Op/Ed: Reality in the Virtual World
by Alphaville Herald on 07/08/07 at 8:11 am
How easily is the fabric of the virtual world is torn?
by Inigo Chamerberlin
Reading some of the comments to the latest episode of the Ginko saga I saw some comments that made me think about virtuality, reality and our Second Life. It suddenly dawned on me that Ginko was, is if you are an incurable optimist, a virtual investment bank in a virtual world.
It was perfectly fine, all the time enough people believed in it, but when enough people stopped believing in it – poof!
Philip K Dick said it rather well I think: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” and of course, it follows that something that ceases to be when you stop believing in it is… unreal?
And just what was it before you stopped believing in it? A dream? An illusion? Spooky, isn’t it? Like the Elf who partnered with his lady love and found out later, much later, that she was not exactly his lady love.
But consider, had she not made it so very obvious to him, wouldn’t she still be his lady love? Changing his perception of her utterly destroyed his belief in the world in which she was – she. And once he ceased to believe in her, she really did cease to exist, for him.
I’ve been pondering just how much of our Second Lives are in any sense real, and how durable they are
Most of us have, I think, agreed, informally, to take things in Second Life at face value. You have to really. It just doesn’t work if you wander around picking holes in the fabric of a virtual reality. So you don’t. Well, not if you are here to enjoy it.
Sure, there are those who enjoy kicking holes in people’s reality, but not many, and they generally aren’t well thought of. No, we have all agreed to live in an illusion.
Linden Lab in fact foster the illusion by maintaining that the local currency is in fact worthless, something they bolster up by setting an exchange rate that not only makes L$ ridiculously cheap, but further heightens the fantasy by maintaining artificially high virtual prices. We may be not that well off in reality, but in Second Life we can all afford thousand dollar designer clothes in Second Life.
Still, there remains the unpalatable fact that this illusion we have all agreed to inhabit for a greater or lesser part of our lives depends utterly on the continued interest of a group of people (and their investors to be sure) in keeping the world running.
Not for nothing do some of us refer to the Lindens as the Game Gods
Philip is very keen on the Metaverse tag, so much so that in the early days there was a feeling that Snow Crash was practically required reading.
However my feeling is that, while Snow Crash may have laid out some of the basic concepts that were incorporated in Second Life, the philosophy that sums Second Life up rather more accurately is somewhat older, dating from a time when something like Second Life was not technically feasible, but manages to lay down one of the foundations without which Second Life could not, cannot exist – and which may yet engulf us as virtual worlds proliferate: Gibson’s ‘unthinkably complex consensual hallucination’…
Granted, Second Life is hardly unthinkably complex – yet, with a nod to Gibson, the Second Life network is generally referred to as The Grid. Our mutually taking Second Life at face value isn’t quite what I’d describe as a consensual hallucination either – possibly something more like a willing suspension of disbelief?
We’ve had two demonstrations recently of how fragile things can be in our shared virtual world. Are we entering a new era in Second Life? A period during which the very fabric of this virtual reality is threatened, not so much by external influences as by our own inability to suspend disbelief?
I doubt it myself. I’m really just playing with ideas here. Trying to understand how and why things can switch so easily from being what they seem to be, to what they are.
So, where does this leave us? In a world where, if we aren’t very careful we begin doubting everyone and everything. It’s enough to make you wonder what you’d actually find if you logged on to Second Life in the wrong frame of mind. Would it all suddenly seem terribly unreal? Would you start wondering who, or what, was behind every avatar you saw?
Hopefully not. I for one will continue to take things at face value. Ceasing to believe in Second Life doesn’t seem a very smart idea. I’ll just carry on being me and enjoying the virtual world.
I don’t go around believing in Second Life, it would be a bit like believing in gravity. But likewise, I see no point in disbelieving Second Life either. Ah well, enough of these musings. I’ll just leave you with some advice someone who taught me quite a lot about virtual life gave me:
“Before you ask the question, be very sure you want the answer”
SLJustice
Aug 7th, 2007
“It is actually the small, perpetual budget deficit that reveals something quite sinister. Unlike L$ sales on the LindeX, they do not reflect a flow of real wealth into Second Life. Instead, they are created by Linden to represent wealth, but no economic production was involved in creating them. These deficits occur when the weekly L$ stipends Linden pays to premium residents exceed its revenues from land rentals and other administrative services it provides to residents. In order to fund the deficits, Linden creates new L$ and injects them into Second Life.”
http://www.mises.org:80/story/2640
http://slcongress.com
Nicholaz Beresford
Aug 7th, 2007
Amen, Inigo! Amen!!
I’ll share sometime along this line though. When I started with SL I was aware that it was essential to take things at face value. As you say, “Before you ask the question, be very sure you want the answer” … and many questions I did not ask because the best of SL experience for me personally is when I forget that there’s even a person behind an avatar. At that time I was fully immersed in that reality –I prefer to think of SL as another reality, not a lesser or an illusionary, but a different one– and I *know* that there were times that there was even a person sitting behind the computer on *my* side of connection. Talk about immersion.
The worst thing I ever did to that immersion, did to my SL experience, was starting to work on the viewer from an open source perspective. There is nothing that not only pokes holes into the fabric reality, it completely rips it apart. It turned the experience into a program and into bits (in both meanings of this word), and I guess this is the reason why the Lindens, who are working on the plumbing side of SL day in and day out, have lost most of their sense of what SL means to the inhabitants.
At good times I can get back glimpses of the initial level immersion, at bad times I’m in there, interacting and alway having an eye on a stats display, the lag meter, the frame stutter or the memory usage.
)) It’s enough to make you wonder what you’d actually find if you logged on to Second Life in the wrong frame of mind. ((
I can tell what you find. On two days in different frames of mind, going to the same places meeting the same people, you’ll find two different worlds.
Which is also true for first life …
Obscure Doodad
Aug 7th, 2007
Beyond all of this is a different reality and for my part it is a surprise.
Namely, the newly released July economic stats. They show growth. There was an apparent reversal in the decline of people with positive monthly Linden flow — in a month of upheaval.
Now, I did think that the elimination of casinos was going to gut LL’s tier revenue, but increase the inworld economy. I presumed that money that had been leaving in the pockets of casino owners would now get spent in world. But there were only a few days of July for this to happen since the ban was imposed in late July and yet the numbers look like growth.
There is yet another reason to show surprise at this — in Meta Linden’s recent office hours she mentioned that more and more of the economy was moving off world. Things were being paid for person to person via PayPal. Her numbers would not catch that.
But they still show growth.
Do we think she gets up and goes to work each day assigned to tell lies to her customers? Well, I don’t. I think people in a job like that are gone within a month or two. They just find another job. So I suspect her numbers are real. And that means the sky is not falling.
Nicholaz Beresford
Aug 7th, 2007
Oh, and on a more philosophical line of thought:
)) Philip K Dick said it rather well I think: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” ((
Which leaves the question what remains if you stop believing in reality.
Victorria Paine
Aug 7th, 2007
I think it very much has to do with the mind of the perceiver.
I view SL as an alternative reality — an immaterial one, to be sure, but a reality on its own terms nonetheless, merely one with different limits and different rules and different controls than the material reality that we all co-inhabit. So, I make the conscious decision to take things in SL at face value because that is how I choose to view it — as a reality that exists in itself parallel to material reality, and one that should be experienced and taken on its own terms.
I think that for many SL participants, however, this is not the perspective they bring to SL. For many, SL is simply an extension of material world lives — a way to expand their material world lives into an additional context that gives their material lives a bit more freedom, or at least an additional context to exist in. When viewed in this way, SL very much is not taken “on its own terms”, but is rather more like a communications medium with graphical elements that exists to help material world persons connect and enjoy creativity and each other. When seen from this perspective, SL is not “real” in itself, but simply an extension of the reality of the material world.
The perspectives clash, quite a bit. Someone who has the first perspective is more likely to have a SL that in some way or another reflects a separation from their material lives (or at least a willingness to accept that in others), while someone with the second perception, by definition, is not making that distinction and is therefore inherently skeptical of others who are living a second virtual life that is separate and parallel to their material lives, but not experienced as an extension of the latter. It’s a clash of mindsets. I think that if you have the second mindset, you’re much more prone to view SL as not “reality”, but as an extension of the material world — a place to create and play that is just an extension of the material personas we live with. If you are of the first mindset I think you are more prone to accept SL as a reality in its own right and on its own terms — terms which are different from those that we expect in the material world, but which nevertheless are intrinsic and proper to a virtual reality.
Ananda
Aug 7th, 2007
Reality is only what we agree to.
Regarding that Philip K. Dick quote – do you know how to *really* stop believing in something? If you stumble over the breakfast table in the morning, are you actually capable of not believing in it? What *would* happen if you truly stopped agreeing it was there?
I can tell you I’ve done that sort of thought experiment where, to my own perceptions, the table was gone, or the wall behind it, or the car in front of me, completely gone from my view. And then proceed to stumble into it because my *body* didn’t quite manage to disagree with its presence.
Nicholaz Beresford wrote:
“The worst thing I ever did to that immersion, did to my SL experience, was starting to work on the viewer from an open source perspective. There is nothing that not only pokes holes into the fabric reality, it completely rips it apart. It turned the experience into a program and into bits (in both meanings of this word), and I guess this is the reason why the Lindens, who are working on the plumbing side of SL day in and day out, have lost most of their sense of what SL means to the inhabitants.”
I get this same feeling from following all the scientific exploration being done in areas such as quantum physics, and neurology, especially the studies in how the brain really combines all our incoming sensory information and derives some sort of coherent perception from it. The closer you plumb the depths of how the “real” universe is constructed the flimsier it looks. The reality of any given subatomic bit depends utterly on it having interacted with some other entity, without that it literally doesn’t exist in any particular state.
A lot of thought about the universe these days has it that the whole thing could really be nothing but a simulation built entirely from information. We perceive it as real because we agree it is real, and have no way of stepping entirely out of the simulation. In many ways SL is simply a miniature version of this.
Here’s a thought experiment for you: What if you were to tie every single one of your sensory channels into SL, so you didn’t thereafter experience anything back out in the “real” universe. Then remain like this for several hundred years, as your memory of there being anything else but SL faded away. Would you believe any more that you had a self separate from SL? What if someone came up to you and tried to convince you that your avatar is not your real self, or real body? Remember, your every perception is dependent on SL as a conduit. Could you possibly come up with any “proof” that SL was nothing but a simulation?
I think our reality *always* depends on agreement with what we perceive, and has no other basis. It’s just a question of whether we can stop agreeing or not.
SqueezeOne Pow
Aug 7th, 2007
Well written!
However, this kinda feels like looking for philosophical wisdom in GTA:San Andreas.
Maybe it’s because I still look at SL as a game with all real players in it is why I don’t get into drama or get bent out of shape when something doesn’t work and am not upset by all the money I’ve spent on a series of 1s and 0s over the years.
Sure I’m on it a lot…but I also spent a ton of time on GTA:SA as well as a lot of time drinking! I have an addictive personality!
It seems to me that a lot of people treat SL the way that one would if the real world was unlivable because of some apocalyptic event rendering the outside world barren and dangerous to live in. They can’t go outside because of the radiation so they stay in their pod using the internet to prove to themselves that there was a world out there.
However, it’s not. It may be SOCIALLY barren and dangerous for many of the people that choose to immerse themselves in SL but how much of that is the person’s own fault?
Anyway, I think people should take out of these times the fact that none of SL is real simply because it could go away if the Lindens stop believing in it. They’ve already stopped believing in parts of it.
And afterall, Ginko is going away because people stopped believing in it, too!
Zera Pera
Aug 7th, 2007
I’ve always thought it best to keep SL in SL an RL in RL. Some people choose to mix the two, it’s completly in their right to do so. But SL has it’s own set of rules that anybody and everybody should be able to accept, and that is how easy things can, and do change. Somebody can click on a new Avatar they found, does that change who they are though? It should only change who they are if they act different with different avatars and other people are willing to go along with it, then they can live double SL lives. Then 2 seconds later, they can switch to something else. Though, in all cases, there is always a chance that you may discover something about your RL self you may not have discovered any other way.
Ethereal Bubkus
Aug 7th, 2007
Good, thought-provoking article Inigo.
anon
Aug 7th, 2007
“Like the Elf who partnered with his lady love and found out later, much later, that she was not exactly his lady love.”
Actually, he found out several weeks after he dissolved the partnership.
“But consider, had she not made it so very obvious to him, wouldn’t she still be his lady love?”
Since he left her weeks prior for unrelated reasons, no.
“Changing his perception of her utterly destroyed his belief in the world in which she was – she.”
Might’ve done, at that.
“And once he ceased to believe in her, she really did cease to exist, for him.”
Wouldn’t that have been nice?
Interesting essay nonetheless.
Rodion Resistance
Aug 7th, 2007
I work for a real world company, that employs people here in Cebu City, Philippines, to “work” in Second Life. All six of us go to a physical, real world office daily from Monday to Friday, from eight in the morning, to five in the afternoon. We create, design, and plan inside Second Life. Although much of what we create is indeed virtual, we do stick to real world conventions on how to manage and/or operate a real world company. To me, all the “virtual things” and activities that I do in SL have a strong bond with the real, simply because I receive a regular salary every month, and this salary allows me to live in a more or less decent manner, and I can even send a kid to school. So whenever I encounter the usual expression one finds in SL profiles, the one that says “SL and RL are two separate things…”, I feel rather ambivalent about this, for without the virtual things I create and the virtual experiences I receive or provide in SL, I’d have a hard time going about my RL (i.e. to buy food, clothing, and other basic necessities), simply because the very means by which I earn money to live, would disappear.
greta garbo
Aug 8th, 2007
“What if you were to tie every single one of your sensory channels into SL, so you didn’t thereafter experience anything back out in the “real” universe. Then remain like this for several hundred years, as your memory of there being anything else but SL faded away. Would you believe any more that you had a self separate from SL?”
Depends on your level of consciousness
“I think our reality *always* depends on agreement with what we perceive, and has no other basis. It’s just a question of whether we can stop agreeing or not.”
If you mean agreed upon by society then yes. If you mean on an individual level then no. There are all types of things taking place that are reality but are not agreed upon by society or scientific community. You cant put something in that box if you dont have the capacity to.
Since reality is fluid and constantly changing its difficult for most people to see or comprehend. But the universe has certain rules, patterns and things tend to happen in certain ways.
Science, religion, art – all paths lead to the same destination. Its a matter of perception and capacity.
There are all types of magical things taking place because Second Life exists. will you preceive it? maybe . .maybe not
Nina A
Aug 8th, 2007
Wow, I believed the reality of Ginko was a con. And it was. Could be something in that.
Astonished Reader
Aug 8th, 2007
Wow! An intelligently written article on the Herald, with a thoughtful and civilized discussion in the article commentary! And this from a publication that takes pride in being “Always Fairly Unbalanced”.
This will probably the first and last time it will happen XD
DJ Cure
Aug 9th, 2007
Great thoughts. I agree and disagree. But I’m glade for the discussion and hope it continues.
I’ve commented on this topic as well as off-shoots on my new blog http://rezyourmind.blogspot.com Feel free to comment. Thanks