own, and anyway, these “self changes” don’t last long, after the influence of the chemical goes away, we return to our own selves. And for the many possible situations, we can even list how long it takes until the “normal self” re-asserts itself after the body is empty of those chemicals.

Well, this still requires a more deeper analysis. So on one hand, we can shrug off things like the masks we wear at home, work, among friends, in a funeral, etc., because these are conscious (or at least “trained”) reactions that we exhibit under certain circumstances, and there is a “hidden self” behind the many masks that manipulates them. On the other hand, a lot of chemicals can really and truly make our self completely different — either for good or for bad — but the effects are more or the less temporary. We might even allow for permanent changes to the self due to surgery or very strong chemicals, used to treat chronic conditions — or behaviours — but we shrug these off too: since the brain is an electrochemical computer, if you change the chemicals, you change how the computer works.

We also shrug off what we call personality disorders, where someone clearly “becomes a different self”, either gradually over a long period of time, or abruptly, when a certain condition is triggered (like, say, a cerebrovascular accident), or due to some anomaly in either the brain itself or in the way it works, like it is so common with patients suffering from some sort of multiple personality disorder. We will also shrug off escapism — a more subtle form of changing one’s self because one wishes to avoid the day-to-day reality and adopt a different personality (even if this is done deliberately and consciously). We also shrug off the “self” we exhibit during dreaming — “it’s just a dream” after all, some phantom memories triggered by the brain in its sleeping state, and not real anyway (and we wake up and know perfectly well that the way we behaved in the dream was not real). And, well, even if we daydream of being someone different, and just recreate that experience in our minds, we don’t even attribute it to a “change of self”, but just a daydream…

We’re shrugging off a lot!

Now let’s get back to Second Life. While we might shrug off all the above as being “extreme conditions” and thus “exceptions”, when we log in to Second Life, there is a different experience altogether. Because we interact through voice, text chat, and an avatar, people will experience us differently: for them, we’re a “different self” even if we work hard to try to “behave as ourselves”. But it’s obvious that people will experience us differently, just because the pixel-based world of Second Life is different than the atom-based world of so-called “Real” Life.

But for many something different happens: we don’t merely get perceived by others as “a different person” — we feel we’re different, too. I’m not discussing extreme escapist cases out of touch of reality altogether — those are far fewer than the mainstream media likes us to believe. No, in a sense, we could compare the sensation of “being a different self” inside Second Life to, say, the experience of being deeply in passion about someone, or getting an adrenaline rush while watching a horror movie. The difference can be subtle, but we can perceive it. And for most of us, it lasts a long time — as long as we’re in-world, in fact. More interesting than that, we “revert” to our own selves when logged out, but, when we’re logged in with the same avatar, we “get back” to our “SL self”. In fact, for long-time SL veterans, this experience is “natural” and nothing special. For some, yes, it can be a mild form of escapism. For others, as said, it can just be role-playing. For most of us, it’s like the experience of doing something under the strong influence of an emotion — passion, fear — or mild drunkenness, even though it is experienced quite differently: we still feel “we’re in control”, in the sense that we can “feel to be someone else” but aren’t really “someone else”, just the “same person expressed differently”.

But like we “know” that we’re not the same person as we were 10, 20, 50 years ago — we have more experience, so we think and behave differently — we still think there is a continuity between ourselves when we were 5 or 15 or 25 years old and who we are today; similarly, when we log off SL and log back in, we feel there is a continuity of the same “virtual persona”. More than that, it’s not just us who feel that way: others, even though they have no proof, will also usually accept that we’re the same person that has logged in a few days ago. Or even a few months. So there is a certain persistence among personality — it might change a bit, now and then, but in general, others will recognise us, and even we feel to be the same person online.

Nevertheless, when we log off, and reflect a bit over that “experience”, what we actually tell to ourselves is that all this “experience” is merely an illusion. We might “believe” it to be more than that; in fact, veteran residents will tell everybody and even themselves that the “experience” is as real as, well, meatspace. There is no difference between the two. Others might claim that something subtle is going on in our minds, and that we somehow engage in suspension of disbelief while logged in: we truly convince ourselves, thoroughly, that while we’re logged in, we’re experienced a “self” — perhaps a “new” self or a variant of our “usual” self — for the duration of the experience. And many will claim that this experience is different than, say, the “personality switch” we all do when coming home to our family back from work.

Let’s pause a bit for reflection here.

For me, it was when I reached this point — a few years ago — that I truly started to think a bit about what all this means. On one hand, I invented a lot of pseudo-explanations to convince myself that we could somehow “shuffle” around bits of our self and present whatever image we wished when logged in to SL, but I assumed that most people would project a “similar” self — it would be mostly the way the environment transmits this image to others, which will then give us feedback about the way they react to our avatar’s interaction with them, that would give us this feeling that the experience of a “SL self” is somehow distinct from the one we have in meatspace. But at the same time, there was a lot of “shrugging off” to deal with the different “masks” we present in society. And, of course, when we dream, we also have to shrug off the notion that our “dream self” exists at all — it’s just imagination. Finally, when in SL, we might not always present the same image: we might use one avatar for our “real work”; another for “leisure & fun”; another for role-playing — which one is the “real” one, and which one is “fake” (in the sense of merely an invented creation)? Also, when logged in to SL with just one avatar, depending on the people you’re with, you will react differently. When I’m doing a formal conference on some topic or other, I write differently in chat than when talking about the latest shopping spree. So I present different “masks” on top of my “virtual self”, which, in turn, is merely a projection of my “true self”, which just gets perceived differently and thus seems to be a different self but…

… you see how this becomes hopelessly confusing! And I have not even given much thought to the issue of time. My good friend Extropia DaSilva, not so much time ago, was defending a certain point of view during a friendly discussion. At some point a few people — including myself — commented that she used to defend a quite different point of view in the past (and thanks to SL’s logging abilities, we can “prove” that). Extropia shrugged it off and said something: “so what? I was a different person then, with less experience, and in the mean time, I have learned a lot more and thought a lot more about that subject, so naturally I have a different opinion now“. She made me realise that “digital personas” or whatever we wish to call “our self immersed in SL” evolve over time, too. But so does our “real” self, whatever that is.

So thanks to Second Life, where we can play the role of “distant observer” and surgically analyse how we interact and behave, there is quite a lot to be extracted about ourselves. What becomes harder to define is what is this thing we call “self” that remains persistent and constant over time and gives us a perception of continuity. Merely logging in and out of SL and seeing how strangers react in a completely different way to our avatars than they react to our flesh-and-blood physical bodies shakes our profound conviction that the self is somehow something immutable — if it were, people’s perceptions of our self would be exactly the same, either in real world or inside the virtual world, under any circumstances. This clearly doesn’t happen. If we have the experience of switching avatars frequently, we will also quickly learn that people’s perception will dramatically change as well — so even if we claim to be the same person to ourselves, others will simply react differently and believe you’re a different person, even if you act and write in exactly the same way. Of course, once we reveal ourselves as being the same person in a different avatar, well, then we might get similar reactions (and people will just accept we’re the same person and disregard the avatar we’re using to interact with them). But we shrug off it too easily as being something strictly tied to Second Life. We believe it’s not the case in meatspace.

Once again, we’re mistaking ourselves. We all remember how adults behaved towards us when we were young, reckless, and innocent; and how they react to us today. Again, we’re too easily moved to brush this off as being just “part of the process”. But if my self is somehow immutable and encoded deep within the structure of our neural pathworks, and we have good memories of our past (it’s not my case, although most people I know claim to have eidetic memories of their youth…), so why should our teen body and our adult, mature, or senior body affect the way people interact with us? Those who claim to be exactly the same person — the same self — as they were in their teens are rarely surprised that people react differently to them nowadays, when people had such different reactions when they were young. But if the self doesn’t change at all, why should it make a difference if our body is young and healthy or old and decrepit? Why do we get different reactions when our body changes? After all, in Second Life, we have the benefit of both experiences: if we change avatars without saying we’re the same person, we get totally different reactions. When we tell them we’re the same person, the reactions will be the same. We find that “natural”, as we find it natural that people react differently to us when we’re young and when we grow old. In fact, old schoolmates — or couples living together for decades — might still behave similarly towards us even though our bodies have changed a lot in all those decades. Others, however, will react in completely different ways.

Because SL lacks a certain degree of body language — “we are our AOs” — many get frustrated because often they cannot convey their feelings and emotions more naturally, reinforcing them with body language. So some things we say get interpreted in a completely different way. I got very frustrated in the past when some people completely misinterpreted my words — in one case, this lead someone to report my profile to Facebook and have it shut down. They portrayed me as some kind of senseless monster — but when I read what I had written, all my words were perfectly neutral and lacking any of the evil connotations that they attributed to them. I was a bit baffled — and also somehow angry. “If only they could have looked me in the eyes they would have understood what I meant”, I thought. But in truth I would not have used different words — I would say exactly the same thing, because, well, that’s what my “self” felt to be correct. However, due to the way things are carried digitally without the benefit of body language, these words were completely misunderstood. Why? If I’m actually the person I claim to be, it should be obvious to anyone who reads what I write what I actually meant. But that didn’t happen — people interpreted my words according to their own perceptions, and thus I was powerless to influence what they thought about me. SL made me realise this — but then I had to ask myself, what about meatspace? How can I really know what people think about myself and what I say? If my self is intrinsically tied to my body, and influences what I say, how can people get a completely different idea of what I mean? While I might agree that body language will help the meaning to become clearer, can I put the blame only on the lack in body language in SL? If I’m honest to myself, I have to admit that in many cases, even with the benefit of body language, people will still misunderstand me, and build up a completely different image of myself than the one I’ve got!

At this stage it should become clear that the interplay between people also influences what we call “self”, and this makes things way harder, when we have to consider that this thing we call “self” is perceived differently by different people, and that we can do very little to influence the way others think about us. Of course that consistent ethical behaviour will give others a certain image of ourselves — but what is ethical for some, might sound like “Puritanism” or “political correctness” or even “hypocrisy” to others and thus might give them a completely different image of what we actually meant.

Extropia DaSilva, in her seminal series of essays about the nature of the “self” (and incidentally on the nature of reality as well), proposes a model which could be summarised, in an oversimplified way, and using her own expression, “I am the multiple alt of others”. Put it in very simple terms, her reasoning is that “self” is mostly a convention we use for practical and functional purposes, but that we actually can only talk about “thought patterns” — which our brains, as very advanced pattern-matching engines, recognise (even partially) to great accuracy. But to be able to find a match, this means we have to store those patterns somehow, to be able to match them against a specific person and identify them. Extropia thus suggests that, as we meet new people, our brain stores a simplified representation of their thought patterns, to be used later to be matched against that person again, so we can say “it’s the same person” to a high degree of accuracy. So two things can be derived from this model: firstly, that the more we interact with someone, the higher the number of thought patterns we archive for them, and the more complex they become. “Knowing someone very well” (as opposed to “merely an acquaintance”) just means archiving more and more thought patterns for that person. Secondly, while on one hand a single person’s thought patterns are stored on multiple brains, we call the “person” (by convention) the one with the highest and most complex number of thought patterns archived for that particular individual.

As Extropia is a good transhumanist, of course, this mostly means a method for achieving immortality: by surviving in the minds of others, who are able to recall those thought patterns of a deceased friend or familiar, and, assembling those from scratch, and interacting with others using those thought patterns — say, using SL! — we can make people “live” again. Of course, this will only work for those who have stored fewer and simpler thought patterns of that particular individual, meaning that they would still get a match for someone who is pretending to role-play Extropia. It wouldn’t “fool” her closest lovers — who would have a much richer archive of Extropia’s thought patterns, and thus fail to produce a match (“How dare you impersonate my lover, you fraud?”). But this would be a low-tech — or almost no-tech — way of achieving immortality: so long as there are enough people around to mentally reconstruct someone’s thought patterns, and interact with others using these thought patterns, the audience will “believe” that this particular individual is still “alive”.

(Convincing others to role-play a certain set of thought patterns is, obviously, another problem).

This also would eventually facilitate the future transfer of those thought patterns, even in an incomplete form, to some sort of mechanical device, and thus produce a way of artificial immortality, which is all that matters to a certain kind of transhumanist groups

For me, this model has just one flaw. It assumes that somehow “one brain” produces “one set [even if incredibly complex] of thought patterns”, related to a individual, and that these can be correlated statistically with a high degree of confidence. In reality, what we experience every day is that our set of thought patterns depend mostly on the “mask” we wear in society, and that it changes over time — we use different masks when we’re young — and under the influence of a lot of external and internal circumstances (like, well, drinking). So this would not only mean that different people would store different thought patterns depending on circumstances and time, but they would also change those thought patterns based on their own perceptions at the time. Worse than that: over time, we will also change, and so those thought patterns “archived” for someone we met in the past would also change over time. How exactly the brain can deal with so much change to an allegedly “unique” set of thought patterns, and eventually how this complexity can be reproduced mechanically, is beyond human knowledge.

My point in mentioning this is that all attempts to describe exactly and precisely what in our brain encodes a somehow “persistent” state of the self — so that it can somehow be reproduced, either organically (through other people’s minds) or mechanically — will fail. This is easiest to see for oneself (pun intended!) because when we try to describe what our own self is — something we “feel” to be persistent all the time — we utterly fail to describe completely, and, worse than that, nobody else will agree with us: everybody will have a different experience. If we cannot see that for ourselves in meatspace, we can, in the limited and controlled “lab” which is the environment that Second Life provides, see that in action — and even review, at leisure, chatlogs and see how different people experience our own self in totally different ways than the ones we perceive.

So not only we fail to capture the essence of that “persistent self”, but even if we come close to capturing it (say, using a systematic RMI scan or some yet-to-be-invented technology which might record snapshots of our brain’s quantum activity at the neural level), nobody else will agree with that “description”: each will mingle the image of our self with their own perceptions and come to different results. And these results will not even be fixed: over time, and depending on circumstances, we will experience the same person through our own changed mind, and thus experience the same person differently — e. g. suddenly the person we have loved for decades “turns to be someone completely different than we thought” and we get angry at them. But it’s not only our beloved one that changed; we changed as well! Again, SL — thanks once more to chatlogs! — is very good to help us to prove that, because we can follow past conversations at leisure. As Extropia so well put it, with new information we change our opinions, so some of our alleged thought patterns will not remain fixed over time, and will thus be impossible to “record”, even using the “perfect” recording device which SL allows us to do. Worse than that, even in the “perfect recording world” of SL it’s impossible to predict how someone’s thought patterns will react in the future — because circumstances will change, and this is one of those kinds of scenarios where past performance is no guarantee of future performance, as they say in the stock market’s prospectus for a company’s potential investors.

Perhaps the stock market is a good model for that! If we take a snapshot of the curve showing highs and lows for a specific company, and see it out of context — without knowing the time it was taken, nor the company’s name — then it’s impossible to say to which company it comes from or when it was taken. Nevertheless, analysts can often make reasonable predictions about a company’s behaviour looking at those curves. Put in other words: while it’s impossible to say “this company is this specific pattern”, we can infer behaviour from those patterns, and we can even predict certain reactions based on past behaviour, but not identify a company with a certain pattern. Why? Because we deal with incomplete information, and we’re applying statistical/stochastic methods to something which is essentially chaotic behaviour — chaotic processes are common in nature and impossible to predict unless you are aware of all variables and know the starting point. This is hardly the case.

Nevertheless, we cannot “shrug off” the pattern of a company and say that it has no relevance to the company whatsoever. Not at all: conventionally, we can look at those patterns and have a reasonable idea if the company is worth investing in, for example. Similarly, using Extropia’s analogy, assuming we could somehow record thought patterns, and tag them to individuals, we might find out recurrent reactions to certain phenomena: like, say, understanding that this person has an aversion to the colour blue or is allergic to certain environments or foods. We cannot say, “this thought pattern has nothing to do with the person”. But we can also not say, “a person’s unchanging self is encoded in this particular thought pattern”, because we can very easily falsify that hypothesis — just be patient and do a lot of statistical analysis on chatlogs taken from Second Life.

So what else can we learn about the self when immersed in Second Life?

We can actually conclude a lot of things. First and foremost that we cannot describe a self. This simply won’t work, and even if we come close to a description, people’s own perceptions will undoubtedly interpret this description according to their own selves. Secondly, and as important, that it’s silly to say that “we don’t have a self” since we all clearly have the experience of having one — and we can all agree that we have this experience, even if we cannot describe it or mathematically express it. This is basically giving a good old kick on “I think, therefore I am” — we are not what we think, because others will have different perceptions of what we are, and so clearly our own thought processes around what we are cannot be a valid assumption and working base for what we call a “self”. Those two extremes — “we have a self” and “we don’t have a self” have both to be rejected.

Thirdly, most people who honestly think about their own selves will at least be forced to admit that they wear different masks depending on occasions and circumstances. But at the same time they will be adamant in claiming “the mask is not the self”. It might be part of the self (at least one can reason that way) but there is something “beneath” it. Nevertheless, from the perspective of others, who will only perceive the mask and not “the person behind the mask”, the mask is the self, because that’s all they can perceive. While this might be hard to believe in real life, we can see that happen in Second Life all the time, and we can validate the assumption by looking at chat logs. A Linden, knowing which avatars are alts of the same physical person, could analyse other’s perceptions to each different alt and statistically conclude that all people interacting with each alt, without knowing the person behind it, will have different perceptions of the “self” and will equate the “self” with the “mask”. But we have just the experience that the mask is something we wear, not something we are. So we come to a second paradox: “I am the mask I wear (as seen by others)” and “I am not the masks I wear (as seen by myself”. We have to reject both extremes again, since they cannot be simultaneously valid.

Next comes how our own self changes all the time. We’re not talking about “masks” any more: we’re talking merely about how people perceive us when we’re young and unexperienced, and when we’re old and allegedly wiser. Again, we might still believe to be the same person we were when we were in our teens, but if we turn to Second Life, and see how we reacted to others when we were newbies, and after 3 or 5 years of being in SL, we will immediately see that we behave differently, and most importantly, people will react to us differently. SL allows us to compress a life’s experience in few months and, even better, it allows us to track it down and log everything. Many will be forced to admit that our “newbie self”, with its ugly avatar, has nothing to do with the current “veteran self” and a sophisticated avatar. We might shrug it off with “it’s just because I’ve learned a lot about SL that I’m different”, but this should make us question if the same isn’t happening in RL as well — we just lack a good logging facility!

And perhaps we might also see how just logging chats from each other — and from ourselves — will not be enough to “define” what our “true self” actually is. We might believe there is a “true self” somewhere encoded in all those logs, but we will be baffled when we see the reactions of others to this very same “true self”: they are not only different among themselves, but they’re different from our own experience of this “true self”. At this point it should become clear that, if there is something as an immutable, deep-down, “core self”, then everybody would experience the same thing about us than we do. This is clearly not the case.

At this stage, modern scientists studying how the mind works tend to shrug off the whole entertaining exercise as simply saying, “we know we have a ‘core self’ encoded in the brain, because there is no place else where it can be stored, but we just lack the mechanisms to track it down. In the future, with more advanced technology, we will be able to find where it is hidden”. Well, Karl Popper would probably get a bit revolted with that kind of attitude, because it tends to introduce the non-falsifiability of studying where the “self” is. It’s just saying, “just because we don’t have the technology now, we will have it in the future”. As more and more sophisticated technology is introduced to scan the brain at more and more detail, we will still use the same argument to shrug off the inability to find anything “encoded” in the brain that works as this “core self”. It simply fails to be “discovered” — and the answer is that our technology is simply not sufficiently advanced.

By contrast, I suggest that we do simple experiments with the tools we actually have. Second Life might not be an advanced brain scanning mechanism, but it nevertheless provides a behaviourist tool to discover facts about our “selves”, because we can track everything down and log everything — unlike what happens with meat brains, where we have not yet invented the tools to do a “brain dump” of its content. While we can argue that SL is very limited in its ability to actually record what people are thinking, we can at least start from a working base: if we assume that our behaviour and our speech is a direct consequence of how our self operates and how it perceives the environment and circumstances under which it operates, then Second Life is a great tool to record that behaviour and speech, and, through that, establish a strong correlation towards tracking down how ultimately the self is “encoded”. If the model is flawed somehow due to SL’s limitations, we have scientific mechanisms to compensate for it. At the very least, we should be able to list those limitations and argue from those why they are not valid tools to “discover” the self.

Under these assumptions, we can go out and try to validate a “model of the self”. Let’s assume, for example, that Extropia’s assumption is correct — i.e. that the “self” is just a series of thought patterns, and that to “recognise” a person, we need to store in our own brains a part of those thought patterns. In that case, we should easily be able to feed our statistical analysis tool several Petabytes of chat logs from different people and figure out what those thought patterns look like, and see how well they’re matched by other people. And then we can run a simulation: feed our simulator the essence of those thought patterns and see if people react to them predictably (i.e. by recognising that they come from the person identified by those patterns).

But at this stage we will come to the same result: we currently have no technology to consistently reproduce those patterns, so we cannot run the experiment.

Why? We can certainly analyse Petabytes of data — Google does it all the time to get profiling data. We have very strong statistical methods these days! And thanks to Web spamming and advertising, these tools were refined and perfected to identify things like buying habits and interests which can be assigned to specific profiles. Facebook, for example, is rather good at finding people who have common interests with us, even if we have absolutely no clue how they have figured that out (when looking at people’s profiles, we might find they have little in common with us — nevertheless, the kind of links they share, the pictures they tag, and the way they write and discuss with other people will match our own thought processes, and thus Facebook finds likely candidates to our own tastes).

But this only works one way. We can somehow profile that data — like, say, doing Fast Fourier transformations to identify similar pictures or voices belonging to a person — but we cannot, based on that data, recreate how a person behaves, because we don’t have sufficiently advanced chatbot technology for that…

So what we’re saying in this case is that, even though Second Life is a very simplified model of reality (and thus might not be able to correlate with the atom-based reality), we have no tools to make predictions based on the data we can gather. This is precisely what happens with trying to scan the brain and understand where the self is. We’re using the same arguments. And using the same tools, too: using statistics to predict models of what essentially is chaotic behaviour, and utterly fail to make any predictions using that model. And using the same excuses, too: if we had better tools, we would be able to perfectly reproduce an avatar’s behaviour based on the data we have gathered and analysed. But we don’t have them, so we can only present thought experiments based on the hypothesis that we will have those tools in the future.

We seem to be stuck.

Well, of course this is the kind of thing that isn’t exactly new; people have been “stuck” with this problem for several millennia. The difference to past thinkers is that these days we have at least some tools to help us out. However, in all those millennia, we have remained stuck with “thought experiments” about the model of the intrinsic, permanent, core self, but always failed to validate those models. It’s just recently that we are so encouraged by the technological advances we made in so many areas that we started to believe that we would eventually reach a result. But the more advanced our technology becomes, the more complex the problem seems to be. Nowadays we start to see that behaviour is not so obviously linked to brain activity; in fact, brain activity seems to predate conscious thought, or be “merely” a reflection of conscious thought — in either case, the assumption of the cause/effect relationship (brain thinks, body behaves) starts to be questioned at well. There were suspicions that this would be the case but the conclusions are just way too weird to be yet fully understood; they also imply that we behave before we’re aware of acting at all, or so the EEGs seem to show. In that case, under some conditions, the only thing we can measure is that our thoughts and reactions influence EEG patterns, but we might not be so sure if they’re caused by those patterns. The big issue in this case is to really understand if we can actually measure “thought patterns” directly, or if we’re just measuring the reflection of those thought patterns in the brain activity. I have to say that I had read those reports a long while ago and failed to google again for them to see if some more thorough explanations have been found for that apparently anomaly of how we perceived the brain to work, and how it actually seems to be working. Or perhaps the tests are not measuring what they should be.

Of course, there is a way out of the dilemma: we have simply to postulate that there is no such thing as an intrinsically-existing “core” self at all, and that’s just something we imagine that exists. In a sense, we just think that we are, and not we think, therefore we are. There is a profound consequence for that, and one that most people would be very, very uncomfortable with. Nevertheless, that’s what we experience every day in Second Life: we imagine that there is this “self” which people attribute to the avatar, which interacts with others freely, acquires some consistence, and persists across login sessions. Nevertheless we know that this “avatar self” doesn’t really exist on its own: it depends on the human behind the keyboard. It just looks like it exists on its own. Others will also believe it exists, since when they interact with it, they have the same experience as if they interacted with a real flesh-and-blood human. If we have just this very slight idea that our “avatar self” is only a bit different from our own “true inner self”, then we have made a huge leap: we have assumed, at least to ourselves, that we are able to imagine a self (even if it’s 99.9999999% equal to our “true inner self”) that somehow is not “real” but everyone will experience it as being real. From that, jumping to the conclusion that our own flesh-and-blood (or should I say “grey matter”-based?) self cannot be more than that: something we just made up for the convenience of interacting with others. But we cannot say it doesn’t exist, either, because we clearly have the experience that it does exist, and this experience is verified and validated by all people we come in contact with. And, finally, we know it has to be encoded in the brain, because if we change or destroy the brain, the self gets changed or gets destroyed as well. And yet we cannot seem to be able to describe where exactly and how it is inside the brain or how it manifests in the brain. All we can say is that brain and self are interlinked; and we can even go further and say that the “idea of the self”, even if we cannot describe it, is fully perceivable by others as well. However, in this case, the strangest thing is that the “idea of the self” as seen by others is different from our own idea. So at the same time we all agree about each other’s selves, but we fail to describe it, and when we start comparing notes, we come to the conclusion that each of us experiences the same self in different ways. We can attribute that to both the “mask” we wear — so that people actually never perceive the “inner self”, but just the mask — and to people’s perceptions, which will react differently to the mask. But when we do that, what we’re actually saying is that the notion of self is completely relative. Interrelated, yes; interlinked with the brain, yes; but not more than that. We can even claim that others see our masks and extrapolate from that the existence of our own selves and try to get a mental image of what our “inner self” is supposed to look like. Since we all do that all the time for all people, we cannot simply say that this “inner self” doesn’t exist — because we all will agree that we think it exists.

Whatever that “inner self” is supposed to be, it’s quite clear that however we look at it, it becomes more and more clear that it cannot be something “hard-coded” in the brain, in the sense of being immutable, unchanging, and acting independently from circumstances. All we can say is that it’s “an emerging property” of the brain, changes all the time, manifests in different ways (“masks”), and is affected not only by chemicals interacting with the brain, but also by the experiences we accumulate over the years and the people we interact with. But, ultimately, that so-called “immutable, hard-coded self” that somehow is at the root of our experience cannot be much more than a myth — an assumption we made but which fails to be validated, and even refuses validation, no matter what kind of test we try to apply to it, even if we come up with the excuse that current technology isn’t sufficiently advanced to figure out the validity of that assumption. If that’s the case, I prefer to accept the alternative: that it’s just a myth like many others, just another concept that we create to facilitate conversation, but that the so-called “true inner self” is nothing more than a sequence of thoughts and imaginations that our mind creates, which changes all the time — often chaotically, in reaction to circumstances beyond our control — and interacts with other “selves”, even though these will have different perceptions. That model of interdependence between brain, self, others, and external conditions and circumstances is at least very simple to validate. But of course it raises a lot of interesting questions.

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

When Linden Lab removed the land tier discount for academic and non-profit institutions, and most organisations simply moved to an OpenSim-grid instead, one started to see less and less announcements about academia in Second Life — with research grants cut to a bare minimum, SL tier, specially for long-lived projects requiring a lot of virtual space, is simply not affordable for most research projects.

Still, OpenSim is not Second Life. It’s getting there, but a lot of projects requiring a certain degree of stability, features, and content, will require Second Life to work. On the other hand, it’s also still where the largest population of virtual world residents are located: with the current trend of commercial OpenSim grids, after becoming successful, removing the possibility of hyper-teleporting to them, it means that there are more and more large OpenSim-based grids isolated from each other.

When announcing an event for the research community that works in these areas it’s thus only natural to use Second Life as the platform for that event.

SLActions is a research conference about metaverse platforms unlike any other. A few are in-world only. Most are held in a single physical space, and some sessions might include “visiting” a virtual world or two. Others have a few sessions or even whole tracks dedicated to exploring virtual worlds.

SLActions, by contrast, is a de-localised, distributed, mixed-media conference. Visitors can attend either physically at any one of the many universities and organisations sponsoring the conference. On those places, a special room is provided with plenty of Internet connectivity to enter Second Life. Some attendants will simply connect to SL wherever they are. All “meet” in virtual space and make their presentations in SL.

The advantage of this system is twofold. “Serious” conferences are about human networking as well. On a 100% virtual conference, some frown upon the perceived limitations of extra-conference socialising and networking (a fallacy in perception, but that’s how people think). By telling your supervisor or manager that you’re going to attend a “real” conference, in a “real” physical place, where “real” people will be in the same room, the likelihood of being allowed to travel there — even if it’s just to sit on a chair and turn on your laptop to connect to SL — is much higher than just saying, “oh, I’m attending a virtual conference on a virtual world”. And with SLActions you’re not limited to go to a single spot; you can just pick from the long list of sponsor organisations the one that is nearer to you, thus saving travel costs.

This model has worked very well in the past. Well, today it’s the day SLActions is back on the road — real and virtual. You can see the list of presentations and attend them in-world.

Academia is not really leaving Second Life; research in the area has constantly increased, not decreased. It’s just that it gets less noticed these days. But then again, that’s pretty much true of everything related to Second Life

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: academic, conference, research, slactions

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

When Government does some measures that the citizens dislike, and appealing to other branches of Government is faced with indifference, what do citizens do? They protest. First, in public forums. And then they come to the streets.

What could be most important to protest for in a democracy? Well, most people in the West are currently worried about the financial crisis and its effects. But much more serious — as we have seen this Spring — is the right to vote and the right to select a Government elected by the people. Into other words: it’s all about voting and getting elected. When that right was never granted, or once granted is threatened to be removed, then people get angry, and, if they’re pacifists, they just go out on the streets and protest their indignation.

This happens not only in the real world; it also applies to the virtual world as well.

(...)
Read the rest of Democracy in Action: Protest March “I Want To Vote NOW!” (1,535 words)

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: cds, confederation of democratic simulators, elections, march, neufreistadt, protest

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

When I read Inara Pey’s article covering Ample Clarity‘s PrimPossible shop, I was a bit skeptic: top-of-the-line furniture design in Second Life® with just a single prim? No way!

As meshes have been introduced, residents have noticed that they are almost worthless for furnishing small parcels — except for some well-designed furniture, the result will end “eating up” way more of your Land Impact allocation (or, for you on older or non-LL viewers, “prim limits”). The algorithm for calculating Land Impact for meshes is not expected to change in the near future, so we’re stuck with older, non-meshed designs for our low-prim furniture.

Then suddenly I got notice of the exact opposite strategy. By using high-end 3D modeling software and an unsurpassable talent, Ample Clarity managed to squeeze a lot of interesting, traditionally very-high-prim designs (like pianos!) into… a single prim. Yes, you have to visit his shop to believe. There is no way you can evaluate the strange feeling of looking at incredibly detailed, beautiful furniture and right-clicking on it to check how many prims it takes and seeing that it only consumes… one prim.

The furniture is also fully functional, too. It includes scripting to change the finely detailed texturing to several colour sets. It includes sitting poses with several male/female combinations. And the beds have — of course — adult animations as well. One prim doesn’t mean “crippled” or “limited” functionality: you’re getting pretty much the same level of interaction and detail as you’d expect from high-end furniture designers. Ample really wants to compete with them, using the same amount of functionality. I was lucky to find Ample Clarity at his shop — perhaps I wasn’t lucky; perhaps he’s always there and helping his prospective customers; if so, that’s wonderful customer support! — and he even promised that he’d consider to include one of my most desired features on sit-target animations: the ability not to trigger any animation when sitting down, a crucial feature missing from most furniture. Why? Because I have an AO and have selected my own, personalised animations for the way I like to sit down I don’t want furniture to tell me how to sit down, lol. Ample Clarity realised that he has the same issue with AOs and furniture, and promised to look into it on updated versions of his furniture scripts.

Of course, there is not yet an infinite amount of variety and choice. And at least on very low-end computers like mine, visiting a shop where perhaps 100-200 highly detailed sculpties are on display will create a lot of client-side lag. So, no, don’t buy his own shop and deploy everything in your home On the other hand, getting one or two items, and, as a result, getting rid of 10, 20, 50 or more prims at home, will decrease lag a bit — and will give you lots of more prims in your parcel to work with.

This is the answer to a crippled mesh functionality — the same quality of a high-end mesh taking just a single prim. As it should be. Linden Lab should have noticed that people are not going to buy more land just to get high-quality meshes. Not at this time. Instead, they’re looking for alternatives to make the best of their existing prim allotment — and it’s things like PrimPossible that allow us to use our land more efficiently.

Another trick is to change the camera settings. Penny Patton proposes a different way of experiencing Second Life by suggesting that you change the camera settings. This really makes a huge impact. On relatively “normal” buildings, builders have not only to account for oversized avatars, but for a camera that is hovering some 6 metres over your head. We’re so used to it that we find it “normal” — and it means that buildings will have a ceiling at around 10 metres or so to “look” like a ceiling. As a consequence, everything in SL is huge, oversized — and eats a lot more prims and requires more land, of course.

Penny Patton’s camera settings bring a little more “reality” to your viewing experience. At the beginning you’ll find it a bit weird, of course. Then, after a few minutes, you’ll get so used to it — specially if you live around communities with small (or should I say, “correctly dimensioned”?) houses and streets, like I do. I have to say that yesterday, while walking on a narrow road around a mountain, I suddenly got this strange feeling: “Wow, this looks just like a scene in Half-Life 2!” No, it wasn’t that SL suddenly became lag-free (it was even a rather laggy area on an openspace sim). After a few moments I realised why I had this experience: the camera in SL with those settings now looks much closer to what videogames use. There is a deeper sense of engagement with your avatar, too — it’s not just something pretty that walks around “down there”.

So, high-quality, one-prim furniture, inside of cramped house, and new camera settings to fully enjoy the experience. That’s quality of life!

Thanks for Inara Pey for being constantly on the watch for innovative things in Second Life. Many thanks to Ample Clarity for the nice in-world chat about the incredible work done on PrimPossible’s furniture.

© Gwyneth Llewelyn for Gwyn's Home, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ample clarity, camera settings, mesh, primpossible, sculpties

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh