I Am a Strange Loop

Now what does this all have to do with telepresence? Well, each long, grueling work session at Stanford was quite hypnotic, and when I left, I would still half-feel as if I were there. One time when I had returned to Bloomington, I realized I had made a serious typesetting mistake in one chapter, and so, in panic, I called up my friend Scott Kim, who also had been spending endless hours in the Imlac room, and I was hugely relieved to find him there. Scott was more than happy to sit down at an Imlac terminal and to pull up the right program and the proper file to work on. So we set to work on it, with me talking Scott through the whole long and detailed process, and Scott reading to me what he saw on the screen. Since I had just spent numberless hours right there, I was easily able to see in my mind’s eye everything that Scott relayed to me, and I remember how disoriented I would feel when, every so often, I remembered that my body was still in Bloomington, for I felt for all the world as if I were in Stanford, working directly at the Imlac terminal. And mind you, this powerful visual sense of telepresence was taking place solely through the sonic modality of a telephone. It was as if my eyes, though in Bloomington, were looking at an Imlac screen in California, thanks to Scott’s eyes and the clarity of his words on the phone.

You can call my feeling an “illusion” if you wish, but before you do so, consider how primitive this now-ancient implementation of telepresence was. Today, one can easily imagine turning up all the technological knobs by orders of magnitude. There could be a mobile robot out in California whose movements were under my instantaneous and precise control (the joystick idea again), and whose multimedia “sensory organs” instantly transmitted whatever they picked up to me in Indiana. As a result, I could be fully immersed in a virtual experience thousands of miles from where my brain was located, and this could go on for any length of time. What would be most confusing would still be the moments of change, when I removed the helmet that made me feel I was in California, thereby finding myself transported two thousand miles eastwards in a fraction of a second — or the reverse, when I would don my helmet and in a flash would sail all the way out to the west coast.

What, in the end, would suggest to me that my presence in Indiana was “realer” than my presence in California? One clue, I suppose, would be the telltale fact that in order to “be” in California, I would always have to don some sort of helmet, whereas in order to “be” in Bloomington, I would need no such device. Another tip-off might be that if I picked up food while meandering about in California, I couldn’t get it into my Indianabased stomach! That little problem, however, could easily be taken care of: just attach an intravenous feeding device to me in Indiana and arrange for it to pump nutrients into my bloodstream whenever I — my robot body, that is — manage to track down some “food” in California (and it need not be actual food, as long as the act of laying my remote robotic hands on it out there activates the intravenous feeding device back home in Indiana).

What one starts to realize, as one explores these disorienting but technologically feasible ideas of virtual presence “elsewhere”, is that as the telepresence technology improves, the “primary” location becomes less and less primary. Indeed, one can imagine a proverbial “brain in the vat” in Bloomington controlling a strolling robot out in California, and totally believing itself to be a physical creature way out west and not believing one word about being a brain in a vat. (Many of these ideas were explored, incidentally, by Dan Dennett in his philosophical fantasy “Where Am I?”)

Which Viewpoint is Really Mine?

I am hesitant to adduce too many science-fiction-like scenarios in order to explain and justify my ideas about soul and consciousness, because doing so might give the impression that my viewpoint is essentially tied to the indiscriminate mentality of an inveterate science-fiction junkie, which I am anything but. Nonetheless, I think such examples are often helpful in getting one to break free of ancient, deeply rooted prejudices. But one hardly needs to talk about head-mounted television cameras, remote-controlled robots, and intravenous feeding devices in order to remind people of how we routinely transport ourselves into virtual worlds. The mere act of reading a novel while relaxing in an armchair by the window in one’s living room is an example par excellence of this phenomenon.