Reclusland

January 21, 2009

- Surveillance, Identity, and Meaning (part 2):
Invasion of the Body Swappers -

(Part one can be found here)

For the second part of my three part series, I had planned on discussing some recent experiments where people’s recognition of their own body or face, which we imagine as key components of our “self”, were shown to be easily distorted or displaced.  Once again, however, Tim Boucher has beaten my to the punch.  No matter, I still want to pursue the topic as it relates to the themes I am exploring here, and a crossing of ideas never really hurts anything anyway.

The first I heard of this was an experiment mentioned on physorg (my best source for all science news):
In the first experiment, the head of a shop dummy was fitted with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of the subjects’ eyes, so that they saw what the dummy “saw.” When the dummy’s camera eyes and a subject’s head were directed downwards, the subject saw the dummy’s body where he/she would normally have seen his/her own.

The illusion of body-swapping was created when the scientist touched the stomach of both with two sticks. The subject could then see that the mannequin’s stomach was being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on his/her own stomach. As a result, the subject developed a powerful sensation that the mannequin’s body was his/her own.  “This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self,” says Henrik Ehrsson, who led the project. “By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies too.”

The strength of the illusion was confirmed by the subjects’ exhibiting stress reactions when a knife was held to the camera wearer’s arm but not when it was held to their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. However, it was not possible to fool the self into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.


This was also soon reported on by the NYTimes, which has this to add:
“The brain is so easily tricked, they say, precisely because it has spent a lifetime in its own body. It builds models of the world instantaneously, based on lived experience and using split-second assumptions — namely, that the eyes are attached to the skull.”

“Similar studies have found that people agree to contribute more to retirement accounts when they are virtually “age-morphed” to look older; and that they will exercise more after inhabiting an avatar that works out and loses weight.

Adding a physical body-swapping element, as the Swedish team did, is likely to amplify such changes. “It has video quality, it looks and feels more realistic than what we can do in virtual environments, so is likely to be much more persuasive,” Dr. Bailenson said in a telephone interview.”

Now, this seems at first to point to a way to experience others as our “self”, that is, to take on others appearances as our own identities.  Tim has done some work on this as well.  The idea appeals to me almost as much as it seems to appeal to Tim, particularly as he describes it.


However, another article from physorg reveals some of my concerns on this topic:
The study reveals that recognition of our own face is not as consistent as we might think. The participants’ ability to recognize their own face changed when they watched the face of another person being touched at the same time as their own face was touched, as though they were looking in a mirror. Specifically, when asked to recognize a picture of their own face, the picture that people chose included features of the other person they had previously seen. This did not happen when the two faces were touched out of synchrony.

Sharing an experience with another person may change the perception we have of our own self, such as the recognition of our own face. “As a result of shared experiences, we tend to perceive other people as being more similar to us, and this applies also to the recognition of our own face. This process may be at the root of constructing a self-identity in a social context,”

If we believe ourselves to be what our sensory input tells us we are experiencing, what happens when we can control that input to such a degree that we can cut ourselves off completely from the actual lived experience of our bodies?  If we can fail to accurately identify our own faces after tricking our brains in such a manner, what happens when our entire sensorial experience becomes interchangeable with someone else’s?

If we can fully experience someone else’s reality, would we have any reason to come back to our own?  Would we slowly begin to lose our ability to function on our own, to recognize and find meaning in our own lives?

What I fear is a world where, instead of reading about celebrities in a magazine and living vicariously through them via the paparazzi, we can actually live vicariously through their broadcast experience.  True reality entertainment, ala Strange Days or Existenz (from all the way back in the 90’s, no less!).

And if we are able to slip out of our reality, how are we ever going to learn from confronting and dealing with our own problems?  Is there a chance that reality might lose all it’s meaning for us altogether?

After all, one way to separate humans from animals is by our highly evolved ability to recognize patterns and attribute meaning to them.  This pattern recognition ability, in conjunction with our memory (and later with writing, which was our first “external hard drive” for the brain) is what allowed us to capture and hold beneficial elements of the world and transmit them on to future generations through the use of culture, ritual, and law.  And in fact, this pattern recognition habit of ours might even be looked at as an extension, or an ephemeralization, of the same workings behind biological evolution, in that these beneficial traits are now passed on and developed at a much faster rate than mere biology could ever handle.

More on this idea of the evolution of pattern recognition can be found from Michael Shermer here:
In my 2000 book How We Believe (Times Books), I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the ancestors of those most successful at finding patterns.

Michael’s article brings up the fact that, as useful as our ability to create meaningful patterns is, sometimes we also get it wrong.  This is called pareidolia, as Rob Bryanton says:
“Where is the dividing line, then, between pareidolia – sensing things that aren’t really there – and the leaps of intuition that allow us to see things that are hidden from view? This is a very blurry line indeed. If any of us can look at a picture of a particular mountain or a particular piece of toast and very clearly see the face of Jesus, does saying “but that’s not Jesus, it’s just some coincidental shapes” make us stop from seeing the face? “


If we’re already so bad at finding accurate meaning in our normal, moment-by-moment time-line existence, what will happen when we explode into a time-space existence, where the information presented to us by reality is no longer restricted to just the area of time-space in which our consciousness happens to exist, via our body?  With such an immensely greater data set from which to pull information, are we more or less likely to continue to find patterns of useful meaning in it?

And how are we to put those meaningful patterns into action, without a contextual grasp of actual reality within which to do so?  “I have no mouth, and I must scream” indeed…

A flood of information and multiple perceptual realities may soon be unleashed upon the world.  Will we be able to swim in it, or will our consciousness be torn apart by the deluge?

More to come (possibly some answers!) in the third and final part of this three-post piece…)

writing —

  1. I think our body is inside our soul. I think its good to do experiments to illustrate that but I don’t think being disoriented is good in and of itself. Its like these hippies with LSD. Its good to open yourself up to altered states and learn but seeing it as an end in itself, IMO is not good.

    What I think, is that, there are two polarities with this. Both are good to master. The one polarity of being really grounded inside your body and being the master of it is good. The other polarity of the connection we have with everything and how our minds are non-local and field like is good too.

    I think mastering the first polarity is called “mind body integration.” Some artists can’t seem to render anyone that doesn’t look like a self portrait. I think that just means they have a certian degree of mind body integration and a healthy ego. Because they are literally able to construct an accurate model of themselves. I think The idea originally behind Yoga was mind body integration. A lot of it has to do with hygiene. When you become more aware of your body you are better able to take care of it.

    I think people need both and I think some need more of one and some need more of the other. For example some people are spacey and tend to dissociate, they are out of touch with their body. In some circles this may be seen as advanced but I don’t think it is. Not if its all you can do is drift away from your body, but never be fully present with it.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 10:29 am


  2. So in other words I share some of your concerns.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 10:32 am


  3. I’ve been one of the spacey ones in my life. But I’ve had the potential of being more physical. For example, I can see what self mastery of both polarities would be like. I think Tim was on the right track on this with his juggling and manual dexterity and “proprioception” stuff. Not that he’s on the wrong track now, but he was working the other polarity then.

    I’ve been reading Alan Watts. Have you heard of him? He is great. He was also an archer in addition to being one of the first western writers that introduced Eastern mysticism to the West.

    He doesn’t think you can get rid of your ego. Neither that you can, nor that it would be a good idea. But once you figure out what it is, it calms you down.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 10:38 am


  4. Anyway, in the 50’s and 60’s he saw the type of stuff coming that the title of your post alludes to, with technology and surveillance.

    The danger is having this one big stupid ego stretching all across the whole planet. Totally wired together and interconnected. So then as the natural resources get used up, this will get smaller and smaller until We all experience the last mouth eating the last bite of food. But by then we will all have plastic replacement parts and won’t need to eat.

    Here is my take on it, Ian. This is what I really think. I think Tim is a shaman. I think he is plumbing the depths of this thing.I think he has the right attitude of being playful and open. I mean that’s the right attitude to learn about things. A very empathic way. But it makes me sick. It makes me want to vomit. The subject matter, that is.

    Maybe its almost like Nietzsche. He entrained himself fully to some aspect of reality and so had all these brilliant insights and then it killed him. He committed fully to something that was unhealthy.

    But all I am saying is, things that make you want to vomit are not good for you. It may be a price you are willing to pay, like a sacrifice. But the picture I have is of a sensitive shaman being able to communicate with some little creature. You know how they do? Like talk to ants and find out what the ants are thinking, what the world looks like from their perspective? What their wants and needs are? So take a sensitive shaman like this and have him try to plumb the depths of an enormous machine intelligence. That’s Tim. Its almost like I wonder how far you have to go to hit something solid that will bounce back? Or is it a bottomless pit? Is it like having empathy for a psychopath? What does the psychopath do with your empathy? What can it do besides use it for its own nefarious ends?

    This is what makes me uneasy.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 11:00 am


  5. Yeah, the body-mind connection is definitely important, I think, and might be better thought of as a polarity type of relationship. And I am a huge fan of Allan Watts!

    As for Tim, I think what he’s doing is hard, and I’m not sure how much is even on an everyday conscious level (course, ‘conscious’ is not really how shamans work anyway). However, I do know a couple of things:

    1) Playfulness is always the best attitude toward something unknown, in that you retain a lot of your power to act, while doing very little to nothing that could be taken as an offense. It is the best way of being respectfully cautious of the unknown.

    2) Before something is completely known (if it’s ever possible to have something be completely known), your relationship to it is still in malleable form. It is difficult to have any control over that malleability, but in a very taosit, wu-wei sense, it may be possible to guide it’s flow. Which is hard, cause we flow through time-space at light speed, remember! :)

    Anyway, that’s my take on it, and is also, I suppose, what I am trying to do here, in a haphazard kind of way. Problems and enemies can become opportunities and friends, if handled in a skillful way. It depends on your polarization when coming into contact with them.

    Comment by Ian — January 22, 2009 @ 11:34 am


  6. See also, Duncan’s comments over at Zac’s site:

    I get the impression that the illusion of ego is still inflating within our culture, and probably still has some course to run, even whilst geo-social circumstances render it more and more unsustainable. All we can do is keep plugging away at trying to persuade others (and ourselves) to give it up.

    That whole post, in fact, is a great read on this very subject.

    Comment by Ian — January 22, 2009 @ 11:37 am


  7. Well, the other aspect, I think is this:

    Robots suck compared to living things. They are really stupid and ugly, compared to the elegance of nature. They are only cool because we made them, because a person made them. The process is cool because you learn a lot, but at the end of the day its crude and primitive and ugly. So, you know how they say “it takes all kinds to make the world go around”? I don’t begrudge people their technology, but its just that if I have to choose what I want to have around, I choose to have more nature. And I can’t because technological society is supplanting nature.

    So I am not impressed. Plus the ego is a delusion. Maybe that is too strong a word. But its based on a misperception.

    So you have a delusion at the root of all this. And its basically, “Aw shucks, it sucks being an aliented little ego in this big scary world, at any moment I could be snuffed out forever. I know! Maybe I could come to dominate everything in nature and get all cybernetic and then I could be all powerful and live forever!”

    So then you get this brutal, crude program. Then at various points along the program, science reproduces things that adepts have been doing for thousands of years, without technology.

    How impressed am I supposed to be? The happiest I can be is that it will cause people to think and open themselves up to new possibilities, but can’t this be done without wrecking everything? And really will any finding or expiriment cause people to drop the program?

    I think its doomed to failure. All it can do is reproduce what people already have but don’t know about. And it probably can’t reproduce it.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 12:08 pm


  8. The only technological thing that really impresses me is green architecture type stuff. And even then the only reason it impresses me is the potential for being able to reverse all the ecological damage we’ve caused. So, really how is that superior to not having a bunch of damage in the first place?

    I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am not a Luddite and I don’t like being absolute about stuff. I also am interested in people bringing about latent abilities and the potential for using technology to do that.

    But the program of dominating everything, like weather patterns, control of all human behavior, cure for every disease and impriosoning yourself in an ego delusion forever is just really repulsive to me and I think without that you wouldn;’t have a lot of the techological stuff. It would take most of the wind out of its sails, IMO.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 12:26 pm


  9. But I will say this Alan Watts says its fun if you look at it as a game, but not if you MUST win. You know the game of controlling your environment.

    Comment by Ted — January 22, 2009 @ 12:41 pm


  10. Yeah, robots suck compared to nature design-wise, but they’re much easier to control. Technology is a decent way to learn that we can control things, but we’re doing a crap job of it.

    The key here is to realize that we’re not, nor have ever been, separate from nature, and that through humans, natures has developed a way to exert conscious control. We’re just a limb of the bioverse, so to speak, and we need to start acting like one.

    But as for as being “doomed to failure”, I don’t think anything is doomed to failure. And I don’t think that technology is something that should be combined with the “ego program” of domination that you’re talking about. Technology is just a technique, a tool. The “ego program” problem is a separate thing, and technology can be used to either support the ego delusion or support escape from the ego delusion.

    On the other hand though, if the ego is only a delusion, how can it be supported? It’s not even there to be escaped from!

    Comment by Ian — January 22, 2009 @ 2:29 pm


  11. I wouldn’t say technology is doomed to failure, I just think being able to control absolutely everything in our environment is doomed to failure.

    Some things excite me about technology and other things depress me. I know Buckminster Fuller excited me when I read him and he was a technophile.

    I guess what depresses me is trying to use technology to control the weather, have total saftey and security and to cure all disease and live forever. Because I just think that impetus behind that is so delusional it can’t help but wreck things.

    I am most excited about elegant types of technology that helps us live in harmony with the Earth and be creative.

    Comment by Ted — January 23, 2009 @ 11:15 am


  12. Me too Ted, me too.

    I recently had a rather hard time hearing a friend explain that just because something seems like a good, helpful idea, it doesn’t matter if it pulls you away from the way things really are. Trying to “solve” all the problems in one area will only mean that a bunch more will crop up. It’s the old many-headed-hydra problem, the only way to stop it is to pull out the root of the problem: the ego.

    Everything’s interconnected, and starting off to solve a problem from an unconnected foundation will only cause more problems. We have to move WITH the world.

    Comment by Ian — January 23, 2009 @ 11:48 am


  13. First off, Existenz is one of only two movies I’ve ever walked out of (the other being Snakes on a Plane – no way had I consumed enough alcohol to survive that mess!) and one of only two movies that made me want to physically hurl (the other being the second Bourne movie, specifically the car-chase as seen from the front row of the theatre ;-D ). (And I even made it through Mama Mia, though I had to close my eyes for much of it :-D )

    My impression from reading McLuhan is that all this has already happened. All technologies are extensions of human faculties, and /by their very existence/ they change the way we experience the world. The existence of tools makes you approach problems with the assumption that tools exist. So it’s possible for technologies to be good or bad by their very existence, whether or not they’re ever used for anything, just by the way they distort our behaviour. So in essence a good technology allows us to see more clearly; a bad technology obscures.

    In this light we must appraise IT. Of what is it an extension? How does it distort perception? McLuhan always comes back to etymology. Personally, then, I suspect all digits are an extension of /fingers/. Stay in touch…

    Of course, McLuhan also says that the moment a medium can be perceived for what it is, it has already been replaced by something else ;-D

    Comment by speedbird — January 28, 2009 @ 4:30 am


  14. Ah, I actually liked Existenz, but then, I got it for a $1.50 from a video store that was shutting down. Much lower expectations. Plus I like the gross bits where people eat their own technology into existence.

    Your McLuhan commentary ties into some thoughts I’ve been having recently about how the mind in general is sort of a lens through which we see things, and how certain flaws or distortions in the lens can cause problems if they’re not accounted for. But the things is, we put those flaws and distortions there in the first place, because they proved helpful at one time or another. Kind of like Ted’s description of how we’re all machines in one big ghost, creating reference points. Or something kind of like these glasses. These flaws and distortions in our mind field are just reference points, which we use to help us do things. It’s only when we forget that they’re self-created that we end up feeling trapped by them.

    As for IT, I think it’s what McLuhan was hoping for: a way to extend all our senses at once, more or less, to put our body in different places. In a way, IT and the internet is already a body swapping kind thing. It allows us to move through time and space instantaneously, and perhaps it’s “massaging” us toward a new gut-level understanding of time and space. Quantum physics finally enters the popular-culture-collective-unconscious.

    One other thing though, is that when McLuhan pointed out that “the moment a medium can be perceived for what it is, it has already been replaced by something else” this instantly gave us the ability to see our mediums in action, because he gave us a way of talking about them that allows for that.

    By him explaining how media work, we can now look for signs of them in action. This either invalidates his statement, or it makes the creation of new media-forms happen faster and faster.

    The question is what’s the next media-form? In my opinion, psi-tech or something along those lines. And if I’m right, or even if I’m not and somebody else is, then it shows that we’re able to predict the next form of media and have moved into a sphere beyond McLuhan.

    Comment by Ian — January 28, 2009 @ 10:50 am


  15. Also, if I’m at all right about the internet being an extension of our bodies, then I predict that smell and taste will soon become the hallmarks of knowing that your in reality, since they’re the only things we haven’t been able to reliable recreate electronically yet.

    Comment by Ian — January 28, 2009 @ 10:53 am


  16. > These flaws and distortions in our mind field are just reference points, which we use to help us do things. It’s only when we forget that they’re self-created that we end up feeling trapped by them.

    Well said…!!

    I always got the feeling that McLuhan was getting at ‘electric speed’ as being something qualitatively different from all its predecessors… but I never understood exactly what.

    Ever noticed how content is /actually called ‘media’/ in IT circles? To watch a movie you download a ‘media player’. Something messed up about that, imho.

    > but then, I got it for a $1.50 from a video store

    Well that’s MM right there ;-D

    Comment by speedbird — January 28, 2009 @ 11:34 am


  17. Well shit. I haven’t read McLuhan in depth, although I did read Medium is The Message in college and (of course) the playboy interview as well as having listened to a couple other lectures I found on slsk.

    But I never noticed him mention “electric speed” so I googled it.

    Check this out:
    “Today it is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development. The entire world, past and present, now reveals itself as a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and with the understanding of causes.”

    Light speed consciousness, electric media as way of seeing change in action… He was onto all this stuff WAY before we got to it here. Check these old comments I wrote on Tim’s site. MM’s saying the exact same thing only years before the internet!

    Comment by Ian — January 28, 2009 @ 2:14 pm


  18. I recommend the collection of essays ‘Understanding Media’.

    McLuhan was indeed writing before the internet, but he /did/ have the worldwide analogue telephone network, and the beginnings of things like Telstar, as reference points. What I mean is, the full impact of digital technology was perhaps less obvious at the time, and I suspect that we’re actually moving into a /post/-McLuhan world. Digitization is inherently a fragmentary medium, surely. What I’m trying to say is, these discussions have been fascinating and I feel like I’m beginning to get a handle on what IT is that still prevents us from seeing clearly forty years on, and it’s something we do to ourselves…

    Comment by speedbird — January 29, 2009 @ 8:29 am


  19. Thanks. I’ll add that to my (already 6 pages long) amazon wishlist. I prefer essay collections to full fledged books on a single topic. Maybe it’s just what the internet has done to my attention span, but essays are more fun to read.

    Yeah, I think I understand what you’re getting at about digital fragmentation. In moving beyond that, I think what we’re hoping for is an analog world, but one that offers us the same control that the digital world did. Hence the “ubiquitous computing” idea, something that reaches everywhere, no boundaries.

    But can we do that?

    Comment by Ian — January 29, 2009 @ 12:09 pm



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