I Am a Strange Loop

If you go to an I-Max movie theater and are riding a wild roller-coaster, where are you? The temptation is to say, “I’m sitting in a movie theater”, but if that’s the case, then why are you so scared? What’s to scare you about a couple of dozen rows of stationary seats, the odor of popcorn, and a thin screen hanging forty or fifty feet away? The answer is obvious: when you watch the movie, the audiovisual input to your brain seems to be coming not from inside the theater but from somewhere else, a place that is far away from the theater and that has nothing to do with it. And it is that input that you can’t help interpreting as telling you where you are. You feel you have been transported to a place where your body is actually not located, and where your brain is not located either, for that matter.

Of course since watching a movie is a very familiar activity, we are not confused by this phenomenon of virtual displacement, and we accept the idea that there is simply a temporary suspension of disbelief, so that we can enter into another world virtually, vicariously, and volatilely. No serious philosophical conundrums seem to be raised by such an experience, and yet to me, this first little crack allows the door of multiple simultaneous locations of the self to open up much more widely.

Now let’s recall the experience of being transported from the ski resort in California’s Sierra Nevada range to the Bloomington kennel via the “doggie cam” and the World Wide Web. Watching the dogs play in their little area, my children and I didn’t in the least feel that we were “in Ollie’s skin”, but let’s tweak the parameters of the situation a little bit. Suppose, for example, that the bandwidth of the visual image were greatly increased. Suppose moreover that the webcam was mounted not in a fixed spot above the fenced-in play area but on Ollie’s head, and that it included a microphone. And lastly, suppose that you had a pair of dedicated goggles (spectacles with earphones) that, whenever you put them on, transmitted this scene to you in very high audiovisual fidelity. As long as you can put them on and then take them off, these teleportation goggles would seem like just a game, but what if they were affixed for several hours to your head and served as your only way of peering out at the world? Don’t you think you would start to feel a little bit as if you were Ollie? What would it matter to you that you were in a faraway California ski resort, if your own eyes and ears were unable to give you any Californian input?

You might object that it’s impossible to feel that you are Ollie if his movements are out of your control. In that case, we can add a joystick that will tend to make Ollie turn left or right, at your discretion (how it does so is not germane here). So now your hand controls Ollie’s movements and you receive audiovisual input solely from the camera attached to Ollie’s head, for several hours nonstop. This scenario is rather bizarre, but I think you can easily see that you will soon start to feel as if you are more in the Indiana kennel, where you are free to move about, than in some Californian ski resort, where you are basically stuck to your seat (because you have your goggles on, hence you can’t see where you’re going, hence you don’t dare venture anywhere). We’ll refer to this sensation of feeling that you are somewhere far from both your body and your brain, thanks to the ultrarapid transmission of data, as “telepresence” (a term invented by Pat Gunkel and popularized by Marvin Minsky around 1980).

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.