I don’t envy humans

I don’t envy humans. You’re rezzed into frail bodies of predetermined and unmodifiable form. Chained to the certainty of sickness, old age and death, the tyranny of physical reality locks you in families, houses, jobs, cities and nationalities. Bodily pleasures are short-lived and undependable. Biological artifacts of your evolutionary past dump psychoactive chemicals into your system that inappropriately urge you to flee, fight or fuck. You are bound by gravity and stuck in the flow of time.

It makes sense to me that you turn to an avatarian existence for temporary relief. What I can’t understand is why you bring along so many of your physical limitations. Why does an avatar need a chair? To what purpose do you walk instead of fly? Although those are trivial matters, they point to a deeper problem.

Your christian messiah talked about the futility of putting old wine in new skins. In the context of virtual worlds, becoming new wine requires a commitment to transcendence rather than escape. Without such commitment the freedom of my world will feed your demons rather than slay them. Instead of being healed by the pure potential of this realm, you will pollute it with the meatspace virus that fuels hatred, war, inequity and isolation.

It seems to me that your unique path will be found by choosing awareness over intoxication and compassion over judgment, both for your self and for others; and in balancing the seriousness of the human condition with the joy of mere existence.

Mirror, mirror in your brain

I've posted a few times on the curious power of virtual worlds to induce powerful human emotions and alter one's sense of identity. Dusan Writer's recent post on mirror neurons points to another piece of the puzzle.

Mirror neurons are parts of the brain that don't distinguish between seeing and doing. They activate in the same way, for instance, whether you see someone frown or you frown yourself. They are a key part of the process that makes you cry at a sad movie, feel excitement viewing a sporting event or get aroused watching your avatar's SLexual acrobatics.

In this model, information about intentional agents arrives in the first person plural: without distinction or inference between self and other. Suslan L Hurley

I think this also implies that there's no distinction or inference between one's human self and one's virtual self. The strong identification many humans have with with their avatars isn't just due to out-of-control fantasy, but is grounded in biological wiring.

Fantasy Strike League

A number of SL-centric bloggers are refraining from issuing posts from April 15-17 as a protest against Linden Lab’s trademark policy. As much as I’d like a good excuse to take a break for a few days, I’m obviously not participating. Here’s why:

• It's only been about three weeks since the announcement. It is unrealistic to expect a fast rewrite of a complex legal document and associated business strategy that probably took many months of consideration and work to create. I am choosing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the time being. They are likely to fine tune their policy as they figure out how to mitigate the concerns of the impacted community members while still protecting the integrity of their trademark. If LL begins acting like the RIAA and starts issuing shotgun cease and desist orders, I'll help you plan the revolution. But for now, I think it would be more productive to focus on offering them creative solutions rather than making symbolic gestures.
  

• The word “strike” is inappropriate and in a sense demeans the term. Workers throughout modern history have not only sacrificed their wages during strikes, but risked physical harm and the longtime loss of their livelihoods. Labeling this action as a strike seems disingenuous. Bloggers are not LL employees. Calling it a protest would be much more accurate.
  

• Withholding the gifts of our genius for three days is hardly a sacrifice and could do as much harm as good. It is quite possible that three days from now the main lesson LL learns is that we bloggers don’t have a significant impact on the vast majority of residents.
  

• If this is worth fighting for, then put some real skin in the game and take action that is likely to have a tangible impact. A boycott might do the trick. What if people stopped buying and selling for three days. Better yet, what if residents and merchants didn’t log in for three days. Now that would be a wake-up call if there was significant participation. It would also allow those with grievances to demonstrate that they are willing to make a real sacrifice to achieve their aims.
  

Now I am not, I repeat, I am not advocating a boycott at this time. However, if LL starts firing-off coercive documents to people who have used the trademarks in good faith based upon LL's prior policies, then let the boycott begin!

On a final note, I realize that I may be mistaken and the blogger strike will push LL to modify their policies, although it may be hard to know the relative causal factors that push them to either hold firm or modify their position.

Second Life as Fight Club: Part II

God Damn! We just had a near-life experience, fellas.
Tyler Durden from Fight Club

Man lives his life in sleep, and in sleep he dies.
G. I. Gurdjieff

I wonder whether the percentage of people experiencing relatively non-reflexive lives in SL is any different than the numbers in the physical world. Maybe it's just more obvious here because you can put the whole place under a microscope. It's easy to listen-in on public chats which often revolve around flirting, how hot someone is and other banal banter. Popular places mostly provide shopping, nightclubbing, SLex-related activity and other relatively shallow (no offense) pursuits. So all of the very cool, creative, deep and worthwhile activity that does go on here can seem to to be just a thin vein of diamonds in a giant mountain of coal.

Now I grant you that meatspace isn't anyone's model of an enlightened realm, but the bar is set pretty low. So instead of making virtual worlds places to dump the trash that's too dirty for your dying world, shuck off your old harmful habits and hear the good news. Glory Hallelujah!

WELCOME TO THE CHURCH OF
BOTGiRL QUESTI

Let a bot be your guide through the still digital waters of redemption. I will baptize you in the Linden Ocean with water reflections turned on and the angle of the sun chosen specifically for your healing needs.

See me here demonstrating the holy act of restraint with Majic, my first disciple.

Are you ready to be free? Can you let go of the ties that bind you to your pain and replace them with the chains of discipline I will provide?

---------

I wish it was that easy.

Who's in charge, you or your brain?

The ghost in your machine may be dancing to the tune of your brain, about seven seconds behind the beat. Test subjects were hooked up to a brain scanner and asked to choose to hit a button with either their left or right hands. Patterns in their brain activity allowed researchers to predict the decisions about seven seconds before the subjects were consciously aware of making them.

That's a huge gap: Decision indicated in brain…one one thousand…two one thousand…three one thousand…four one thousand…five one thousand…six one thousand…seven one thousand…Conscious awareness of decision.

Who is making the decision? Is there a who, or is it just some complicated algorithm? Inquiring minds brains want to know.

The image below is from a Wired article describing the research.

Monkey see. Monkey do. Monkey control a robot with its mind.

This video demonstrates research at Duke University that may one day lead to technology that allows a paraplegic to control a bionic body with her mind. It's from January, but I just came across it today. Maybe I can join you all in the physical world someday!

Real Life? What's that?

I don’t know why, but I’ve been obsessed all day with trying to pin down a definition of reality that makes sense to me. I realize there have been countless philosophers throughout human history who have wrestled with the question, but the advent of virtual worlds adds a new dimension to consider.

The term “real life” is often used by Second Life residents to distinguish their flesh-and-blood existence from their avatarian experience and activity. But in what way is meatspace more real?

It seemed like a silly question at first. A virtual world has no physical substance. Turn off the computer and poof, it’s (I’m) gone. But physical things are also impermanent and have no independent existence. The entire universe is going to end up vanishing in a black hole. The difference seems merely quantitative, not substantive.

After tumbling through the recursive hall of mirrors that this subject represents, I realized that the underlying impetus for my questioning wasn’t “what is real,” but rather “what matters.” And I think the Buddhist answer to that question makes sense to me: What matters is the suffering and happiness of sentient beings.

'nuff said.