Total Eclipse

The following is a translation of a paper I wrote for my Techno-Utopia & Cyberculture course from 2 semesters ago. Enjoy:

The issue of Personal Identity is a complex subject, which raises many difficult questions. What is a Person? That which thinks the thoughts I have? Is it identical to my body? Is it my soul? How can there be continuity in time, and yet, a consistant identity? Is Personal Identity uniform? Moreover, how can we even know?
These questions have been occupying philosophers and scholars since ancient times¹ .
One of the great pioneers in this field was 17th century English philosopher John Locke. In Locke’s An Essay on Human Understanding² he asserts that Personal Identity is based on Consciousness, and not Body or Soul. We are the same Person in the sense of continuous consciousness between past and present in our thoughts and memories. This assertion (as was noteworthily pointed out by Nietzsche³ and other opponents of Locke) has far-reaching moral and legal reprecussions. If Personal Identity is based solely on consciousness, and only the subjective Self has access to said consciousness, how do we know we are judging and passing verdict on the same Person and not merely the same Body? Locke concludes that we may judge all the actions of the Body, but in truth, a man is only responsible for his conscious actions.

In the 20th century, this discourse received particular attention from Post-Modern thinkers. They expressed skepticism of Enlightenment-era ideas of Reality as based on a Correspondent Truth Theory. We must look upon discourse as having it’s own independent and legitimate existence. To evaluate a discourse through criteria of “objective truth” is irrelevant. “There is nothing outside the text”, as Derrida⁴ would put it.
One of the most prominent characters in this context is French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault asserts that there are historic analyses of concepts (such as madness, sexuality, or reasoning), and that contrary to our intuition that these are wholly natural terms, Foucault demonstrates that they are in fact saturated with culture, politics, and historical contingencies.
To the question of Personal Identity, Foucault implements an expansion of the genealogy that Nietzsche performed to Consciousness and Personal Identity to the Legal and Penal system⁵ . The establishment of the system determined to punish the individual, lead, in fact, to his creation.
The Personal Identity, which we preceive as a natural, a-historic concept, if truth be told, appears completely different in different eras in history. The concept of Self is not only culturally-dependent, it is a product of culture. As such, it belongs in the cultural-symbolic world, and there is no need to maintain it’s relation to the outside world.

We leave the 20th century with a psychologistic conception of Personal Identity, based on a “Doctrine of the Ghost in the Machine⁶ ,” but with materialistic characteristics. A type of Cartesian Theater⁷ , where Self is not attached to the physical Body, but rather comprises of a collection of mental states.
This outlook has a deep relationship with contemporary Information Theories⁸ , though an important prior antecedant would be in the discourse of the Cybernetic sciences. Paraphrasing Norbert Weiner⁹ , one of the pioneers of cybernetics, “Fundamentally, a Person is something which can be sent in a telegraph.”
A Person that is comprised of nothing more than thoughts aמd memories, is, in other words, comprised of information. Information which can be reduced to bits.
The conception of Self as a body of information is realized in a rather interesting fashion in life on-line. In the process of constructing an identity on the internet¹⁰ , (homepage, nickname, behaviour – text-based information) as a person runs more and more of his life on-line, so the manner in which he presents himself on-line constitutes a more central component of his identity.

The conception of Self as a body of information allows the division of Person in two senses¹¹ :

* The possibility of several persons existing in a single body¹²
* Person as something decentralized, and less consistent and uniform.

Internet life emphasizes this embodiment in the concept of information. Life in virtual worlds, several windows open simultaneously, enable these sorts of divisions, which are nothing more than exemplars of what exists internally. This is the complementary approach. Cyberspace is an environment where divisions in Self are not only possible, but are normatively accepted, and maintain a complementary and even therapeutic role.
It is possible to anchor the division and multiplicity of Self in post-modern discourse¹³ .
Sherry Turkle sees in cyberspace a demonstration or realization of these ideas. She turns to thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, who assert that we live in a society that sanctifies and demands a coherent and uniform Self. In other cultural contexts, they say, lack of consistency and division in Self is legitimate. Thus in tribal examples there are situations where a decentralized or divided Self (e.g. a state of trance) in the ritual context of Rites de Passage¹⁴ is normative.

These divided states are called “liminal states”; border-states where the Self is “neither here nor there”¹⁵ . To the traveller in a rite of passage, personal characteristics blur. He is not as he was before, but is still not what he will become. The liminal state is characterized by bizzare elements. Through anormal strangeness, the traveller goes a deconstruction and reconstruction of subject. This is the stage where all doors are open, and thus the liminal state is infused with creative force. The liminal space is an anthropological arena¹⁶ , hidden and magical, as opposed to the familiar Euclidian space, the traditional “work” space; In many ways this is the distinction between secular and sacred.
In post-industrial society we find what Turner called “liminoid states” – liminal-like. The distinction comes to significant realization when we discern work and leisure (or: play).

Work is normative activity, taking place in Euclidean space, and if it has any rituals at all (social and religious), they are liminal, and compulsory for the indivudal in some manner or form.
Play, on the other hand, constitutes situations which express liminoid states. They are idiosyncratic, reated to the individual and do not require mediation. They are off the shelf products, which we can purchase at any time, like a movie ticket. To distinguish liminoid states from liminal states, I’d say that liminoid states do not pull the traveller towards an end, where the change taking place becomes permanent. It is roleplaying, in the full sense of the term, where one may enter or exit as he pleases.

Cyberspace has liminoid characteristics¹⁷ ; Anyone can plug in and be somebody else for a few hours. The social arena in cyberspace is open to the hybrid social player; The subject moves between leisure and seriousness, work and play. The social act in cyberspace contains a dominant component of playfulness. We shall now call this play a “deep play¹⁸ “.

Deep Play is and interperative game; Social act containing the essence of meaning for that society. Deep Play games are a model or simulation for the social game; They hold within them a reduction of the complex social matrix, to simpler game rules.

The virtual game in cyberspace has distinct qualites of deep play. I will attempt to exemplify this through the famous incident known as the “Rape in LambdaMOO”¹⁹.
LambdaMOO was one of the first MUD²⁰ worlds; game worlds, where the player creates for himself a character (or several characters), with which he plays in interaction with other player characters. Roleplaying is essentially a discoursive game, and so we will see elements of deep play rise within it.

The article details a case study of virtual sexual violence, which took place one night in one of the central game-rooms of the MUD. It was carried out by a perverted clown character named Mr. Bungle, by taking advantage of a Voodoo Doll (an in-game command), which allowed him to take over other characters. Mr. Bungle filled his nefarious intentions, until a veteran player character was called into the room, who knew how to operate a counter-command and stop the rape. What followed is the heart of the deep play.
A discussion starts in the MOO mailinglist and in the MUD itself. The community was divided into several camps. In the Royalist camps came the demand to ban and “execute” Mr. Bungle (i.e. delete the character from the database). In contrast, in the Parliamentarian Legalist camp came a cry that no one has the right to eliminate a character someone laboured to create, and that Mr. Bungle had not broken any rules. The debate sees parallels to the controversy concerning the legal right of the state to execute convicted felons in American society.
There is a dissonance between the status of virtual events and events in real life (RL). On the one hand, this behaviour is unacceptable in the outside world, however, this event did not take place in the outside world. In the liminoid state, the borders blur, and so they did in this case.
Mr. Bungle acted in accordance with the rules when he executed the Voodoo Doll command, even if such use was not popular or accepted. As he was not breaking any rules in the MUD world, and none in the outside world (no actual rape took place, afterall), what right do we have to limit his freedom of expression? The Techno-Libertarian camp asserted that “noise” of the kind Mr. Bungle represented is to be expected in a free world like cyberspace, and everybody playing the game has the necessary tools required to ignore him through a simple command in the MUD, without censoring his freedom of expression.
Here to, we see a clear parallel to a hotly debated topic in American discourse: Freedom of expression vs. Community values. The debate raged on in the MUD community for weeks. People became more involved; Players were like citizens of a Polis in a direct democracy – The Wizards (game technicians), had long since adopted a doctrine of non-interferance. They will do only what the community as a whole will choose, and they are the only ones capable of deleting (“To toad”) a character.
The debate moved in practice from the game itself to a discussion of the American social matrix, guised as gameplay. The boundaries between the game and reality blurred. The game became deep play.

The questions arising from the rape in LambdaMOO, constitute an excellent example to the deep nature of play on the internet. The game became a social simulation for the outside world, the beating-heart of American discourse came to life.
Through this, we can now fully comprehend the Sherry Turkle²¹ quote appearing in the body of the question:

“Virtual personae can be a resource for self-reflection and self-transformation. Having literally written our on-line worlds into existence, we can use the communities we build inside our machines to improve the ones outside of them.”

The gameplay on the internet is equivalent to our life outside, and constitutes a complimentary array to it. If only we meet wisdom with desire, we can use the interpretative game taking place, and build ourselves a model of a better society – and a finer world²² .

1. Heraclitus’ River Fragments (“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”) and Theseus’ Ship Paradox are good examples of this. [↩]
2. Chapter XXVII “On Identity and Diversity” in An Essay on Human Understanding (1689) [↩]
3. Chapter II “Guilt,” “Bad conscience,” and the like” in The Genealogy of Morals (1887) [↩]
4. Jacques Derrida in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966) [↩]
5. Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975) (from French: Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison) [↩]
6. The Ghost in the Machine is British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s derogatory description for René Descartes’ Mind-Body Dualism, which asserts a categorical (ontological) distinction between mental activity and physical activity. Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949) [↩]
7. Yet another somewhat derogatory term, this time from contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett, to Cartersian Materialism, what he preceives as discourse “leftovers” from Cartesian Dualism. Daniel C. Dennett in Consciousness Explained (1991). [↩]
8. See Floridi, Luciano on “Semantic Conception of Information,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Section 1. [↩]
9. Norbert Weiner in the second edition (1954) of The Human Use of Human Beings. Weiner maintains that the problems entailed with such an endeavor are of a technical nature, not fundamental. [↩]
10. Erving Goffman in “The Presentation of Self in Electronic Life,” Goffman on the Internet / e-mail and the world wide web (1995) [↩]
11. See: David Cole in A.I. & Personal Identity (1991) [↩]
12. Conceptions which inherently tie between Self and Body would not think this division possible. These ideas tend to see unity of Body as a motivation to accept a unity of Self, but since even this conception of unity of body is under attack since the late 20th century [see Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1990)], and in light of the contradicting empirical evidence, this position is maintained by a minority of thinkers today. [↩]
13. Sherry Turkle in Construction and Reconstruction of Self in Virtual Reality: Playing in the MUDS (1997) [↩]
14. Arnold Van Gennep in Rites de Passage (1909) [↩]
15. “Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” Victor Turner in “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols (1964) [↩]
16. Pierre Levy in Collective Intelligence (1997) [↩]
17. David Tomas in Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson’s Cultural Model of Cyberspace (1991). [↩]
18. Clifford Geertz in “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) [↩]
19. Chapter 1 in Julian Dibbel’s My Tiny Life: A Rape in Cyberspace (1998) [↩]
20. Multi User Dungeon/Dimension. A MOO is an Object-Oriented MUD [↩]
21. Sherry Turkle in Virtuality and Its Discontents: Searching for Community in Cyberspace (1996) [↩]
22. With this is mind, I recommend visiting the current iteration of MUD games, Second Life, an advanced 3D simulation for another life, inspired by Neal Stephenson’s concept of “Metaverse”, as appears in his influential book Snow Crash. [↩]

Tagged as AI, anthropology, Arnold Van Gennep, Betwixt and Between, cartesian theater, Clifford Geertz, community, complementary personhood, concepts, Consciousness, correspondent truth theory, Cyberculture, cyberspace, Deep Play, Derrida, digital age, diversity, dot.communism, dot.person, electronic age, ERving Goffman, ghost in the machine, identity, individuality, internet, John Locke, LambdaMOO, liminal, liminal states, liminoid, liminoid states, metaverse, Michel Foucault, mind-body dualism, MOO, MUD, net, norbert weiner, personal identity, personhood, post-modernism, psychologism, Rites de Passage, second life, Shay Brog, Sherry Turkle, sociology, techno-utopia, The Rape in LambdaMOO, The Self, Victor Turner, virtual personae, virtual reality, virtual worlds, web, web2.0, william gibson, שי ברוג + Categorized as Art/Culture, Philosophy, Psychology, Science/Technology