My paper about our confused intuitions on moral status of virtual avatars is up in the latest edition of Stillpoint Magazine.
A reader just emailed me asking about the moral dimensions of avatar use explored by James Cameron in his engaging movie Avatar. In this film an other-world tribe of native humanoids, the Na'vi, adopt an "avatar" (what the Na'vi call a "dream walker") of a paraplegic marine named Jake Sully into their culture.
Sully's avatar is a cyborg of sorts, a biologically engineered physical being. Hence, Sully's avatar is more akin to the cyborgs in Bruce Willis' film Surrogates than to digital-based avatars which exist on a digital plane of existence. Sully and his avatar are two bodies in the same "analogue" world, whereas a digital avatar inhabits a distinct world from their user. This small point has, I think, a large effect on our intuitions.
Sully's cyborg avatar is clearly just an extension of his body, and thus it is Sully himself who is adopted by the Na'vi people and who (spoiler alert!) marries the Na'vi princess. Even the princess recognizes this "extension" relationship, as evidenced by her care for his damaged human body.
What if, by contrast, the Na'vi and their world was portrayed in the movie as digital, a variant of Second Life? Would it be as obvious that Sully himself was adopted by the Na'vi people, etc? Not to me, anyway. It seems like involvement in the digital world, separate and unique to ours, brings about a deep confusion about the moral status of its creatures.
In sum, Cameron's film does not bring up the same confused intuitions on our moral status that Second Life does, but that isn't to say that there aren't other intriguing ethical questions to be drawn from the film.
What would it take for him to be adopted by the Na'vi if they were purely digital beings? Would it be sufficient if Sully simply became so self-identified with his avatar that it became his only mode of meaningful interaction? What if he pared away his flesh and had his brain put in a vat so that his only mode of interaction was through the avatar? Or would the digital/physical divide create such an alienation that he would need to perform the ultimate sacrifice--upload his consciousness to a computer and kill his physical being--in order to have the digital beings accept him himself?
ReplyDelete(Of course there are lots of other questions to be raised about the nature of `digital beings', A.I., persistence of identity, multiple selves etc.)
Having not seen the movie, I don't know the answers to any of these questions.
Thanks Zach,
ReplyDeleteI think these possibilities push the point in the right direction. Sully (spoiler alert) actually does divest himself of his human body and becomes fully Na'vi by the end of the movie. His "resurrected" Na'vi body then becomes more than a mere extension, it becomes ALL that he is. I think this parallels the point you had in mind.
What's interesting is that our intuitions are not disturbed by this physical human to physical Na'vi transformation, at least not as disturbed were he operating with a truly digital avatar and transferring his physical human identity to a purely digital format. I think THIS possibility is were the action is.
For example, were Sully to become a purely digital self, I still don't know if he would have full moral status--if I could call his digital actions "good" or "bad". Such is not the case with the physical Na'vi transformation, at least for me.
Brian,
ReplyDeleteThanks for taking up this fine tuning of moral intuition relative to the digisphere (if I can coin a term). One of the original A.I. innovators at MIT's cog-lab, Ray Kurzweil, has a whole ideology of the cyberhuman (see http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1) and I for one find him and his vision very disturbing.
Essentially he argues that our carbon-based life is going, inevitably, to be replaced (in stages) by a silicon-based cyberlife with fewer limitations and none of the claptrap of religion. His vision is a kind of uber-evolution and even more perverse than Nietzsche's Ubermensch.
My problem with his vision (and even with many of the less extreme forms of this same futurism) is the lack of ethical, philosophical, and theological subtlety. Your questions about N'avi incarnation versus pure digital existence are, I think, tickling the right impulses. The one thing that N'avi panentheism has going for it is authentic compassion for the weak ones -- and a forgiveness and humility in the face of life's injustices.
The silicon ubermenschen have no such softness and are better exemplified by the warrior-colonist character in Cameron's movie. It's all about our limitless potential and self-perfectibility -- like Orwell's baleful vision of a "brave new world" of eugenics and amoral power.