The Cat in the Hat is a Brain in a Vat...
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We didn't get much of a chance to talk about the 'Brain in a Vat' hypothesis during our brief discussion of models of cyberspace in Week 1, so I thought I'd pop it in here. (bit of light relief during your revision, etc, etc) :) It's a pretty simple notion really and you're probably all very familiar with it from films such as The Matrix and Vanilla Sky (I don't think I mentioned that Vanilla Sky has my favourite film quote of all time...."I'll tell you in another life....when we're both cats" Just a small 'aside', there).....So....here it is.; 'Bain in a Vat 101' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat. Opinions?
While you're rolling that one around, combine the possibility with this about 'mirror neurons' http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran06/ramachandran06_index.html .......and consider this scenario. You're in a synthetic world (like SL) with your avatar. You've had this online persona / visual representation of you for many moons....and suddenly you're 'physically' attacked by others there and the avatar is subjected to pain. The avatar of a friend of yours is attacked too. Would the mirror neurons in your anterior cingulate fire more at the sight of 'you' being attacked? Would the firing rate approximate that of you being actually physically attacked.? Would this depend on level of assimilation of the avatar persona into your offline persona? Am I rambling or might this be damned interesting neurocyberpsychology PhD of the future. Probably rambling.......as per :)
1 comment:
"you're 'physically' attacked by others there and the avatar is subjected to pain....Would the mirror neurons in your anterior cingulate fire more at the sight of 'you' being attacked?"
I think that's a very real possibility but would depend on how invested you are in the avatar. Look at gamers, particularly hardcore gamers. They immerse themselves completely in the game and characters take on a life of their own, even though they're controlled by the computer and to some extent, are predictable.
I'm not just talking about 3D immersive environments like SL, but also "old" games like Sonic or Mario. The characters are fictional, but the emotions you feel from interacting with them are very real. I've seen gamers take things very personally to the point where they make up names for their opponents and give them human qualities like being "sneaky", "crafty" and "hard to beat".
and that's for computer generated and controlled characters with only rudimentary AI. When you consider multi-player games where the other characters are controlled by humans or games which use cutting edge AI to make characters more real, I wouldn't be surprised if the effect is amplified.
If the effect persists in places like SL, the implications are scary. Imagine a situation where people have invested months if not years building up their avatar and then it's deleted by a virus - virtual death. Now imagine the virus spreads quickly and destroys thousands of avatars within a few hours. Virtual plague? Would virtual grief counselling be out of the question? and if 'virtual deaths' really did hit people that hard, then what do we do with the culprit? Punish him/her under existing computer misuse laws or would it be time to introduce a new law taking into account the amount of real emotional distress they'd caused? Lots of questions, but as always, no easy answers...
and in a similar vein to the research on mirror neurons, I found the following research interesting and I wonder to what extent it too would apply in cyberspace:
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/Clips/2005/dec/051226.Moods.html
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