A couple of things sort of bouncing off of each other in my head. _I Am A Strange Loop_. Alan Turing. Virtual friends. ELIZA.
Anybody know Douglas Hofstadter? (Anybody even reading this?) My brother got me his most recent book, _I Am A Strange Loop_. I never actually ever finished reading, "Godel, Escher, Bach," so I kinda feel like I'm cheating by skipping ahead to read his second book. But the book has me thinking about what it means to be a thinking being. Consciousness. All that kinda trippy jazz, complete with color photos of video feedback loops. And not too long ago, I had also finished reading a biography of Alan Turing. And then there's all this business about the SG Heathers with their strict rules about the necessity of virtual friendship. So, virtual social networking.
Oh, and if all of this doesn't get me nominated as the Xah Lee of SG, I don't what will. Of course, I should probably be writing this on a group forum to increase its visibility, but, like... whatever.
Anyway, I have, at times, considered it to be something of a cruel joke to play on people that they are such social animals that they literally can not remain sane without social interaction. If people are kept in solitary confinement for too long, for example, it is bad for their mental health. So this recent blather about virtual friends kinda had me wondering about the effect of someone who had been locked into solitary confinement with only a computer terminal for "social" interaction. I wonder how that would effect the mental health of someone so confined. And this is also where I started wondering about the Turing Test, which is were the Alan Turing bit comes into play. Would the ability of someone to be able to determine whether or not she or he was communicating with an actual real person deteriorate if they had been forced to only interact with people electronically for a long period of time? I'm not sure how much we've advanced since the likes of ELIZA with programs for simulating natural language usage. I think I know that Cyc is supposed to be good enough that when asked, for example, a question about anthrax, to know that it needs to differentiate between the band and the disease. (But I have absolutely no idea where I read that.)
What is it about the human brain that needs some kind of social interaction? Is there some kind of physical communicative aspect to this? Probably. At least, I've heard an episode (don't think that's the right term) of "This American Life" where they talked about psychiatrists actually doing experiments in the 50s to try and give experimental evidence for the developmental need for physical interaction. Some really fucked up stuff, too. Taking baby monkeys and removing them from their real mothers. They would do things like substitute the real mother with various fake mothers, dolls and such. Some of the baby monkeys would be giving "bad mothers", they would shock the babies occasionally. Even with the "bad mothers", the baby would still try to physically attach themselves, even though these were fakes and even in the face of negative reinforcement.
Where was I going with that? Oh, yeah. So, I wonder if having only some kind of a virtual connection to another human would suffice as a substitute for "face to face" communication. And would someone be able to fool themselves into thinking they were getting some kind of human interaction with a program like ELIZA. There is a powerful scene in "I Am Legend", ... oh, and don't keep reading if you've not seen the movie (all of you reading my nascent blog entries with rapt attention)
What is it with this need to be part of a social network? I think that if I had even a thimble full of the talent of someone like Ray Bradbury, I would be able to turn this into an interesting short story. But I don't and so I'm wasting the sleeping hours tapping away right here. But that scene in _I Am Legend_, I would try and put a character into such a desperate place, and then somehow put him in front of a computer. It would somehow be connected to something inspired by all of the social networking sites that are so popular with the unzotted youth of today. (Shout out to all my sXe homies.) There would be lots of old threads and pictures and whatnot but there would also be something that would respond. And our protagonist would find himself in a Turing test (pause for dramatic affect) for his very soul.
Or something like that. But, again, I don't have the talent of a Ray Bradbury, so... And to get back into the Hofstadter business at the beginning of this blog (I hate that word), it would be interesting if somehow the protagonist where someone corresponding with a program of his own invention, only he'd lost the ability to recognize this because of his desperate situation. Would that be a strange loop? I think it probably would.
*sigh* See, and none of this crap is anything about which I would have any qualms having one of my little cousins finding online. (As my fans will recognize from other postings, it was feeling a bit weird about running into one of my much younger cousins on Facebook which had me spending more time online SG). Cock. Pussy. Anal sex. There. Now its dirty.