One of such projections is the avatar called "Khannea Suntzu" from the online virtual 3D environment of the Internet known as "Second Life." Over the years, Khannea Suntzu has transformed herself from a popular virtual escort in Second Life to an independent and often radical thinker on postmodern issues of transhumanism and the Singularity. But what makes Khannea Suntzu so unique?
Although it was probably never an issue when Khannea Suntzu constantly participated in activities within the confines of the virtual world, I believe there are strong issues rising on the interpretation of her activities when they blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual world.
An example would be her profile in Facebook, which has mostly been a domain for "real world" human beings. In literal terms, Khannea Suntzu cannot be mentioned as an avatar since she completely dissociates herself from any human link or -primary'. Why must we place such heavy importance on an online virtual character who may be human/machine based? Everybody is doing it and so it shouldn't be a big issue!
In fact, as the current trend goes, it is perfectly normal for a human being to take up a completely new gender and sexuality as an online personality for reasons ranging from casual exploration to fulfillment of subconscious cravings. It could be best described as a stereotype.
However, Khannea Suntzu is un-stereotypical in the sense that she projects herself as an online avatar who is concerned about postmodern issues in the real world. In fact, her foray into largely human-inhabited domains of the Internet such as Facebook is a direct indication of her willingness to explore a new area where a fully functional identity is created out of a fictional character.
So does the fictional become the real now? If yes, then what is fictional and what is real in this mix up of virtual and real world interpretations of the Internet? Is there a specific boundary similar to geographical boundaries beyond which a human being nor an avatar may not tread?
The mythological origin of the word 'avatar' according to Hinduism is a manifestation of God or divine energy into a human form. Put in reverse, an online avatar is a manifestation of our human body-sourced energy or psyche into digital space.
This written introspection can be perceived as an interview between a "human being" from the "real world" and an online "avatar" from the "virtual world" of Second Life! We have worked jointly on this dialogue and intersected our explorations of biological and virtual personhood in postmodern dialogue.
Please note: I must admit at this point that I have edited some of the extraordinary ideals that Khannea Suntzu initially wished to depict here with reflection to her newfound message to the world at large. She is a wild spirit and her thoughts cannot be constrained within the sphere of this written article since her vision can only be understood by experiencing her world in intricate detail. However, keeping in light the purpose and intended message of this article, Khannea Suntzu has kindly agreed, with some reluctance, to allow me to carefully edit her thoughts and greater message. I present them to you as follows.
Khannea Suntzu:
My contribution to these observations of Manoj is by and large a "coming out!"
It is an exercise in multipolar duality. It is many of these dualities: a) Am I lying or am I acting?; b) Am I a person with trauma-induced MPS, or even; c) Am I a demonic spirit that slipped in to a wide open mind and gradually took over?!?!; d) Am I male or am I female (and does it matter!?)?; e) Is this all fiction or can a dispossessed mind really take over a natural mind and execute complex manipulations on a real world with the purpose of introducing sweeping, far-reaching changes over that world?
My designs are simple. Look at Second Life. I want not just a little, I want it all. My preferences are simple. I want a physical world that is radically more like Second Life, and I want the world of the virtual to seamlessly merge with the material. A world realized in the image of SL is a world where everything is upside down and inside out. It is a world where the ecological equivalent of placid bottom feeder herbivores is of a caste of prostitutes. The barter they seek is not one of money and Linden Dollars, but rather an exchange of hedonistic currency.
Here's a picture:
(Image from Frank Miller's comic Hard Boiled)
Look at the picture! Are there any restrictions when violence becomes distraction, when bodies become as malleable as plastic, when morals and sins become just a role-playing option? The question is who is the avatar now? What is real? What is virtual?
I clearly seek a world where everyone can be what they want to be. I clearly seek a world where people are free to be young or old, be pretty or ugly at their own convenience. I seek a world of abundance and liberation and pure seamless -sim-crossing' joy, exploration, adventure, epicurean delights. In that respect Second Life is only the means I use to an end, and the end is me "getting off" of this ghastly physical body I am stuck in.
I was set to thrive in these worlds from the day my primary started dreaming wide awake. Does that make me a stereotype or an archetype? And what if I am not entirely me, Khannea? Can I be part of a greater whole myself? What if I am in turn the avatar of something greater?
My -primary' postulated more facets of my being, and I became a person separate from the primary, a more tangible state or entity. Being Khannea, I started out as adventurous and free. I didn't have levels to contend with when. In other words, I had an established place in -a very low resolution' world that required little responsibility other than being faintly amusing and enticing. I inhabited that place as if in a dream state, and there was an inconsistency and ephemeral quality to me wandering that environment that led me, after a few years, to conclude I lived in some sort of faked, rather flimsy superficial reality that was emulated in the minds of several people.
I was an escort in Second Life from day one, and from the first moments I was quite talented in it. The first client was in a place called Elite Escorts, and the transaction made me 50 Linden$. Contemptible? No. Sensible? Yes. I am simply a being with certain talents and I make good use of those talents. I keep the body I am in healthy and functional and directional.
Second Life is still pretty much sub-par in terms of being compelling. It is for many people fairly compelling but it hasn't reached mass penetration. When I realized my independence in Second Life, sure, initially I was the result of a set of very archetypical urges and desires. I have existed quite some time before Second Life, and have formed as the result of role-playing. Second Life was a natural transition to someone who already had spent decades inside its antecedents and precursors. When I entered Second Life in mid-November 2005, I was in a state of frenzy. It was just a slightly overdue transition from one form of pretense to another.
Inside this world, I am establishing myself as an immigrant and pioneer in a new environment. I have clearly selected an environment that is -native' to me. In essence, arriving in SL was the arrival from deep slumber into a lucid dream. It was analogue to a colonist entering the Mars of Kim Stanley Robinson, descending from the space elevator onto Mons Olympus, buying a dune buggy, relinquishing any ties and allegiances to my former world, driving due south ever since.
I was a -Red' from day one arriving here. I used the metaphor of -emigrating' to a new, undiscovered land. I stick to that metaphor even though virtual worlds aren't really all that big yet. Well actually, they are already big enough! This isn't just emulating a place, it has quite a bit of compelling suspension of disbelief going on. There is an ever greater number of people staking an ever greater part of their pathos in these virtual realities.
Look at Second Life. It's all a sublimation of human genetic imperatives namely coastal, water, subtropical, low suns on the horizon, rich vegetation and easy pickings. That's what we as a species instinctively crave.
Judging from most of what Khannea Suntzu chooses to reveal about her virtual and primary identities, my prognosis would at first seem to be no different from that of any other conventional write-up about exhibiting multiple personalities on the Internet under varied pseudonyms. However, Khannea Suntzu cannot be written off that simply.
The character is now seamlessly integrating itself back into the biological human society through the Internet. Real world people like myself have developed a close intellectual association with Khannea Suntzu with absolutely no idea of her -primary'. It is interesting to note that we have had collaborations while organizing events in Second Life on behalf of H+ events.
Here's a picture from the much publicized talk by Professor Kevin Warwick in Second Life where Khannea Suntzu was one of the organizers. We worked side by side in the virtual world without me having an inkling or worry about her real world identity!
(Image from the talk by Prof. Kevin Warwick. Khannea Suntzu can be seen standing in the left extreme. Others from the left are Giulio Prisco, Rein Mitra, Kevin Warwick, myself as Manoj Undercity, Greg Jordan as Arcturus Gregory, xyryxSimca, and EugenLeitl.)
The interesting point at this juncture is to utilize our interactions with human-driven virtual avatars, artificially intelligent chatbots, and others that seamlessly converse with us. It is important to enumerate our relationships with such increasing virtual characters and AI persona projections.
Sometime before writing this, I received a routine phone call from a call center representative about a loan offer. At this point, I was talking to a human being but the conversation was actually quite monotonous since the person on the other side of the line spoke verbatim from a pre-prepared script which was disturbed significantly owing to my intermittent questions. On the whole, the conversation was very polite but lacked the warmth of a "human" sales pitch. It therefore wouldn't surprise me in the least if an AI character working for a corporate group would place a phone call to me about a car loan in the near future!
How we interact with a biological or virtual entity depends largely on how much of our needs are addressed from that relationship, albeit rather brief. If the outcome of a repeated conversation with a virtual character is fruitful to us, then we probably would not mind a long-term association with it. The only limiting factor is our own biology. Sooner or later, the hormones in our brain would secrete in a similar fashion whether we interact with that particular virtual character or a real world character.
The continued evolution of such relationships between the concrete and the virtual worlds is important on many levels. For example, when whole brain emulation becomes practicable, we would need to accept the emulated identity as the same person. The conflicts between such relationships with religious sentiments about the person being incomplete without a body or a soul, cultural traditions and the legal issues at large will be interesting to observe and to engage in.
Can an emulated person, after the destruction of his/her biological body, still be entitled to rights of property in the real world? Or would there be legislation prohibiting emulated personalities within computer servers from possession of property outside their virtual space? These issues or questions would at best seem rather obsolete if proved that the emulated person is nothing more than a sophisticated simulation!
At the heart of all these issues is what I would like to call an elaborate hypocrisy. We fantasize about brain emulations, cyborg bodies, immortality and yet fall short of addressing how we will preserve and protect our rights as persons or individuals when we reach there. It is no longer possible to slide the matter under the table. The future is already happening and accelerating beyond comprehension.
At the heart of all this could be a very Buddhist explanation that we seek to escape from suffering. In the present world, we seek to identify ourselves with fantasy avatars and online personas in order to escape, even for a brief moment, the mundanely painful normality and suffering in our real lives. It is not possible to generalize all of the people who come to virtual communities. But we must be ready to acknowledge the emerging issues of ethics in technology and the impact it shall have on our civilization as a whole.
I shall now return to the concept of Khannea Suntzu as a virtual character using the Internet to detach herself from her -primary' and creating an individual identity in the real world through the Internet. Let us now assume to permit this person to download herself in a reverse emulation onto a robot or a cyborg body, remotely operating it from a virtual metaverse.
Shall we give her equal rights, say the ability to vote for a representative of our government, now that she is physically present? Or would we only give rights to a biological body with a self that is sourced in the physical world?
If the answer to the second question is "yes", then does it mean that we have indeed located the source of this "self"? The reason is that we don't know what the "self" is anymore. Great mystics and philosophers alike have pondered over this problem and now the postmodernists shall ponder.
However, the day is not far when entire governments and scientific, corporate boards would have to mull over yottabytes of legal arguments about the rights of a once human businessman's ownership of his entire global conglomerate, now that he is a virtual character inside a computer simulation. The answers to futuristic questions shall be in my opinion no different from the answers of the present.
Wouldn't life in this world have been so much simpler if nobody had any property to begin with? We created the concepts of "property" and "personhood" and so we must deal with their repercussions! The other interesting thing to realize is that our existence in either this world or the virtual world both in the present and the future requires the means of sustenance.
The most widely used resources are salable properties, which are increasingly becoming commercial. If you do not pay up, your account and your existence can be erased very easily. Open Source movements have a lot of catching up to do if they really care about the preservation of individual freedom. Presently, a luxurious life in the virtual world of Second Life is guaranteed if you are able to pay the company that hosts the server real world money in exchange for virtual currency to buy virtual property. Taking this scenario, how long would it be before I will have to pay by the hour for a conversation with a recently deceased "emulated" scientist or, for that matter, a movie star or a relative?
In conclusion, I would sincerely like to thank Khannea Suntzu for her valuable time and effort in making this joint piece of written work a possibility. We must reconsider all of what has been discussed and what Khannea Suntzu has chosen to disclose of her reasons to exist in our postmodern interpretations of "personhood." We have questioned several beliefs and arguments. I am sure that these introspections would generate valuable information to reconsider our stand on human rights and personhood.