Dear Player,
It sounds like you have a lot of people in your life, Player, who think they know you better than you know yourself. I wo n’t go into detail about your deepest self, but I can suggest some ways to consider your choice:
- Fantasy and literature give you an escape from your typical point of view and allow you to look at things from viewpoints entirely different. Choosing a droid as your avatar does n’t mean you’re a robot deep down. Reading a book that tells the story of a female narrator’s perspective does n’t automatically make you a woman ( or a” creep” ) in disguise. The internet’s pioneers hoped that modern spaces would let us study with preconceived identities hidden behind the veil of secrecy and free us from our everyday lives. That’s undoubtedly not the utopia we ended up with ( instead, prediction engines and targeted ads frequently place us in rigid boxes ). However, video games also offer the promise of the masquerade ball, a position where you can don a wardrobe, get a fresh skin, and pretend to be someone else for a while.
- Play- standing and role- playing, of course, can often reveal deeper longings, particularly those the mindful mind has refused to entertain. If playing a female figure makes you feel euphoric all the time, or if you have your own fantasy of being the image in real existence, your companions are mistaken about something deeper going on.
- It’s frequently said that female itself is a “script,” a kind of functionality that is socially reinforced to make people from all parts of the gender spectrum adhere to the accepted norm. Not always as proof that you’re living in the wrong system; rather, choosing a female character might be an acknowledgement of areas of your personality that you feel compelled to suppress in daily life. An “avatar”, in its initial impression, refers to the various forms/genders that a god can get. The figures you pick may be an acknowledgement of your own diversity or an attempt to evil just one of your many incarnations.
I’m a vegetarians, but I’d take laboratory- grown meat. Does that render me a liar? —Chicken Little
I assume your eating is morally or morally motivated, as Marjorie Taylor Greene might put it, as you are not disgusted by the idea of beef being grown “in a cherry tree dish.” Hence the fear of hypocrisy—but I do n’t think that’s the right word, exactly, for what you’re feeling. A liar is someone who claims moral standards that their actions firmly contradicts, and laboratory flesh, if we are to believe the hype, promises to be both humanitarian and green. Like many technological transformations that turn a vice into a natural alternative ( clean energy, NA beer ), it voids the moral calculus and delegates us from the obligation to sacrifice for a better world or a better self. You can have your content cows and feed them, also.
The dishonesty you fear is more simple and insidious. Perhaps the idea of consuming test meat makes you feel bad about it, like allowing yourself to spit abuse on a bot. The technicality of the claim that it’s” not harming anyone” should n’t make you feel uneasy about your motivations and the suggestion that antisocial desires would probably be better repressed. As I’m sure you know, Chicken, it’s possible to force the Frankenmeat thought study into darker place. Do you eat lab- grown individual flesh? Which animal would you prefer to consume: child or adult cell?
If you’re concerned with only the practical consequences of your actions, therefore certain, you’re not betraying any of your ideals. You are betraying a particular aspect of yourself. You may have chosen to become a vegetarian because you liked the idea of being the type of person who would make sacrifices and do tricky things for higher principles, no because you really believed your personal behavior would change the world. Perhaps abstention made the slew of pointless consumer choices feel a little more meaningful. It might have inspired you to do other difficult things for the sake of moral consistency. If you only pay attention to the outcomes of your actions, you’ll end up constantly looking for moral ambiguities that cost the price of your soul. Virtue, even when arbitrary and pointless, has rewards of its own.
I just assume that everything I see or read on a screen is fake until proven to be true now that AI can fake pretty much anything. Is that reasonable or cynical? —Doubting Thomas
I think you’re right to doubt, Thomas. Your namesake, the apostle, refused to believe in the miracle of resurrection until he saw proof with his own eyes. But what kind of hard evidence, if any, can convince us of anything in the Year of Our Lord 2024? Photos lie, machines hallucinate. The social sciences ca n’t replicate their most fundamental experiments. Data analysis, at a certain scale, can be exploited to prove basically anything. It’s easy to feel like something has been lost, that our faith in consensus reality—or any kind of reality—is on the decline.
At the end of the day, Thomas, how much can you really know for certain? Can you provide evidence that the sixth finger in the photo is not a polydactyly? That the princess in the paparazzi photo is not a body double? That the leviathan is not some guy’s bathtub? Can you fathom the 1.76 trillion parameters that produce the chatbot’s answer? Do you understand the origins of the universe or our current location? Can you explain the wonder of time? Can you be certain that everything you have experienced in life is real, real, and not just a computer simulation? Can you prove that you are not just a mind in a vat, hallucinating all of this: the words you are now reading, and the screen on which you are reading them, and the vast and preposterous world that lies beyond—the shadows, and the wind, and the waning light?
Faithfully,
Cloud
