Disqus - Latest Comments for daleinnis

Re: Second Life – The Revelation

daleinnis — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:21:53 -0000

Well, since you abandoned the "SL makes a really bad WoW!" tack, there's not nearly as much to disagree with anymore. :)

Re: Second Life – The Revelation

daleinnis — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:18:37 -0000

Much better. :) It's definitely not a game (how many people have recommended that you take a look at WoW as a place to interact with learners?).

It's a platform in some sense, in that people can create games (and lots of other things) there. But it's also more than just a platform, because people *have* created so many things there, and because so many people are there to interact with. You can hardly rent a beach house and go out dancing on a "platform", after all. :)

(Blue Mars in its current form is more of a platform; it's sitting there waiting for people to create worlds on it, and for those worlds to draw people.)

I don't know of a better word for Second Life than "world". Just like the real world, it has only the narratives that you (and others) create; none are built-in. And just like the real world, the people are very unevenly distributed. A random square mile of North America would be no more populated than a random parcel in Second Life. You have to put in the effort (and it's not much) to find things that interest you.

Glad you had your revelation. :) It's interesting how many people we've seen in the past couple of weeks saying "hey, this is really pretty neat once I stop expecting it to be WoW!"...

Re: My Secret Love Affair With The Avatar Botgirl Questi

daleinnis — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 09:37:57 -0000

Profoky is a boy (at least last time I saw him). His typist's gender is none of my business. But yeah, that suggestion has come up before. People are complex things... :)

Re: My Secret Love Affair With The Avatar Botgirl Questi

daleinnis — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:36:13 -0000

Ah, so you're going to post more lies about me to your weblog, but first you're going to ban me so I can't respond to them? Well, it has a sort of ruthless efficiency to it at least. :)

Re: My Secret Love Affair With The Avatar Botgirl Questi

daleinnis — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 14:07:17 -0000

Posting comments to someone's weblog is a liiiiitle different from stalking them, I think. :)

"I guess you can't be too terrified": Yeah, that was exactly my point. Even when people do link the two identities, as you did by linking to my RL weblog while talking to me in my SL name, nothing bad comes of it. My identity isn't particularly a secret, as Botgirl's now isn't either. It'll be interesting to see how the vanishing of that wall effects Botgirl's, and David's, future history.

Re: My Secret Love Affair With The Avatar Botgirl Questi

daleinnis — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:33:37 -0000

lol, Prok; you have linked to my RL weblog in a Twitter (or was it Second Thoughts?) post, and you have talked about my RL children's hobbies and the state of my RL marriage. And now you're talking to me in someone else's weblog comments! I didn't use the word "stalked", but if the shoe fits... :)

Re: My Secret Love Affair With The Avatar Botgirl Questi

daleinnis — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:32:18 -0000

Ha, cool! Bold of you to write about it (and of her to let you). Opening them doors into the unknown sure is fun, eh? :)

It's always been pretty easy to find out the RL name most closely associated with "Dale Innis", but I know of only like three people who have ever bothered, and it hasn't caused any problems (well, not counting some weird Prokofy Neva asides haha). I hope this marks the beginning of an interesting new period for both / all of you. Or maybe we'll be surprised again :) and it'll turn out not to matter much! Is a funny world...

Re: Half a decade ago…

daleinnis — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:02:53 -0000

Happy various birthdays! :)

Re: Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

daleinnis — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:25:30 -0000

Sounds good! :) I look forward to your next essay. I've read some of the work on RL people who seem to have two consciousnesses in one atomic brain, but never really studied them systematically. Now you've got me thinking about a piece of fiction where the RL and SL people in a given atomic brain really do seem to be two different people in a convincing way. All I need is a plot. :)

> When 'Dale' is online in SL interacting with someone, does Daphne ask herself "what would Dale do in this situation" before responding?

Heavens, no! In fact the question took me aback; at first I had a hard time even parsing it grammatically. Daphne and Dale are the same person, so this would be like thinking "what would I do in the current situation?", which is dangerously circular. :) If Extie's primary thinks things like "what would Extie do in this situation?", my immediate reaction is that Extie is simply a fictional character, and we're done. But in general one can't interact with fictional characters (in weblog comment threads, for instance); they interact with other fictional characters instead, in a fictional universe. (Peter Pan interacts with Captain Hook, not with the reader).

So now I have to think about the extent to which Extie's primary having some way of answering questions like "what would Extie do in this situation?", makes me feel that Extie exists, for various values of "exists". Which is to say, I think I'm finally at least in the right universe of discourse to think properly about Extie. So I may eventually be able to ask some of the right questions. :)

Re: Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

daleinnis — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:31:49 -0000

Thanks yet again! And again I haven't asked the question well enough. :) You interpreted me as saying something like:

Is it subjectively different to be Extropia DaSilva doing stuff in SL than it is to be [name of Extropia's current typist] doing stuff in RL?

which you answered, quite reasonably, in the affirmative, and which is a fine interpretation of my question. It's just not what I mean to ask. :) What I meant to ask was something more like:

If you count the number of subjective consciousnesses associated with Extropia DaSilva and her typist, do you get one, or two? (Or some other number?)

Even this isn't a terribly well-defined question, 'cause I have no idea how to actually count subjective consciousnesses. :) But for instance if you count the number associated with Daphne and Dale, there's just one, if you count the number associated with Daphne and Barak Obama, you get two, if you count the number associated with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers you get zero, etc.

That is, I take it as uncontroversial that with various things in the objective world (specifically people, and living human bodies, and some other living systems, opinions differing as we go down the chain of multicellular complexity) there is associated exactly one subjective consciousness each. Sure, I feel different when I'm being Dale than I do when I'm being Daphne, on average, the quality of my consciousness is different when I'm shopping vs when I'm in Church vs when I'm writing code. But it's still the same consciousness, the same inner Me. There's isn't one separate one for Daphne and one separate one for Dale. On the other hand me in church and Barak Obama in church are two different subjective consciousnesses in the obvious way. And there is no subjective consciousness at all associated in that same way with Tom Swift Jr.

I wrote:

'fictional characters don't; Flash Gordon has no subjective awareness'.

and you responded:

"Nor do avatars when the RL person who pupetteers them is AFK. In that case, you have a very strong argument that, in and of myself, I cannot have subjective awareness. "

which I think is interesting. So you, Extropia DaSilva, are the SL avatar that goes all unresponsive when the RL person is AFK? That's interesting to me; I don't think that Dale Innis is the same as the SL avatar, any more than I think that Daphne is the same as the RL body. That is, the person, the subjective consciousness, that is Daphne/Dale, is associated in certain ways with the RL body, and with the SL avatar, but is not identical to either of them. When I type these words, it is in some technical sense my body typing, but it isn't my body writing the words; it's me!

As to your patterns, if you are identical with Extropia DaSilva the SL avatar, then there aren't many patterns there to copy, nor to execute; a few dozen K at most, I'd say. On the other hand if you are (let's see) both the SL avatar, and some representation of that avatar's actual and potential / counterfactual behaviors, then the patterns are pretty tightly coupled to a bunch of patterns in the RL typist's mind, and it would be very hard to tease them out and say "here are Extropia's patterns, and we can transfer them to the new ultracomputer over here to run". In fact, assuming that there is no subjective consciousness belonging specifically to Extropia (and I think there probably isn't) there wouldn't even be a fact of the matter about whether we'd succeeded if we tried. We might get an SL avatar that behaved just like Extropia according to some of her friends, but seemed significantly different to others. And no way of saying that one group was right and the other was wrong.

But then of course if Extropia does develop to the point where there *is* a specific subjective consciousness associated with just her (a) I have no idea how we'd be able to tell that that had happened, and (b) I have no idea what would happen to that subjective consciousness if Extropia's patterns were moved from one implementation to another, or duplicated a dozen times, or run very slowly, or anything else interesting. But boy would I love to find out! :) Which is why I love this sort of discussion.

Which is to say, I guess, that I don't think anything all that interesting happens if, say, there are a bunch of SL AVs running around that are powered by committee, so to speak, even though they each claim to be a single digital person. Or rather, what would happen would be interesting in all sorts of ways, but not fundamentally new or puzzling or radical. On the other hand, once we get to the point where we have systems besides human brains that have subjective consciousness, we *do* get a whole new raft of really hard and fascinating questions (and while I see no fundamental barrier to that happening eventually, it seems to me that we're still pretty far away from having it actually happen).

Re: Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

daleinnis — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:09:05 -0000

Anyone assuming that that situation can never happen would be making some sort of simple error. :) 'cause clearly it could. I know (of) a few AVs that are "corporate", and have different atomic-world humans behind them at different times. I don't think this raises any really fundamental questions, unless someone seriously puts forward the position that there is an *additional* consciousness associated with that AV. That is, a numerically and ontologically additional subjectivity brought into being by the situation. I doubt that anyone would claim that and seriously attempt to defend it, but it could be fun if someone did. :)

Re: Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

daleinnis — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:54:50 -0000

Sure, I don't think there's anything there I could reasonably disagree with. But you're still talking entirely from the outside: entirely about what someone *else* might think about who is Extie or who is Morgaine or Dale, in some given situation. The thing I'm most interested in, though, is the internal view: what is it like *for Extie*. Or for Dale, or etc.

I think it's uncontroversial that atomic-world people have subjective awareness: there is something that it's like to be me (Daphne/Dale), I have subjective consciousness, or whatever phrase you like best. I think it's similarly uncontroversial that fictional characters don't; Flash Gordon has no subjective awareness. So my question is: what about Extropia DaSilva? Leaving aside all the questions about what someone on the *outside* might think about continuity of identity and proper use of names or whatever in various situations, *what does Extropia think*?

Does Extropia DaSilva have a subjectivity, an inner consciousness, that's different from the subjectivity of her typist?

Given that you avoid the question so thoroughly :) I'm guessing that the answer is no, and that since that's sort of a boring answer you find other things more interesting to talk about. Which is fine. But if the answer is yes in any significant way, I'd be fascinated in knowing more about it...

Re: Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

daleinnis — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:03:04 -0000

Yeah, again, we can ask "is Dale different from Daphne?" in two kinds of ways: we can look at various "from the outside" sorts of things, like "Dale didn't exist until 2006, whereas Daphne is 'way older" and "Dale has a different set of friends than Daphne", and decide if we want to call them true or not, and so on, and that's jolly good fun and leads to some insights about how we think of the world and how we use words and stuff. That's the kind of thing that got me my Bachelor's in Philosophy. :)

But I really wanna know, and I can't think of any evidence I could have one way or the other aside from Extie telling me, whether there's a subjectivity, a being-Extie-ness, that's a different being-ness from her primary's. That, I think, is where the really fascinating questions lurk. What really is the association between matter and subjectivity, or pattern and subjectivity, or anything else and subjectivity? That fascinates me. The other stuff, like logic-chopping over whether say two things can be the same thing even though one is heavy and one is light, I could do all day, but it's sort of like mental push-ups; or even mental bon-bon popping. Fun, but not all that fascinating long-term...

Re: Offline in the Afterlife: An Essay by Extropia DaSilva

daleinnis — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:23:39 -0000

It seems to me like there are two different levels of question here.

In the case of the afterlife, for instance, we can talk about the evolution of mental person-permanence models, we can talk about the extent to which someone lives on in their children or in the memories of other people, and so on, and those are all interesting questions. In some sense there is no fact-of-the-matter to lots of them: if one person says "George is dead, so he no longer exists", and another says "George still exists in these complex patterns of associations in and between the minds of those who knew him", it's not like one is right and the other is wrong; it's more like they're just using words differently, and that's fine.

But then we can also ask what it's like from George's point of view. Unless we're solipsists, we believe that George, while alive, had a subjective consciousness, that where was (to use Nagel's phrase) *something that it's like* to be George. Now that George is dead, that subjective consciousness either does, or doesn't, still exist. And if one person is sure that it doesn't (because they believe for whatever reason that subjective consciousness is essentially tied to certain movements of atoms, say), and a second person is sure that it does (because they believe for whatever reason in the accuracy of some religious text, say), then one of those people *is* right, and the other one *is* wrong (about this particular one-bit issue, at least), and it's not just that they are using words differently.

The same thing applies, I think, to the question of what happens to Exty when Exty's Internet connection is down. If one person (Exty, say) defines Exty as a digital person essentially associated with virtual spaces accessible only via the Internet, and says that Exty therefore doesn't exist during that time, and another person defines Exty as just an alias that some flesh and blood human sometimes uses on the Internet, and says that Exty therefore exists regardless of Internet accessibility, it's not clear that they really disagree about anything other than the proper use of a label: "Exty".

But a much deeper question, and one that I don't recall seeing you (Exty :) ) address (although I have to admit to not having read everything you've written, because I have the attention span of a muon these days): In terms of subjective consciousness, does Extropia DaSilva have a separate one, an ontologically distinct one, from Extropia's primary, from the most-closely-associated flesh-and-blood person? That question isn't just about the use of words, and touches on the relationship between subjective consciousness and matter, which is something that we know amazingly little about.

From my own point of view, I believe with a high degree of confidence that Dale Innis does have a subjective consciousness that is separate and distinct from that of, say, Extropia DaSilva, or Extropia's primary, or Barak Obama, or virtually everyone else. But Dale does not have a subjective consciousness that is separate and distinct from that of her primary, who we will call (just for fun, and contrary to easily discoverable actual fact) Daphne. Dale and Daphne are the same person, if we count persons by counting subjective consciousnesses. There are differences between them (Dale can fly, usually; Daphne can't, usually), but they aren't important differences, any more than "Dale is wet" might be true of her feet but not her head if she was wading.

To that degree Dale is not a digital person, because she exists in the analog world just as much as in the digital one, even if she often uses a different name there. Of course people who know both Daphne and Dale may come to have rather different bundles of thoughts about them and impressions of them and associations with them, and may think of them as different people in some sense or senses, and that's fine. But that's in the area where there's really no fact of the matter, and one person can think of Dale and Daphne as the same person and another can think of them as different people, and neither has to be wrong. But where there *is* a fact of the matter, in the issue of the number of subjective consciousnesses involved, the fact is that there is exactly one, and it belongs to Dale, who is Daphne, who is Dale. If someone were to insist that Dale and Daphne actually have different subjectivities, they would be mistaken (or else I am mistaken, and I would be fascinated to hear an argument to that effect in this case).

So, Exty! :) Do you have a different and distinct subjective awareness than your primary? Do you think that Prokofy Neva, who you have given as an example of a digital person who might not be aware of their own digitality, has a separate and distinct subjective consciousness from his atomic-world typist? I'm genuinely curious and open to either answer on these questions. Well, especially on the first :). On the second, I have my own rather definite belief and would be interested in discussing the matter if your belief is significantly different.

This seems like the vital root of the question when all of these things like "where does the SL person go when SL is down" are discussed: do we mean the person as seen and defined from the outside, or do we mean the subjective person, the "what it is like to be" ness of the person? Because depending on which of those we mean, we get very very different sets of questions, and also of answers...