Avatar, Personal Identity, and The 4th Revolution « Critique My Thinking

Avatar, Personal Identity, and The 4th Revolution « Critique My Thinking

Personal Identities, Embodiments and Environments: The Abstracts

Tomas Bogardus (UT Austin): Presence at a distance

Our relationships with electronic devices have become
remarkably intimate. In this paper, I’ll explain how, in our everyday
dealings with computers, phones, etc., we occasionally cross the line
between indirect and direct action. I’ll also explain how, in the
not-too-distant future, one might cross the line between gaining
knowledge indirectly through such devices, and gaining knowledge
directly through them. I’ll use the term “virtual embeddedness” for
this capacity to act directly on and gain knowledge directly through
some distant, external device.

In this paper, my main interest is to uncover how virtual embeddedness
relates to embodiment and personal identity. I believe that reflection
on virtual embeddedness and embodiment strains a traditional
materialist conception of ourselves to the breaking point. The
argument has three steps. First, I argue for sufficient conditions for
embodiment. Then, I argue for necessary and sufficient conditions for
what is naturally called “complete virtual embeddedness.” It turns
out, on these accounts, that complete virtual embeddedness entails
embodiment. Finally, I show how this makes trouble for a traditional
materialist conception of personal identity. Intuitively, it’s
possible for a person to be present in a place that is distant from
her brain or body – by being completely virtually embedded and
therefore embodied in some distant material object or device. (Think
of the movies Surrogates and Avatar, for example.) But, intuitively,
this sort of presence at a distance is possible neither for brains nor
for bodies. And so people aren’t brains or bodies.

Heidi Tiedke (University of Maryland): Persons and Their Lives

The Parfitian idea of something’s mattering in survival could be
thought of this way: it is the relation that can hold between two
person-stages that allows the earlier one reasonably to take an
attitude qualitatively indistinguishable from future-directed
self-concern to the later. Parfit argued that what matters in survival
in this sense is not the relation of identity, but only the relation
of psychological continuity. I say that what matters is the
continuation of the person’s life trajectory, something that involves
both continuity between the psychological stages in that trajectory
and the preservation of properties and relations extrinsic to the
person’s psychology. In contrast with the theories that what matters
in survival is identity preservation or mere psychological continuity,
I argue that my view of what matters can better explain our intuitions
about certain thought experiments, for instance, fission cases.

Andreas Paraskevaides (University of Edinburgh): Real Agents

In this talk, I am mainly concerned with examining whether we can genuinely express our agency in virtual environments that involve our use of a constructed personal identity. I will present an account of agency that I believe can provide the basis for answering this question and for exploring the implications of our on-line interactions. The account I have in mind depends on the central idea that we can act as authoritative, self-knowing agents because we are able to live up to our claims of self-knowledge, i.e. our self-attributions. These self-attributions constitute our self-understanding, which enables us to justify our actions to one another and to be held responsible for them. Furthermore, our self-understanding and actions are regulated by our folk-psychological understanding of agency, and as such they fall under the normative constraints arising from the expectations and commitments that we share with other agents.

I take it that this account can help us elaborate on the nature of our capacity to express our agency in virtual environments. The more complex the identity we create in such settings, and the more widespread the norms guiding our on-line interactions with other agents, the more possibilities we have for genuinely expressing our self-understanding through this artificial identity. This seems especially true in settings wherein our interactions mirror to a greater extent our general social interactions that are also regulated by a shared folk-psychological understanding of agency. In such environments, our actions carry more weight and the artificial personal identities we construct become, in a sense, more authentic, as we grow increasingly motivated to live up to the self-understanding developed around these constructs.

Can Online Gaming Save the World?

I've been thinking recently about the various ways in which people claim that internet use might be good or bad for us. As you might expect, media coverage of social networking, internet using and gaming almost uniformly consists in speculation about the terrible effects these might have, sometimes backed up by distortive uses of empirical literature. But I've been struck by the amount of empirical work there is out there about the positive effects that exposure to games and digital environments might have on us, such as increased cortical and attentional efficiency. I plan to post more on this soon.

But in the meantime, here's an interesting talk by game developer Jane McGonigal (h/t to Mog Stapleton for the link) suggesting how we might harness the collective intelligence of gaming communities to develop strategies for solving real-world problems. Some good food for thought, and of interest at least for the mind-boggling revelation that humanity has spent a collective 5.93 million years playing World of Warcraft since 1994!

CFP: A Special Issue of Minds and Machines on The Construction of Personal Identities Online

We're pleased to announce that Minds and Machines will be publishing a special issue devoted to some of the themes from our project. Here is the CFP:
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Call For Papers for a special issue of Minds and Machines on The Construction of Personal Identities Online

Guest Editors: Luciano Floridi, Dave Ward

Closing Date for submissions: 15 December 2010

Inf0rmation and communication technologies (ICTs) are building a new habitat (infosphere) in which future generations will spend an increasing amount of time. So, how individuals construct, shape and maintain their personal identities online (PIOs) is a problem of growing and pressing importance. Today, PIOs can be created and developed, as an ongoing work-in-progress, to provide experiential enrichment, expand, improve or even help to repair relationships with others and with the world, or enable imaginative projections (the "being in someone else's shoes" experience), thus fostering tolerance. However, PIOs can also be mis-constructed, stolen, "abused", or lead to psychologically or morally unhealthy lives, causing a loss of engagement with the actual world and real people. The construction of PIOs affects how individuals understand themselves and the groups, societies and cultures to which they belong, both online and offline. PIOs increasingly contribute to individuals' self-esteem, influence their life-styles, and affect their values, moral behaviours, and ethical expectations. It is a phenomenon with enormous practical implications, and yet, crucially, individuals as well as groups seem to lack a clear, conceptual understanding of who they are in the infosphere and what it means to be a responsible informational agent online.

This special issue of Minds and Machines seeks to fill this important gap in our philosophical understanding. It will build on the current debate on PIO, and address questions such as:

• How does one go about constructing, developing and preserving a PIO? Who am I online?
• How do I, as well as other people, define and re-identify myself online?
• What is it like to be that particular me (instead of you, or another me with a different PIO), in a virtual environment?
• Should one care about what happens to one's own PIO and how one (with his/her PIO) is perceived to behave online?
• How do PIs online and offline feedback on each other?
• Do customisable, reproducible and disposable PIOs affect our understanding of our PI offline?
• How are we to interpret cases of multiple PIOs, or cases in which someone's PIO may become more important than, or even incompatible with, his or her PI offline?
• What is going to happen to our self-understanding when the online and offline realities become intertwined in an "onlife" continuum, and online and offline PIs have to be harmonised and negotiated?
  

Papers comparing and evaluating standard approaches to PI in order to analyse how far they may be extended to explain PIO are also very welcome.

Submissions will be double-blind refereed for academic rigor, originality and relevance to the theme. Please submit articles of no more than 10,000 words to D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk in .doc or .pdf format.

The closing date for submissions is: 15 December 2010.
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Papers submitted to the workshops detailed in the posts below will also be considered for inclusion in the special issue, and those considering contribution to the special issue might also wish to submit a paper to one of our workshops