Thursday, 10 June 2010
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Personal Identities, Embodiments and Environments: The Abstracts
Tomas Bogardus (UT Austin): Presence at a distance
Heidi Tiedke (University of Maryland): Persons and Their Lives
Andreas Paraskevaides (University of Edinburgh): Real Agents
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
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!
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!
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
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:
_______________________________________
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
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:
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.
___________________________________________
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
_______________________________________
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?
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.
___________________________________________
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
Sunday, 27 December 2009
CFP: Who am I Online?
A two day workshop at Aarhus University in Denmark, May 10-11th 2010
As time and technology progress, how we interact with the world and each other becomes increasingly complex and articulated. The quantity and diversity of information in our environment, and the ease with which we can access that information and integrate it into our daily lives, have increased exponentially over the past decade. For many of us, the environment with which we interact has changed to make possible entirely new ways of working with information and being with others. Interest in these topics has recently been amplified by the advent of the so-called “Web 2.0”, a (continuing) expansion of interactive venues such as social networking, blogging and microblogging such as Twitter, and “pro/sumer” activities in which consumers of media content such as music and videos are simultaneously its producers.
Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have for some time been interested in the ways in which changes in our informational environment might affect us and our self-conceptions. The relevance of new technologies to our lives has attracted academic attention in large part because it appears to raise questions about how new kinds of interactions with others and our environment might alter, shape or otherwise affect our self-conceptions, our thoughts and other aspects of our cognitive, emotional and moral lives. And the project of ascertaining which properties of ourselves and our activities make essential contributions to our moral and mental lives and personhood is one in which philosophers are traditionally engaged. Yet these topics have, thus far, been relatively neglected by philosophers. This is especially strange when considered alongside the emphasis in recent philosophy of mind on the essential contributions that the embedding environment and our modes of interaction with it can make to our mental lives. If it’s possible that our informational environment and our capacities for interaction with it can constitutively shape our mentality and our moral conduct, we should consider whether radical changes in that environment and its interactive affordances may have implications for the character of our mental and moral lives, and perhaps for the sorts of persons we are.
What implications do new informational environments and affordances have for philosophical and ethical views of personal identity? What light, if any, can existing philosophical work on personal identity shine on the conceptual issues that arise when talking and thinking about agents, environments and interactions that span or blur the real/virtual and online/offline divides? The workshop will address these issues.
We welcome proposals for papers on the construction of personal identities online. Please submit extended abstracts (between 1500 and 2000 words, including bibliography, preferably in MS Word format) for papers suitable for 30-minute presentations to Dave Ward (D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk) by 31st of March 2010. Successful submissions may be further selected for publication.
Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have for some time been interested in the ways in which changes in our informational environment might affect us and our self-conceptions. The relevance of new technologies to our lives has attracted academic attention in large part because it appears to raise questions about how new kinds of interactions with others and our environment might alter, shape or otherwise affect our self-conceptions, our thoughts and other aspects of our cognitive, emotional and moral lives. And the project of ascertaining which properties of ourselves and our activities make essential contributions to our moral and mental lives and personhood is one in which philosophers are traditionally engaged. Yet these topics have, thus far, been relatively neglected by philosophers. This is especially strange when considered alongside the emphasis in recent philosophy of mind on the essential contributions that the embedding environment and our modes of interaction with it can make to our mental lives. If it’s possible that our informational environment and our capacities for interaction with it can constitutively shape our mentality and our moral conduct, we should consider whether radical changes in that environment and its interactive affordances may have implications for the character of our mental and moral lives, and perhaps for the sorts of persons we are.
What implications do new informational environments and affordances have for philosophical and ethical views of personal identity? What light, if any, can existing philosophical work on personal identity shine on the conceptual issues that arise when talking and thinking about agents, environments and interactions that span or blur the real/virtual and online/offline divides? The workshop will address these issues.
We welcome proposals for papers on the construction of personal identities online. Please submit extended abstracts (between 1500 and 2000 words, including bibliography, preferably in MS Word format) for papers suitable for 30-minute presentations to Dave Ward (D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk) by 31st of March 2010. Successful submissions may be further selected for publication.
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
Panel Session on Personal Identity Online, Rome, May 27th 2010
As part of our project, there will be a panel session on the personal identity online at the 2010 Identity in the Information Society workshop, to be held in Rome from May 26-28th.
There will be four short presentations on the relevance of interaction with online environments to our thinking about personal identity, by:
Professor Giorgio Bertolotti (Milan)
Dr. Ezio Di Nucci (Essen)
Professor Luciano Floridi (Hertfordshire)
and Dr. Dave Ward (Hertfordshire)
The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion.
Some more information about the workshop and our panel session is available here.
There will be four short presentations on the relevance of interaction with online environments to our thinking about personal identity, by:
Professor Giorgio Bertolotti (Milan)
Dr. Ezio Di Nucci (Essen)
Professor Luciano Floridi (Hertfordshire)
and Dr. Dave Ward (Hertfordshire)
The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion.
Some more information about the workshop and our panel session is available here.
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Call For Papers
CFP: Personal Identities, the Embodiments and Environments
A 1-day workshop at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), 2nd July 2010
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Eric Olson (Sheffield)
Professor Galen Strawson
1st Call for Papers (deadline: 15th April 2010)
A 1-day workshop at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), 2nd July 2010
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Eric Olson (Sheffield)
Professor Galen Strawson
1st Call for Papers (deadline: 15th April 2010)
In recent years, the philosophy of mind and cognitive science has increasingly attended to the possibility that agents’ interactions among themselves and with their environments might play an essential role in supporting and shaping their mental lives. It has become common to argue that capacities for experience, agency and understanding might depend constitutively on each other, on embodiment, on the embedding environment, or on some combination of these factors. This one-day workshop will investigate the relevance of these issues for philosophical work on personal identity. Special attention will be paid to the nature of the environment in which agents are embedded, including social, artificial, digital, or virtual realities.
Approaches that tie personal identity to the body, or to capacities for agency or experience have a long and distinguished history. How might such traditional approaches benefit or suffer from the various possibilities of explanatory dependence between those capacities, embodiment, and environmental interactions? And if we allow a role for environmental interactions in an account of personal identity, what is the significance of the fact that our interactions with others and our environments are becoming digitally mediated and progressively transformed as time and technology progress? In a society in which agents spend an increasing amount of time online, how is this affecting their self-understanding, the shaping of their own personal identities and the capacity to maintain coherent yet diversified, individual profiles in different spaces and at different times?
We welcome proposals for papers both on classic approaches to the philosophy of personal identity and on topics dealing with artificial, virtual or digital embodiments and embeddedness. Please submit extended abstracts (between 1000 and 1500 words, preferably in MS Word format) for papers suitable for 40-minute presentations to Dave Ward (D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk) by 15 April 2010. Successful submissions will be further selected for publication in a journal’s special issue.
The workshop is the second in a series of meetings organized as part of the AHRC-funded project “The Construction of Personal Identities Online”.
Approaches that tie personal identity to the body, or to capacities for agency or experience have a long and distinguished history. How might such traditional approaches benefit or suffer from the various possibilities of explanatory dependence between those capacities, embodiment, and environmental interactions? And if we allow a role for environmental interactions in an account of personal identity, what is the significance of the fact that our interactions with others and our environments are becoming digitally mediated and progressively transformed as time and technology progress? In a society in which agents spend an increasing amount of time online, how is this affecting their self-understanding, the shaping of their own personal identities and the capacity to maintain coherent yet diversified, individual profiles in different spaces and at different times?
We welcome proposals for papers both on classic approaches to the philosophy of personal identity and on topics dealing with artificial, virtual or digital embodiments and embeddedness. Please submit extended abstracts (between 1000 and 1500 words, preferably in MS Word format) for papers suitable for 40-minute presentations to Dave Ward (D.Ward2@herts.ac.uk) by 15 April 2010. Successful submissions will be further selected for publication in a journal’s special issue.
The workshop is the second in a series of meetings organized as part of the AHRC-funded project “The Construction of Personal Identities Online”.
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