The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  So the Internet can become addictive and it can also be dangerous, especially in the case of immersive gaming where individuals can play for hours in fantasy worlds. In 2010, South Korea had a greater proportion of its population online than any other nation (81 per cent of forty-six million). Most Koreans spend their online time in internet cafés that provide fast but cheap connections. This can have devastating consequences. Many of them develop serious medical conditions related to hours of online activity at the cost of offline inactivity. Their joints swell up. They develop muscular pain. Sometimes it’s others that get hurt. In the same year, a South Korean couple who met online married in real life, but unfortunately had a sickly premature baby.38 But then they decided to continue their lives online in the café across the road in a game where they raised a virtual baby. They only returned to the house once a day to feed their own real baby. This lack of care meant that their own child eventually died of severe dehydration and malnutrition. Undoubtedly, this is an extreme case and many children raised in poverty are neglected but it highlights the compulsion of the Web. I recently hosted a highly educated academic family visiting from the United States and after the initial social conversation and exchange of anecdotes over dinner; we soon dispersed to check our email, Facebook and other online lives. It was not only the adults in the group, but the children as well. At one point, I looked up from my laptop and saw everyone else in the room silently immersed in their own Web. Whereas we once used to compartmentalize our lives into the working day and time with the family, the Web has destroyed those boundaries forever. Most of us are connected and we like it that way. Just like drug addiction, many of us get withdrawal symptoms of anxiety and irritability when we are denied our Web access.

  We have become shaped and controlled by our technology in a way predicted by Marshall McLuhan when he introduced phrases such as the ‘global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’.39 Even in the 1960s, before the invention of the Web, McLuhan predicted that society would change to become dependent and shaped by our communications technology. He understood that we extend our self out to others and in doing so, become influenced by their reciprocal extensions. To this extent we are intricately inter-related to each other through the mediums by which we communicate. Likewise, Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist, has also described this shift from face-to-face interaction to terminal-to-terminal interaction in her recent book, Alone Together.40 As we spend more time online, we are necessarily less offline, which means that we will cease to live the same lives shaped by our immediate others. Rather, who we are will increasingly become shaped by the mediums in which we exist. Some people find this scary. For many it is liberating.

  We All Want a Second Life

  What do you do if you are unemployed, overweight and living off benefits with no prospect of escaping the poverty trap? Since 2003, there has been another world you can live in – a world where you can get a second chance. This is Second Life, a virtual online world where you reinvent your self and live a life among other avatars who never grow old, have perfect bodies, never get ill, have fabulous homes and lead interesting lives.

  David Pollard and Amy Taylor are two individuals who separately wanted to escape the dreariness of their mundane lives.41 Both of them lived in Newquay, a seaside resort in southwest England that has become a Mecca for drunken teenagers who come in their hordes to party away the summer. The town is far from idyllic and I would imagine living there, without a job and prospects, must be depressing. To escape the drudgery, David and Amy (who initially met in an online chatroom) joined Second Life where they became ‘Dave Barmy’ and ‘Laura Skye’ (see Figure 11). Dave Barmy was in his mid-twenties, six foot four, slim, with long dark hair, and was a nightclub owner who lived in a sprawling villa. He had a penchant for smart suits and bling. In reality, David Pollard was forty, overweight at 160 kg, balding and living off incapacity benefits in a bedsit. He wore T-shirts and tracksuit bottoms.

  Figure 11: Dave Barmy and Laura Skye

  Laura Skye was an equally exotic character. She was also in her mid-twenties, a slim six foot with long, dark hair, living in a large house. She liked the country and western look of tight denim blouses and boots. In reality, Amy Pollard was an overweight, five-foot-four redhead who was also living off benefits. The contrast between reality and fiction could hardly have been greater (see Figure 12).

  When the couple met online as Dave Barmy and Laura Skye, they fell in love and married in Second Life. But they also met up in real life with Amy moving in with David in Newquay. After two years, they married for real – just like the Korean couple. However, as in real life, that’s when things started to go wrong. Laura (Amy) suspected Dave was playing around in Second Life so she hired a virtual detective to check up on her virtual husband. At one point, she discovered Dave Barmy having sex with a call girl in the game. In real life, David apologized and begged for forgiveness. The final straw came when Amy caught her real husband in front of the computer in their small flat watching his avatar cuddling affectionately on a couch with another Second Life character, Modesty McDonnell – the creation of Linda Brinkley, a fifty-five-year-old twice-divorcee from Arkansas, USA. Amy was devastated. She filed for divorce on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour even though Dave had not actually had sex or an affair in real life. Soon after, Dave proposed to Modesty online and in real life even though the couple had never met.

  Figure 12: The real Dave Barmy and Laura Skye

  When the world discovered that a couple was divorcing on the grounds of make-believe unreasonable behaviour, the press flocked to Newquay. However, in what can only be described as reality imitating art, imitating reality, the Cornish couple initially declined to give interviews and would not answer the door. Then something very odd happened. Two enterprising journalists from the South West News hit on the bright idea of going into Second Life to secure an interview. From their offices miles away in Bristol, Jo Pickering and Paul Adcock created virtual ace reporters ‘Meggy Paulse’ and ‘Jashly Gothley’ to seek out Dave Barmy and Laura Skye for an interview.

  Jo still works on South West News and she told me that she had the idea after speaking to a colleague who had been using avatars to attend online courses. As Meggy Paulse, Jo found Laura Skye in Second Life. She told me that the online Laura Skye was much more approachable and confident than the real life Amy. Eventually Meggy Paulse persuaded Amy to logoff and go downstairs and open the door to speak to the reporters camped on her doorstep. They eventually got their story.

  Jo explained that Amy had felt that the betrayal online was far worse than betrayal in real life, because both she and David had created these perfect selves and still that was not good enough. In real life, we are all flawed and often put up with each other’s weaknesses, but in Second Life there were supposed to be no weaknesses. That’s why the online betrayal hurt. As Jo says, ‘She had created this perfect version of herself – and even that wasn’t good enough for him.’

  I asked Jo about what ever happened to the couple. Apparently Dave did eventually meet up with Linda Brinkley, but reality must have kicked in when it came to having a real marriage when you are both poor and live on different continents. When online Dave Barmy met online Modesty McDonnell for real, David Pollard and Linda Brinkley got real. What this morality tale tells us is that the boundaries between reality and fantasy can sometimes become blurred. Paul Bloom, tells of a research assistant who was asked by her professor to do some research on these virtual communities.42 Apparently, the young woman never came back. Like some electronic cult, she preferred life in a virtual world compared to the real one. If the urge to live a life online is so compelling, it does make you wonder what the future holds. Surely something has to give, as one cannot be in two places at the same time even between virtual and real worlds. Both require the limited resource of time and that is something that cannot be easily divided.

  When Online Behaviour is Off

  Some individuals in power seek out s
exual gratification by engaging in risky encounters. They step over the boundaries of decent behaviour. The Web has made this type of transgression all too easy. With what must be the most unfortunate of surnames, Republican Congressman Anthony Weiner found himself at the centre of a career-destroying scandal in 2011 when he was forced to resign after confessing to sending pictures of his penis to women whom he followed on Twitter.43 ‘Weinergate’, as it became known, was just another example of high-profile men using the Web to send naked images of themselves to women. In the past, men exposed themselves for sexual gratification in public places but, with the advent of social networking sites, offline flashing has moved online and is much more common.

  Indeed, some argue that one of the main uses of the Internet is for sex. A 2008 survey of more than 1,280 teenagers (13–20 years) and young adults (20–26 years) revealed that one in five teenagers and one in three young adults had sent nude or semi-nude photographs of themselves over the internet.44 One online dating site, Friendfinder.com, estimates that nearly half of its subscribers are married. Either they are looking for new partners or the opportunity to flirt.45 Probably one of the most remarkable cases was US Army Colonel Kassem Saleh, who had simultaneously wooed over fifty women online and made marriage proposals to many of them despite the fact that he was already married.

  ‘Sexting’ is a relatively new phenomenon in which individuals use technology to engage in sexual activities at a distance. Susan Lipkins, a psychologist from Port Washington, New York, reports that in her online survey of thirteen to seventy-two-year-olds, two-thirds of the sample had sent sexually explicit messages. The peak activity was in the late teenagers and young adults. What was interesting was that this behaviour was associated with personality measures of power such as assertiveness, dominance and aggression in those over the age of twenty-seven. Power was not a factor in the younger group but was significantly related to sexting in the older men.46 The ease and speed of the Web, as well as the perceived dissociation and distance from reality, lead to an escalation of brazen activity. This can easily slide into moral indiscretions that are unregulated by social norms compared to real life. Just like bullying, the apparent anonymity, distance and remoteness of being online allows us to not be our self as we would behave in the real world.

  The Cyber Rape by Mr Bungle the Clown

  When it comes to the boundaries between reality and fantasy and between moral and immoral acts, probably the most poignant tale that reveals the blurring in these situations is the story of Mr Bungle the Clown. Mr Bungle was a cyber character who inhabited the virtual world of LamdaMOO – one of the first online communities back in the early 1990s where multiple players create and control virtual characters. Mr Bungle was a particularly nasty piece of work. In one notorious event one evening in a virtual room in a virtual mansion, he violated members of his fellow online community using software subroutines (sections of code designed for a particular task in computer programming) to make the other characters perform perverted sexual acts.47

  Of course, this terrifying vision of Mr Bungle was all in the users’ mind. He didn’t really exist. If you logged on to LamdaMOO back in these early days of virtual communities, you simply accessed a database stored somewhere inside a Xerox Corporation research computer in Silicon Valley that presented the user with scrolling lines of description. The environment, objects and all the characters were just subroutines of text – fairly basic stuff compared to the rich visual environments that are expected in today’s technologically advanced online communities. LamdaMOO was nothing compared to the graphical 3D visual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft, but then human imagination doesn’t require very much to generate a vivid impression.

  Mr Bungle was the disturbed creation of a young hacker logging on from New York University who had managed to hack the system’s software to produce a subroutine that presented other users with unsolicited text. During the event in question, several female users were online when they were presented with text describing how their characters inserted various utensils and derived sexual pleasure as Mr Bungle watched, laughing sadistically. Again it was all in the mind as the whole attack was played out as a series of scrolling text.

  Afterwards, one female user from Seattle whose character, called ‘Legba’, had been virtually abused, publicly posted her assault on the LambdaMOO’s community chatboard and called for Mr Bungle’s castration. Months later she told the reporter who had first covered the story that as she wrote those words, ‘post-traumatic tears were streaming down her face’. Clearly this was no longer a virtual incident in her mind – as a victim she had taken it to heart. The assault had crossed the boundary of imagination to affect the real-life emotions of those concerned.

  They say words can never harm you but for the self illusion, words from other people can be everything. The case of Mr Bungle raises so many interesting issues about identity, the self and the way these operate in online communities. Everything that happened, the characters, the assault, the reaction and the eventual retribution were nothing more than words, the frenetic typing of cyber geeks on their keyboards. But why the outrage? Why did people feel emotionally upset? No physical contact had ever taken place. Clearly the players were not deluded into believing that a real assault had happened, but psychologically the users felt violated. In the minds of the players it had gone beyond role-playing. Their indignation was real. Ostracism and the pain of social rejection can be so easily triggered by simple computer simulations of communities that are a sufficient substitute for reality. That’s because they stimulate our deep-seated need for social interaction.

  So where is the real self in these different examples of online communities and virtual worlds? Most of us believe that we are not hypocrites or duplicitous. We like to think we have integrity. If the self is a coherent, integrated entity then one would predict that the way we behave online should accurately mirror the way we behave offline. However, that does not appear to be the case. How people behave depends on the context in which they find themselves. The Web is no different. The way you behave online would never be acceptable offline and vice versa. Online you have to be open, engaging and willing to share but then you are more likely to tell others what you think of them, flirt and generally act in a way that would get you into trouble in real life.

  Sometimes we surprise our self in the way we behave online as if we have become a different person. Maybe this is why online life is so popular. We get to be a different self. We get to be someone else – maybe someone we aspire to be. At the very least we get to interact with others who are missing in our daily lives. This need for an online identity that seems so different to our offline self perplexes pre-Web adults, but we need to understand how this need for technological escapism has become integrated into the human psychological development. This is because the Web will eventually swallow up everyone on the planet so it is important to consider how it may influence and change the next generation. We are not likely to become like the Borg, but we do seem to shift effortlessly between our online and offline selves. Consequently, the Web dramatically reveals the extent to which the notion of a core self is an illusion.

  9

  Why You Can’t See Your Self in Reflection

  When I was a graduate student working on visual development in very young babies some 20 years ago, I studied how they move their eyes. Babies don’t speak, but their eyes are windows into their brain. Where they look and for how long, reveals what their brain is paying attention to. Where is the self in this decision? If you think about it, for the most part, we do this unconsciously. But who is moving our eyes? Who decides? Does a newborn have a self in control? Working with newborn babies, sometimes only minutes old, I never really asked this sort of question. I was more concerned what newborn babies looked at.

  It seemed obvious to me that babies look at things that they can see most clearly and that this is determined by what is out there in the world to look at. As far as I was concerned, it see
med unlikely that they had models of the world already encoded in their brains that predicted where they would look next. Rather, at the very beginning, everything must be driven by what existed already in the environment to be seen. It is the properties of the external word that compete for the attention of the eye movement systems in the baby's brain. There was no need for a self in control. Newborns don’t really make decisions about where to look. Rather, the brain mechanisms they are born with have evolved to seek out information from the external world and then keep a record of those experiences. It was this early insight into the mind of an infant that opened my eyes to the self illusion.

  As the brain develops, it builds up more complex models of the world–expectations about where and what should happen. We develop an increasing flexibility to apply those models to understand and make predictions. Twenty years ago, I appreciated that development was the integration of internal mechanisms working in conjunction with information in the world. That fundamental principle works all the way up the nervous system from simple eye movements to the full repertoire of human thoughts and behaviours – the same activities that give rise to the self. This is why the self is an illusion. It did not suddenly manifest one day inside our head on our second or third birthday. It has been slowly emerging – sculpted out of the richness of human activity and interaction. Our self is a product of our mind, which in turn is a product of our brain working in conjunction with other brains. As the brain develops, so does the self. As the brain deteriorates, then so must the self.

  Why did we evolve the self illusion? Like every other illusion our brain generates, it serves a useful purpose. If you think about the “I” and the “me” that we usually refer to as the self, it provides a focal point to hang experiences together both in the immediate here and now, as well as to join those events over a lifetime. Experiences are fragmented episodes unless they are woven together in a meaningful narrative. This is why the self pulls it all together. Without a focus, the massive parallel processing in our brain means that we would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of computations if we ever had to deal with them individually, Rather, we get a summarized headline that relates all the outputs from these unconscious processes. Sometimes we can delve into the details of the story a little more closely if we scrutinize the content, but very often much of it is hidden from us.