Telepresence versus “Real” Presence
Perhaps my most vivid experience of telepresence occurred when I was typesetting my book
Gödel, Escher, Bach.
This was back in the late 1970’s, when for an author to do any such thing was unheard of, but I had the good fortune of having access to one of the only two computer typesetting systems in the world at that time, both of which, by coincidence, were located at Stanford. The catch was that I was an assistant professor at Indiana University in far-off Bloomington, and I had courses to teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. To make things doubly hard, there was no Internet, so I couldn’t possibly do the typesetting work from Indiana. To typeset my book, I had to be on site at Stanford, but my teaching schedule allowed me to get there only on weekends, and not on all weekends at that. And so each time I flew out to Stanford for a weekend, I would instantly zoom to Ventura Hall, plunk myself down at a terminal in the so-called “Imlac room”, and plunge furiously into the work, which was extremely intense. I once worked forty hours straight before collapsing.
Now what does this all have to do with telepresence? Well, each long, grueling work session at Stanford was quite hypnotic, and when I left, I would still half-feel as if I were there. One time when I had returned to Bloomington, I realized I had made a serious typesetting mistake in one chapter, and so, in panic, I called up my friend Scott Kim, who also had been spending endless hours in the Imlac room, and I was hugely relieved to find him there. Scott was more than happy to sit down at an Imlac terminal and to pull up the right program and the proper file to work on. So we set to work on it, with me talking Scott through the whole long and detailed process, and Scott reading to me what he saw on the screen. Since I had just spent numberless hours right there, I was easily able to see in my mind’s eye everything that Scott relayed to me, and I remember how disoriented I would feel when, every so often, I remembered that my body was still in Bloomington, for I felt for all the world as if I were in Stanford, working directly at the Imlac terminal. And mind you, this powerful
visual
sense of telepresence was taking place solely through the
sonic
modality of a telephone. It was as if my eyes, though in Bloomington, were looking at an Imlac screen in California, thanks to Scott’s eyes and the clarity of his words on the phone.
You can call my feeling an “illusion” if you wish, but before you do so, consider how primitive this now-ancient implementation of telepresence was. Today, one can easily imagine turning up all the technological knobs by orders of magnitude. There could be a mobile robot out in California whose movements were under my instantaneous and precise control (the joystick idea again), and whose multimedia “sensory organs” instantly transmitted whatever they picked up to me in Indiana. As a result, I could be fully immersed in a virtual experience thousands of miles from where my brain was located, and this could go on for any length of time. What would be most confusing would still be the moments of change, when I removed the helmet that made me feel I was in California, thereby finding myself transported two thousand miles eastwards in a fraction of a second — or the reverse, when I would don my helmet and in a flash would sail all the way out to the west coast.
What, in the end, would suggest to me that my presence in Indiana was “realer” than my presence in California? One clue, I suppose, would be the telltale fact that in order to “be” in California, I would always have to don some sort of helmet, whereas in order to “be” in Bloomington, I would need no such device. Another tip-off might be that if I picked up food while meandering about in California, I couldn’t get it into my Indianabased stomach! That little problem, however, could easily be taken care of: just attach an intravenous feeding device to me in Indiana and arrange for it to pump nutrients into my bloodstream whenever I — my robot body, that is — manage to track down some “food” in California (and it need not be actual food, as long as the act of laying my remote robotic hands on it out there activates the intravenous feeding device back home in Indiana).
What one starts to realize, as one explores these disorienting but technologically feasible ideas of virtual presence “elsewhere”, is that as the telepresence technology improves, the “primary” location becomes less and less primary. Indeed, one can imagine a proverbial “brain in the vat” in Bloomington controlling a strolling robot out in California, and totally believing itself to be a physical creature way out west and not believing one word about being a brain in a vat. (Many of these ideas were explored, incidentally, by Dan Dennett in his philosophical fantasy “Where Am I?”)
Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?
I am hesitant to adduce too many science-fiction-like scenarios in order to explain and justify my ideas about soul and consciousness, because doing so might give the impression that my viewpoint is essentially tied to the indiscriminate mentality of an inveterate science-fiction junkie, which I am anything but. Nonetheless, I think such examples are often helpful in getting one to break free of ancient, deeply rooted prejudices. But one hardly needs to talk about head-mounted television cameras, remote-controlled robots, and intravenous feeding devices in order to remind people of how we routinely transport ourselves into virtual worlds. The mere act of reading a novel while relaxing in an armchair by the window in one’s living room is an example
par excellence
of this phenomenon.
When we read a Jane Austen novel, what we look at is just a myriad of black smudges arranged neatly in lines on a set of white rectangles, and yet what we feel we are “seeing” (and should I use the quotation marks or not?) is a mansion in the English countryside, a team of horses pulling a carriage down a country lane, an elegantly clad lady and gentleman sitting side by side in the carriage exchanging pleasantries when they espy a poor old woman emerging from her humble cottage along the roadside… We are so taken in by what we “see” that in some important and serious sense we don’t notice the room we are sitting in, the trees visible through its window, nor even the black smudges speckled all over the white rectangles in our hands (even though, paradoxically, we are depending on those smudges to bring us the visual images I just described). If you don’t believe me, consider what you have just been doing in the last thirty seconds: processing black smudges speckled on white rectangles and yet “seeing” someone reading a Jane Austen novel in an armchair in a living room, and in addition, seeing the mansion, the country road, the carriage, the elegant couple, and the old woman… Black curlicues on a white background, when suitably arranged, transport us in milliseconds to arbitrarily distant, long-gone, or even never-existent venues and epochs.
The point of all of this is to insist on the idea that we
can
be in several places at one time, simultaneously entertaining several points of view at one time. You just did it! You are sitting somewhere reading this book, yet a moment ago you were also in a living-room armchair reading a Jane Austen novel, and you were also simultaneously in a carriage going down a country lane. At least three points of view coexisted simultaneously inside your cranium. Which one of those viewers was “real”? Which one was “really you”? Need these questions be answered? Can they be answered?
Where Am I?
As I was driving a few days ago, I pulled up alongside a jogger waiting at a red light. She was trotting in place, and then the light changed and she crossed the street and disappeared. For a brief moment, I was “in her shoes”. I had never seen her before and probably will never see her again, but I have been there many a time. I had lived that experience in my own way, and even though I know virtually nothing about her, I have shared that experience of hers. To be sure, I was not seeing it through her eyes. But let’s briefly jump once again into the realm of slightly silly technological extravagance.
Suppose everyone wore a tiny TV camera on the bridge of their nose, and that everyone had glasses that could be tuned to receive the signals from any selected TV camera on earth. If there were a way of specifying a person by their GPS coordinates (and that certainly doesn’t seem far-fetched), then all I would have to do is set my glasses to receive the signals from that jogger’s nose-mounted TV camera, and presto! — I would suddenly be seeing the world from her perspective. When I was sitting in my car and the traffic light changed and she took off and disappeared, I could have ridden along and seen just where she was going, could have heard the birds chirping as she jogged through a woodsy lane, and so forth. And at any point I could switch channels and go see the world through the nose-camera of my daughter Monica or my son Danny, or anyone else I wished. So where am I? “Still just where you are!” chirps common sense. But that’s too simplistic, too ambiguous.
What determines “where I am”? If we once again postulate the idea of obtaining nutrition by carrying out certain remote actions, and if we add back the ability to control distant motion by means of a joystick or even by certain brain events, then things really start to shimmer in uncertainty. For surely a mobile robot is not where the radio-connected computer that is controlling it happens to be sitting. A robot might be strolling about on the moon while its computerized guidance system was in some earthbound laboratory. Or a self-driving car like Stanley could be crossing the Nevada desert, and its computer control system might be on board or might be located in a lab in California, connected by radio. But would we even care where the computer was? Why should we care where it is located?
A robot, we feel, is where its
body
is. And so when my brain can switch at will (using the fancy glasses described above) between inhabiting any one of a hundred different bodies — or worse yet, when it can inhabit several bodies at the same time, processing different kinds of input from all of them at once (perhaps visual input from one, sonic from another, tactile from a third) — then
where I am
becomes extremely ill-defined.
Varying Degrees of Being Another
Once again, let’s leave the science-fiction scenarios behind and just think about everyday events. I sit in a plane coming in for a landing and overhear random snippets of conversations around me — remarks about how great the Indianapolis Zoo is, how there’s a new delicatessen at Broad Ripple, and so forth. Each snippet carries me a smidgen into someone else’s world, gives me the tiniest taste of someone else’s viewpoint. I may resonate very little with that viewpoint, but even so, I am entering ever so slightly into that person’s “private” universe, and this incursion, though absolutely trivial for a human being, is far deeper than any canine’s incursion into another canine’s universe ever was.
And if I have untold thousands of hours of conversation with another human being on topics of every imaginable sort, including the most private feelings and the most confidential confessions, then the interpenetration of our worlds becomes so great that our worldviews start to fuse. Just as I could jump to California when talking on the telephone with Scott Kim in the Imlac room, so I can jump inside the other person’s head whenever, through words and tones of voice, they call forth their most fervent hopes or their most agonizing fears.
To varying degrees, we human beings live inside other human beings already, even in a totally nontechnological world. The interpenetration of souls is an inevitable consequence of the power of the representationally universal machines that our brains are. That is the true meaning of the word “empathy”.
I am capable of being other people, even if it is merely an “economy class” version of the act of being, even if it falls quite a bit short of being those people with the full power and depth with which they are themselves. I have the good fortune — at least I usually consider it fortunate, though at times I wonder — of always having the option of falling back and returning to being “just me”, because there is only one primary self housed in my brain. If, however, there were a few high-powered selves in my brain, all competing with each other for primacy, then the meaning of the word “I” would truly be up for grabs.
The Naïve Viewpoint is Usually Good Enough
The image I just conjured up of several selves competing for primacy inside one brain may have struck you as extremely weird, but in fact the experience of internal conflict between several “rival selves” is one that we all know intimately. We know what it is to feel split between wanting to buy that candy bar and wanting to refrain. We know what it is to feel split between driving “just another twenty miles” and pulling off at the next rest stop for a desperately needed nap. We know what it is like to think, “I’ll just read one more paragraph and then go fix dinner” and also to think, “I’ll just finish this chapter first.” Which one of these opposing inner voices is really
me
? In growing up, we learn not to ask or try to answer questions like this. We unthinkingly accept such small internal conflicts as simply part of “the human condition”.
If you simultaneously dip your left hand into a basin of hot water and your right hand into a basin of ice water, leave them both there for a minute, and then plunge them into a lukewarm sink, you will find that your two hands — usually your most reliable scouts and witnesses of the outer world — are now telling you wildly opposite things about the very same sinkful of water. In reaction to this paradox, you will most likely just shrug and smile, thinking to yourself, “What a strong tactile illusion!” You aren’t likely to think to yourself, “This cognitive split inside my brain is the thin edge of the wedge, revealing the illusoriness of the everyday conviction that there is just a single self inside my head.” And the reason nearly everyone would put up great resistance to such a conclusion is that for nearly all purposes, the simple story we tell ourselves is good enough.