"Advanced" use of virtual worlds? (Re: [MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs)

[Matt Mihaly]

On Fri, 8 Feb 2002, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> From: "Matt Mihaly" <the_logos at achaea.com>
 
>> No you don't. It's like claiming that virtual worlds are somehow
>> "not real". They are real, because they are part of reality.
 
> No, they're not.
 
>   real: Being or occurring in fact or actuality.
 
>   virtual: Existing or resulting in essence or effect though not
>   in actual fact.
 
> A virtual world is "not real" by definition. To claim otherwise is
> to commit a fallacy of equivocation.

This is difficult to make a short reply to. What epistemelogical and
ontological framework are you coming from? Your definition of real
seems (and I might be inferring what's not there) to derive from
so-called "naive realism" (Oxford's term, not mine) and simple
materialism. In other words, everything 'real' is made of matter,
and that your perceptions of that matter are direct, and unmediated
by awareness of subjective entities, and that in normal conditions,
the matter has the properties you perceive it to have.

The problems with those viewpoints are legion, and philosophy
outgrew them hundreds of years ago. Briefly though, the problem with
your definition of real and virtual are, I think, that you seem to
assume that 'being' equates to a materalist-style existence. You
want to tack on the requirement of perceived spatial relations to
existence, but there's no good reason to do that. It's just as valid
to say that the number 10 exists as that my computer exists. The
computer has what you might call a spatio-temporal existence while
the number 10 has a non-spatial, non-temporal existence.

W.V. Quine famously said, "To be is to be the value of a variable." 
That's kind of difficult to understand, but E.J. Lowe paraphrased,
saying, "To be accounted amongst the entities recognized as existing
by a given theory is to belong to the domain assigned to the
variables of quantification of that theory, according to its
standard interpretation." Quine also said, "No entity without
identity." which is to say that the key feature of being an entity
is possessing determinate identity-conditions.

I realize that was probably spectacularly unhelpful, but I hope it
at least illustrates that the field qualified to speak on the nature
of 'real' (philosophy) has thought about this for thousands of
years, and has come up with slightly better answers than just "My
table is real, a MUD is not."

>> Any character you play is part of you, because it is a sub-set of
>> you.
 
> You seem to have an awful lot of difficulty understanding the
> basic concepts behind roleplaying.

> Feregar, one of my characters in a pen and paper campaign, was
> afraid of mushrooms. If he saw mushrooms, he would try to avoid
> them. If he couldn't, he would panic and insist on destroying them
> immediately.

> I am not afraid of mushrooms, and I certainly do not panic at the
> sight of them. To suggest that Feregar is merely a subset of me is
> ludicrous.

Well, the character Feregar may not be, but everything you do when
you play him is a subset of you. It's not ridiculous. It's inherent
in saying "I am roleplaying." If you're the one doing it, then ipso
facto, it's you doing it. No one is suggesting you're ACTUALLY
afraid of mushrooms or panic at the site of them. I am suggesting
that your ability to pretend, and, in fact, the act of pretending,
to panic at the thought of them is you just as much as anything else
you do.

>> Characters don't have emotions. People do. Characters are
>> data-sets and/or ideas.
 
> But they are ideas of people. And an idea of a person can have an
> idea of an emotion.

No, the idea of a person can't have an idea. Dr. Harold Brown wrote
an excellent essay on ideas, that is largely accepted as the
viewpoint of metaphysicians (who seek the nature of reality) and
epistemologists (who look how knowledge is gained). He begins by
writing, about ideas:

  "These are entities that exist only as contents of some
  mind. Ideas in this sense should be distinguished from Plato's
  Ideas or Forms, which are non-physical but exist apart from any
  conscious beings."

>> Well, you have a pretty good idea how it feels to impress a human
>> wearing a description that says "I am a dragon" at the least.
 
> No, that would be actual experience. He would KNOW how that feels,
> because that is exactly what he has really felt.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the 'that' in "He would KNOW
how that feels." If you mean he would know how it feels to impress a
human wearing a description saying "I am a dragon." then yes, I'd
certainly agree, as that's exactly what he did: impress a human
pretending to be a dragon.

 
--matt
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