Abstract
A small but significant number of residents of Second Life (SL) insist that SL is as real to them as Real Life (RL) and that their SL avatars are as much themselves as their offscreen selves. This paper investigates whether this claim can be literally true in any philosophically interesting way. Using a narrative account of personal identity I argue that there is a way of understanding these identity claims according to which the actions and experiences of the offscreen user and the online avatar are indeed actions and experiences of a single person. In the course of describing how this is so, the paper also uncovers new insights into how a narrative approach to personal identity should be structured and developed.
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Notes
For a helpful taxonomy see Søraker, J. Virtual Entities, Environments, Worlds and Reality: Suggested Definitions and Taxonomy. In C. Ess and M. Thorseth (eds.), Trust and Virtual Worlds: Contemporary Perspectives, 44–72, especially pp. 64–66. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. The question of whether and how my analysis would apply to game worlds is an interesting and fruitful one, but unfortunately outside of the scope of this essay.
"Current user metrics for Second Life". Secondlife.com. http://secondlife.com/xmlhttp/secondlife.php. Accessed 2010-02-19.
Subscribers to SL get an avatar with a default skin, which appears artificial. The texture maps that make up the skin can be customized to provide a more realistic appearance. Those without the desire or skill to customize in this way themselves can buy texture graphs or “skins” from other players. For a nice description of this practice see Marion Walton, “Second Skins”, LiveJournal, http://marion-walton.livejournal.com/6553.html, accessed 12/14/2010.
A wealth of examples can be found in Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Related examples of phenomena of this sort in virtual worlds other than SL can be found in Annette Markham, Life Online: researching real experience in virtual space, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press and Sherry Turkle Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Markham, Life Online: researching real experience in virtual space, Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, p.20
Ibid.
Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 21
Markham, op. cit., p. 115
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 116
In this respect, a careful examination of how questions of identity play out in multiple user online gaming would be particularly interesting, since these games stand, in certain relevant respects, between virtual worlds and single-user games.
Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. I have, in fact, altered and expanded this view in many ways since first presenting it, as well as rethinking the precise question of personal identity to which it applies. (See, for instance, “Stories, Lives, and Basic Survival: A defense and refinement of the narrative view,” in Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel Hutto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 pp. 179–202 and also “Personal Identity and the Practical,” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2010 Aug;31(4):271–83) Describing these changes would only muddy the waters here, however, and so I will stick with the original presentation in what follows. This view can be thought of as expressing the aspects of personal identity relevant to this particular question about online contexts, with the recognition that there is a broader space of related questions waiting to be explored.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon, p. 340
Although recently there has been a pronounced backlash against this approach. See, for instance, Eric Olson, The Human Animal: Personal Identity without Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997
For instance, the films, Freaky Friday, Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa, Body Switch, and a host of others. For a fairly comprehensive list of media depictions of the Prince and Cobbler case see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_swap_appearances_in_media, accessed September 3, 2011. The point is that in almost every one of these depictions it is taken for granted that the person goes where the consciousness goes, which is just what Locke argues.
David Lewis, “Survival and Identity,”, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983 p. 17
More specifically, developed versions of the neo-Lockean psychological continuity theory typically define personal identity over time in terms of the existing of overlapping chains of properly caused psychological connections holding from one time to another. A nicely laid out version of a highly-influential psychological account can be found in Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon, 1984, p.206. I also discuss the development and details of neo-Lockean views in The Constitution of Selves (pp. 18–23)
Discussing these would take us too far afield here, but they can be found in chapters 2 and 3 (pp. 26–70) of The Constitution of Selves.
As I mentioned earlier, I have come to think that the notion of personhood should be broader than this. The relevant aspects of personhood in the present context are, however, those that define Lockean personhood, and so we can think of personhood in these terms for present purposes.
Unlike, e.g., rabbits, which can live the lives of rabbits without conceiving of themselves as doing such.
The argument for this claim is long, and I cannot present it here. It unfolds in The Constitution of Selves from pp. 93–162. I hope what I have said will be sufficient, however, to ameliorate at least somewhat any worries that the view must be viciously circular. What it is to live the life of a person (at least as understood here) is to live a life involving norms in the ways Locke describes. Narrative self-conceptions constitute individual persons by allowing them to live such lives, but do not define what it is to be a person.
This may help to clarify the difference between the kind of appropriation of experiences described by NSCV and the Kantian unity of apperception. Both notions involve taking experiences or thoughts to be one’s own. The Kantian notion, however, is more concerned with synchronic self-attribution, and is a formal relation we have to our experiences. The narrative notion focuses more on the self-attribution of temporally distant actions and events, and requires that such self-attribution materially change the nature and content of the experience. I am grateful to Charles Ess for pointing out the importance of clarifying this distinction.
Indeed, Boellstorff suggests that it is only because it is distinguished clearly from RL that SL can be a culture unto itself and so, in the respects that it is, a genuine place. See, e.g., Boellstorff, op. cit., p. 119
There are many examples of this in the popular media. Robert D. Hof, for instance, tells the story of Anshe Chun, who amassed SL Real Estate holdings in the hundreds-of-thousands of dollars (US) and had to open an RL studio in China employing ten people to manage her SL affairs (“My Virtual Life”, BusinessWeek, May 1, 2006, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm, accessed 12/6/10). Wagner James Au tells the intriguing story of a suit brought in RL court against an SL avatar for violating copyright on a lucrative virtual sex bed designed and sold by the plaintiff’s avatar (“Second Life Avatar Sued for Copyright Infringement,” Gigacom, July 4, 2007. http://gigaom.com/2007/07/04/second-life-avatar-sued-for-copyright-infringement/. Accessed 12/15/10), and the ubiquity of these kinds of cases led Martin Davies to write in The Guardian that “the gap between virtual worlds and real life is constantly closing, with developers encouraging in-game economies with currencies that translate to real-world pounds and dollars.” “Gamers don’t want any more grief,” The Guardian, June 15, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jun/15/games.guardianweeklytechnologysection2. Accessed 12/15/10
In the last US Presidential Election, for instance, several of the major candidates had campaign offices in SL.
See, e.g., Eliot van Buskirk, “Second Life Bluesman Gets First-Life Recording Contract”, Wired, August 13, 2008, http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/08/second-life-blu/ accessed 12/15/10, and Rubina Reuters, “Artists struggle but don’t starve in Second Life,” Reuters, April 16, 2007, http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/04/16/artists-struggle-but-dont-starve-on-second-life/. Accessed 12/15/10. Many good examples of this kind of thing can also be found in Boellstorff, op. cit.
See, e.g., “Virtual world, real emotions: Relationships in Second Life,” CNN Living, December 12, 2008, http://articles.cnn.com/2008-12-12/living/second.life.relationship.irpt_1_virtual-world-wedding-latte?_s=PM:LIVING, accessed 12/15/10 and Judith Woods, “Avatars and Second Life adultery: A tale of online cheating and real-world heartbreak,” The Telegraph, November 14, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3457828/Avatars-and-Second-Life-adultery-A-tale-of-online-cheating-and-real-world-heartbreak.html. Accessed 12/15/10
For a nice discussion of the complexities of RL romances see Boellstorff pp.165–174. Of course, many residents also see SL and RL relationships as distinct, and some see SL relationships as mere play. My interest here is in the not insignificant component that takes these relationships as in some important sense “real” and seeking to determine what this amounts to.
Kristina Dell, “How Second Life Affects Real Life”, Time, May 12, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1739601,00.html. Accessed 12/15/10
Of course, an author might “fall in love with” his character in a way that prevents him from pursuing relationships in his real life, or an actor may be so consumed by his character that he acts as if he is really in the relationships his character is in. But these are precisely cases in which the line between reality and fiction get blurred. What this shows is that the phenomenon of “narrative bleeding” that can occur in Second Life can also sometimes occur in fiction and acting. I am completely open to this possibility. My only point is that cases where it does are importantly distinguishable from cases in which there is no such blurring, and that they impact identity in the one case and not the other. The claim is not that virtual worlds are absolutely unique in this respect, only that it does happen here. If understanding these identity claims in the case of SL allows us to go back and see that similar claims can sometimes be made in other creative work—and to see why this is so—so much the better. The crucial point is that we have a principled way of distinguishing between this kind of blurring of lines, in whatever medium it appears, and the mere expression of authentic traits via a character described in section one.
Ibid., p. 109
For a particularly entertaining version of this phenomenon see Stranger than Fiction, Sony Pictures, 2006.
While I do not have space to explore this here, the idea is that whether there is a single broader narrative here depends upon whether the resident views SL as a game or not. If she does, what happens there will not impact her user narrative in the right way to make a more comprehensive narrative. If she views it as real, however, the interactions described in the previous section will occur. This is an intriguing, important, and challenging implication of the view that needs further unpacking.
Sherry Turkle also suggests something along these lines. She invokes the Eriksonian idea of adolescence as a moratorium to explain the nature of SL. Adolescence is, of course, a time of deeply significant passions and engagements. Erikson sees it as a moratorium in the sense that it is also a period where there is a tacit understanding that the activities of the adolescent are exploratory and do not have the same implications as adult actions. She also notes vacations as a kind of adult moratorium, but feels that virtual worlds present a new kind of phenomenon since “time in cyberspace reshapes the notion of vacations and moratoria, because they may now exist in always-available windows.” (Turkle, Life on the Screen, op. cit., p.204) She therefore sees the online experience as providing a concrete representation of the postmodern view of the decentered self. It should be clear that I am broadly in sympathy with Turkle’s perspective, but my focus is as much on the unity as on the multiplicity. A decentered self is interesting because it is also a single self. NSCV can explain both the unitary and the decentered nature of the self. The self is decentered insofar as it may contain many “special contexts” with sub-narratives of their own; it is unitary, however, insofar as these sub-narratives interact with one another in regular ways, and must be subsumable under a single broad narrative that recognizes their various contributions. I thus do not see my view on these issues as fundamentally at odds with Turkle’s, rather it is the use of similar observations in the context of a somewhat different project.
I am grateful to many people for extremely valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper. In particular I could like to thank Charles Ess, Luciano Floridi, Colin Klein, Ed Tverdek, Aleks Zarnitsyn, two anonymous referees, and the participants in the Workshop on the Construction of Personal Identity Online at the University of Hertfordshire, June, 2011.
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Schechtman, M. The Story of my (Second) Life: Virtual Worlds and Narrative Identity. Philos. Technol. 25, 329–343 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-012-0062-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-012-0062-y