Current Results

Total number of responses on this poll: 165

Are we destined to merge with our avatars?

1. Yes, that seems inevitable.



36.97%

2. Maybe some of us.



21.82%

3. Nope.



20.0%

4. We’re already indistinguishable from our technology and/or the self is a subjective illusion.



21.21%

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Comment Thread (3 Responses)

1. I think the people voting “Yes, that seems inevitable” are forgetting something critical. An Avatar serves a function, and that function is an interface to a virtual environment. Merging with our avatars would impair that function as well as our sense of “Self”. It much more likely that the avatars will become symbiotic, a representation not just of our physical selves in a virtual environment, but an early embodiment for a personal AI or AI assisted intelligence. Maybe something like the animal companions in “The Golden Compass” but more useful and a much deeper reflection of how a person would like to present them selves, but still separate. The majority of Virtual worlds are omnipresent, in a sense they continue on even when we log out. So it would improve the avatars function for it to be able to act “like you” so that it can act on it’s own while your attention is else where. But it will always be an important function of an avatar for you to be able to separate your original self. Each persons avatar is a reflection of ones self, and as interfacing with virtual worlds and virtual reality overly add a layers of complexity our biological brains will be unable to deal with (txting while driving being a good example) we will become increasingly dependent on our avatars, and the intelligence we give them. For such a relationship to work your avatars personality will have to be built from yours, an extension of your self, but still separated from the real world.

   Posted by: Coldwave123   October 07, 2009 08:18 AM
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2. Avatars, digital-age symbols, objects used for representation of a single human user. They are visual-spatial forms of expression, switched from verbal or written formats to something able to represent the user without words. Avatars, being simply an artificial extension of oneself, are not fundamentally different from older low-tech forms of visual representation, from family crests to royal seals to national standards (flags). They merely function without the need to enlist other humans. This poll is not able to separate two entities for the voters: the multitudinous expressions of oneself, i.e. avatars online, books in a library, and the singular Self, which is inexpressable, since such expression becomes definitively avataresque. I.e, answers 1 and 4 are both, in my opinion, correct. >;~P

   Posted by: Adam Cutsinger   October 23, 2009 07:33 PM
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3. According to Brian Greene, of all the new ideas advancing string theory, the holographic principle shows the most promise in helping us gain a understanding of our universe. (see Fabric of the Cosmos p.485) The information stored in Plank size, time varying bits of information about the interaction of atomic and subatomic particle stored at on the surface of 3D anti de Sitter space without gravity can represent the same interactions in 4D space containing gravity. It occurred to me that all the information about consciousness and evolving life history which gives life as we know it its sense of reality, could actually be stored somewhere in our personal 4D space time hologram. Perhaps the avatars or the human bodies that we humans occupy temporarily on earth (the temples of our being) were designed to survive on Earth. When we die, perhaps our essence remains in the personal hologram. Could our soul then be transfered to another avatar on another planet in another universe in another space-time.

   Posted by: rhinopete   April 23, 2010 09:52 PM
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