Virtual Selves by J. David Velleman

I have never been a part of the Second Life world, or any other virtual world where one creates an avatar. A few months ago, or maybe longer, I read an article on Dialogical Self Theory that looked at avatars in Second Life as a virtual form of an I-position (a part or subpersonality). I think that looking at the idea in practice would be an interesting research project.

This article takes that idea in a different direction, suggesting that there is less difference than we might think between a virtual avatar and the physical avatar we inhabit in meat-space.

Below are the the first few paragraphs - the paper can be downloaded as a PDF by following the title link.

Virtual Selves

J. David Velleman
New York University - Department of Philosophy
October 7, 2011

Abstract:
An avatar in Second Life is a fictional body with which the user performs fictional actions. The user's real body is the avatar with which he performs real actions. The difference between the two is less than we might have thought.

Second Life

On most recent mornings, there have been over 30,000 computer users logged on to a virtual world called Second Life. Their computer screens show scenes of a nonexistent world, peopled by humanlike figures. Each user views the world from a point of view slightly above and behind one of those figures, who is his avatar in the world and whose movements and utterances he controls through his computer keyboard and mouse. The other figures on his screen are being controlled by other users, all of whom witness one another’s avatars doing and saying whatever their owners make them do and say. Through their avatars, these users converse, buy and sell things, and have all sorts of other humanlike interactions. (You’d be surprised.)

If you saw the virtual world of Second Life on your computer screen without knowing how the images were generated, you would take yourself to be watching an animated cartoon in which human beings, presumably fictional, were portrayed as doing and saying various things. Once you learned about the mechanics of Second Life, you would interpret the doings onscreen very differently. You would attribute them to unknown but real human beings who own and control the avatars that you see. And indeed, the typical participant in Second Life attributes to himself the actions apparently performed by his avatar. What a participant causes his avatar to do in the virtual environment, he will report as his doing. “I went up to the professor after class . . . ,” he may say, describing an encounter between a student-avatar that he controlled and an instructor-avatar controlled by someone else. In reality, the speaker went nowhere and encountered no one, since he was sitting alone at his computer all along.

These self-attributions can be startling, given the differences between avatars and their owners. A young female avatar may belong to an older man, who may end up remarking, “For last night’s party, I chose a tight dress to show off my figure.” An ablebodied avatar may belong to a quadriplegic, who may then report, “I ran all the way.” The obvious interpretation of such remarks is that they have the status of makebelieve.

According to this interpretation, the animated figures on the speaker’s computer screen are what Kendall Walton (1990) calls props in the context of pretend-play.(2) Such props include the dolls that children rock as if they were babies, the chairs that they drive as if they were cars, and so on. Just as a child might initiate a game of make-believe by pointing to a doll and saying “This is my baby,” the participant in Second Life may be taken as having pointed to his avatar while saying “This is me.”