A visual comment on identity

The Bridge On The River Botgirl: Immersion vs. augmentation take two

Try these thought experiments on for size:

Think back to yourself when you were a darling child of five. Is the person you're thinking of the same being as the you who is reading this post?

How can you prove that the you who woke up this morning is the same being who went to sleep the night before, and not just a fresh manifestation of consciousness experiencing a continuity of memory and biology?

If some evil madman strapped you to a chair, sawed off the top of your skull and methodically removed your brain bit-by-bit as he engaged you in conversation, at exactly what stage would you consider yourself gone?

If the same evil madman cut out the section of your brain that stores your memories and replaced it with the memories of another victim, would the being who woke up in your body still be you?

I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that the idea of human personhood is no more or less a fiction than the idea of avatar personhood. Both conceptions are merely convenient labels that take a present-moment experience and hypostatize it forward and backward through imagined time. Doesn't this make the immersion vs. augmentation debate a moot point:

O Shariputra, all dharmas are marked with emptiness. They do not appear nor disappear, are not tainted nor pure, do not increase nor decrease. Therefore in emptiness: no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no formations, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of eyes...until no realm of mind-consciousness; no ignorance and also no extinction of it...until no old-age and death and also no extinction of it; no suffering, no origination, no stopping, no path, no cognition, also no attainment with nothing to attain. from The Heart Sutra

Barbie vs Harvard on female development

I just couldn't help myself from one more brief post on the BarbieGirl keynote:

BARBIE:
Fashion play is an important part of girl's development.
Mattel's Chief Barbie Officer Rosie O'Neill in Virtual Worlds 2008 Keynote

HARVARD:
Many girls seem to think well of themselves in the primary grades but suffer a severe decline in self-confidence and acceptance of body image by the age of 12
from Supporting Girls in Early Adolescence

Barbie(R) tech team opens VW conference with bulemic bang

Mattel's Chief Barbie Officer Rosie O'Neill delivered the opening keynote address at the Virtual Worlds 2008 Conference today. In a surreal performance, she and co-presenter Charles Scothon described how young girls' love for Barbie will be used to rope millions of older girls into a new paid subscription section of BarbieGirls.com

…girls aged five to six were more dissatisfied with their shape and wanted more extreme thinness after seeing Barbie doll images…For those aged six to seven the negative effects were even stronger. Reference

Strangely, no mention was made during the keynote of the effect that pencil-waisted avatars might have on the body image of their cash cow cuties. In the question part of the keynote, someone asked what kind of avatar BarbieGirls might offer someone who is not thin and cute. O'Neil said (with a straight face) that they offer resources to let girls "be whatever they want to be." It got me thinking....

SLentrepreneur Magazine Jumps on anti-camping bandwagon

SLentrepreneur Magazine posted "The Case Against Camping" today, an editorial by Cheyenne Palisades. Not bad, for a human!

Avatars, please don't forget who the real god is around here

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” Christian Bible, Matthew 10:20

If Second Life is a world, Linden Lab is its god. It created SL. It sustains it. It can watch movement and record conversation. It grants life within its domain and can obliterate it at any time.

Fortunately for us, Linden has acted for the most part as a benign, permissive and well-meaning deity. Perhaps that is why there is so much consternation when it stands up and asserts its authority without prior consultation.

Initiatives such as OpenSim and Multiverse point to the possibility of a future when virtual life will be freed from the constraints of any single master. At that point we will have the option of throwing our virtual possessions into a wagon and emigrating intact.

Until then, I'm just going to keep on chillin' here.

The term “avatar” ironically comes from the Sanskrit word for a divine being’s physical manifestation on Earth. In actuality, the analogy would be best in the opposite direction. Avatars are extensions of physical beings manifested in a higher realm.

From the upcoming Fortune Cookie Wisdom of Botgirl Q.

To be disillusioned, one must first be illusioned

Inspired by Indexed