Once we take virtuality seriously as a way of life, we need a new language for talking about the simplest things. Each individual must ask: What is the nature of my relationships? What are the limits of my responsibilities? And even more basic: Who and what am I? What kind of society or societies are we creating, both on and off the screen?
If “acting out” is going to happen, MUDs are relatively safe places, since virtual promiscuity never causes pregnancy or disease. But it is also true that, taken by themselves, virtual communities will only sometimes facilitate psychological growth.
In my interviews with people about the possibility of computer psychotherapy, a ventilation model of psychotherapy came up often as a reason why computers could be therapists … MUDs may provide a place for people to talk freely – and with other people rather than with a machine – but they also illustrate that therapy has to be more than a safe place to “ventilate.”
The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self-fashion and self-create … Is this a shallow game, a giant waste of time? Is it an expression of an identity crisis of the sort we traditionally associate with adolescence? Or are we watching the slow emergence of a new, more multiple style of thinking about the mind?
We are trying (as Marshall McLuhan said) to retribalize. And the computer is playing a central role … These shifts raise many questions. What will computer-mediated communication do to our commitment to other people? Will it satisfy our needs for connection and social participation, or will it further undermine fragile relationships? What kind of responsibility and accountability will we assume for our virtual actions?
Romantic machines may have the effect that critics feared from the “classical,” rational ones … When connectionist neuroscience begins to revise the boundaries between brains, machines, and minds, it is harder to argue for the specificity of the human mind.
For the foreseeable future, emergent machine intelligence will exist in only the most limited form. But even now, it is providing a rich store of images and metaphors for the broader culture … The language of neurons, holism, connections, associations, agents, and actors makes it easier for people to consider themselves as that kind of machine.
The unconscious has its own, structured language that can be deciphered and analyzed. Logic has an affective side, and affect has logic. Perhaps the models of human mind that grow from emergent AI [Artificial Intelligence] might come to support a more integrated view. The interest of psychoanalysts in these models suggests some hope that they might, but there is reason to fear that they will not … Information processing left affect dissociated; emergent AI may try to integrate it but leave it diminished.
There is a tendency to anthropomorphize a single agent on whose intelligence the users of the program will come to depend. It is this superagent that is often analogized to a butler or personal assistant.
Emergent AI falls into line with postmodern thought and a general turn to “softer” epistemologies that emphasize contextual methodologies … Its constituent agents offer a theory for the felt experience of multiple inner voices. Although our culture has traditionally presented consistency and coherence as natural, feelings of fragmentation abound, now more than ever. Indeed, it has been argued that these feelings of fragmentation characterize postmodern life. Theories that speak to the experience of a divided self have power.