CHAT 2010: Transforming Narratives

I’ll refer you, first, to a great piece of commentary that has emerged from this talk: Whitney Trettien’s Digital Storytelling, Zola, Experimentalism, and the Scientific Method. Trettien knows literature, and places Michael Young’s work and Katherine Hayles’ thoughts in a historical and theoretical context.

The only thought that I might add is somewhat techno-utopian. Our lives are not intrinsically meaningful or teleological; we don’t have purposes, per se, except insofar as we create our own—a state of affairs that may be satisfactory to the existentialists among us, but one which many people will never successfully come to terms with. One of the many ways in which literature has functioned has been to create the relief of structured narrative: an immersive world where purposeful events take place. Sometimes, we create such narratives by selective remembrance of actual events, creating histories and myths.

Young’s games are designed to anticipate possible user actions and find ways to incorporate these actions while still moving the story to its predetermined narrative conclusion. As people spend more of their lives online, intersubjectively transforming virtual worlds into real ones, I can imagine a future where such systems, augmented with tremendous computing power, will allow people to carry out much of their lives within teleological narrative structures—meaningful existence, delivered by technology.

The accompanying dystopian thought: who will be the meaning-makers for these anti-existentialists, and how can we be sure that these narrative storytellers will have everyone’s best interests at heart?

Virtual money: first across the divide

Kant once wrote that “A hundred real thalers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible thalers.” (Critique of Pure Reason, A599)

These words might have been true in 1781, but at the time I’m writing this, a US dollar is worth 264 Linden dollars. Something unprecedented is going on with virtual currencies.

Kant’s point was to claim that, given a concept, to claim that the object posited by the concept exists is to add nothing to the concept itself. It just describes a particular relationship between the concept and the real world. This seems like a rather academic argument—and it is—but it points out the futility of trying to prove that something exists by armchair reasoning. Kant was specifically targeting Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.

If we were to set about looking for 100 thalers, we wouldn’t have to specify that we’re looking for 100 thalers that exist. The last bit would be taken for granted. So trying to add existence as an additional predicate to the concept of our 100 thalers is pointless, according to Kant.

That would indisputably be the case, if we only ever approached concepts as necessarily referring to objects in the real world. But that’s not true; make-believe is another way that we engage with concepts. A child at play could indeed be searching for 100 thalers that do not exist. I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to rustle up Gil while playing Final Fantasy XII.

In Kant’s time, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction was clear. But during the twentieth century, mass media allowed fiction to become the jumping-off point for new social realities. Fan communities made the production of entire fictional universes profitable. People began speaking Klingon and invested themselves in social role-playing games.

The social element is key to explaining how virtual currency has broken through to the real world. If I like something, it has value to me, whether it’s real or fictional. If the pool of people who value something is large enough, and trade can occur, than economic forces will come into play. Online role-playing games has allowed the creation of fictional goods that can be traded among massive numbers of people.

It cannot go unremarked that while fictional money has become real, our real money long ago became fictional. With the abolishment of the gold standard and the adoption of fiat currency, our money became nothing but a function of intersubjective perception of value—a move that prepared us to accept the possibility of virtual currencies.

Links: Web 2.0 freedom, VR interfaces, soft luddites

• The Web democratized media for the technologically adept. Web 2.0 is democratizing it for everyone else. But what happens when the regime notices?

A couple of new devices chip away at the wall between cyber- and meatspace:

• Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a pair of goggles that recognizes and stores references to objects that you look at.
• Meanwhile, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created an electromagnetic device that allows you to feel virtual objects.

A few links on the “soft luddite” front:

• Readers report an emotional attachment to physical books. I wonder if this is simply a matter of familiarity, as the article implies. I doubt it. I suspect that the cultural mythos surrounding the book is adding a quasi-moral dimension here. Could you really bring yourself to abandon the good, true, trusty book, emblem of the learned and vehicle of the Word?
• BuzzFeed gently mocks the technology-fasting that seems to be all the rage lately, while providing several links to examples of the phenomenon.

Gaming goes hyperdimensional

My wife likes to make fun of my spatial reasoning skills. She’s an intern architect and a master closet packer, able to maximize the use of space in any situation. In contrast, whenever I try to imagine any but the simplest, most static of three-dimensional spaces, my brain starts moving very, very slowly. I mostly navigate the world by thinking about space in either the plan or elevation view.

As a kid, I always failed those tests where you had to imagine rotating a solid object and then pick it out from a list of similar solids. I never solved my Rubik’s cube, despite wasting man-months of my life in the attempt.

My condition couldn’t have been helped by the amount of time I spent racing around in the two-dimensional Nintendo dungeons of my formative years.

I’ve grown comfortable with the 3D interfaces that have become standard console game fare in the last decade or so. But it was not an easy transition. I remember one nauseous dream that consisted of being trapped in a sped-up Super Mario 64 level. I gave up after less than an hour of playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, declaring that no 3D Zelda could ever be as good as 2D A Link to the Past (now that I think about it, I’m not sure that this prediction was actually wrong).

But why stop with straightforward three-dimensional gameplay? One of the great things about virtual worlds is the possibility of bending even our most basic physical rules. Super Paper Mario for the Wii, and more recently the indy game Fez, have experimented with gameplay where the same virtual space can be 3D one minute, 2D the next, as if your in-game persona were the sphere from Abbott’s Flatland. One of last year’s biggest sleeper hits, Portal, throws you into a world where you can create wormholes that flatten distances and bend gravity around corners. 4D Tetris, anyone?

I’m in no position to review these games, since I haven’t played any of them. If I did, I think I would have smoke coming out of my ears. But I’m interested to see if games like this catch on, and what advances in science and mathematics might come from a generation that grew up playing them.

There’s been quite a bit of evidence that video games can teach the brain new tricks. Will the kids of tomorrow be as comfortable working in Hilbert space as the rest of us are on a Cartesian graph? Quantum mechanics, cosmology, systems analysis, topology, and game theory, among countless others, are fields that could benefit from minds that are natively hyperdimensional.

Then again, all those hours with the Rubik’s cube didn’t teach me anything.

Bits become atoms

It is often said that the conceit of the first Matrix film—with the “whoa” it brings forth from both the protagonist and viewer—is a variation on the “brain in a vat” thought experiment often given in introductory philosophy classes to illustrate the position of the universal skeptic. As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Consider the hypothesis that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrient fluids. This brain is connected to a supercomputer whose program produces electrical impulses that stimulate the brain in just the way that normal brains are stimulated as a result of perceiving external objects in the normal way. (The movie ‘The Matrix’ depicts embodied brains which are so stimulated, while their bodies float in a vats.) If you are a brain in a vat, then you have experiences that are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal perceiver. If you come to believe, on the basis of your computer-induced experiences, that you are looking at at tree, then you are sadly mistaken.

I would argue that while this comparison immediately leaps to mind, the real problem raised by the Matrix is much deeper. The brain-in-a-vat Gedankenexperiment implicitly assumes both that there is a real world, and that the computer-generated illusion isn’t it. In the Matrix films, however, this isn’t quite so straightforward.

Most of the simulated worlds we’re familiar with mimic reality at a very high level of emergence. Physics engines used in video games, for instance, copy the effects of Newtonian physics with macroscopic objects treated as primitives. But in the real world, the behavior of macroscopic objects emerges as a consequence of the crowd behavior of microscopic objects. Since the physics engine does not simulate these, it must substitute other causes to reach the same effect.

Take, for instance, the fact that two solid objects which collide will bounce away from one another rather than pass through each other. In the real world, this will occur because the particles which make up the solids will electrically repel each other; in a physics engine, this effect must be created with explicit collision detection and response rules.

But what if our physics engines had a great deal more computing power at their disposal, and simulated physics at the microscale, allowing macroscopic effects to emerge? In such a situation, the artificiality of the physical effects is less clear. They are not explicitly created by the programmer, but rather appear as a result of the same processes by which they come about in real life. As artificial intelligence researcher Steve Grand writes in his book Creation:

A computer simulation of an atom is not really an atom.... But if you make some molecules by combining those simulated atoms, it is not the molecules’ fault that their substrate is a sham; I think they will, in a very real sense, actually be molecules. ... the molecules made from it are second-order simulations because they are made not by combining computer instructions but by combining simulated objects.

Suppose we were to take this to its logical conclusion and posit a simulation based on the still-undiscovered Grand Unified Theory of physics, that is, a perfect physics engine from which even the behavior of the tiniest particles emerged from underlying rules rather than being directly simulated.

If we found ourselves in such a simulation, there is no way we could ever find it out; indeed, there is no way we can state with confidence that we are not. We don’t know anything about the nature of the ultimate substrate of this world. It could be a computer, the mind of God, or turtles all the way down. Yet this is the world which we refer to as “real.” I think we’re justified in referring to it as such, but in so doing we have to accept that being real does not necessarily exclude the possibility of being a computer simulation.

Although its portrayal is not entirely consistent, the fidelity of physical behaviors in the Matrix suggest that it’s just such a perfect simulation. The human occupants of the Matrix are shown to be aliens to that world. But it can never be entirely clear that the “real world” to which they escape is less of a simulation than the one they left, or that the natural inhabitants of the Matrix—the programs—aren’t less flesh-and-blood than their jacked-in counterparts. Indeed, both of these conclusions are hinted at in the second and third films.