Hardihood Books Newsletter 17
October 2022
Greetings,
Welcome to the October edition of the Hardihood Books Newsletter. Thank you for reading and for supporting my work. I hope you have a happy Halloween.
Housekeeping:
In Case You Missed It: In yesterday’s email, I asked readers to answer a Poll Question: Should I email out every post to free and paying subscribers, or should I continue my current practice of posting short stories and essays on the site and emailing you only at the end of the month? If you haven’t already done so, please let me know your response to that question (via email, or by commenting on the site).
Next Month and Beyond:
Nothing to report at the moment.
Monthly Reflection: Virtual Living
Recently, I’ve been thinking more about digital life – or the shallow facsimile of life that we call “digital life.” Perhaps it would be better to say that I’ve been unsuccessfully avoiding thinking about it, but so it goes. I thought I’d preview for subscribers some of the material I’ve been writing about – which will eventually find a form in essays I plan to publish.
I’m perhaps both less enamored with the features of digital life than many people, and less worried about “Big Tech” or various negative trends we hear so much about these days. Mainly because I don’t think “digital life” is nearly as important as real life. Partly, this is a function of my bias towards physicality, and the material world, over anything that happens on a screen. Social media and video games bore me. To some extent, digital life can’t hold my attention because I don’t think it’s real.
Of course, in one sense it is real – you really did craft the social media profile(s) you have, and you really do communicate with other human beings through your screens. But, in another sense, none of it is real. If you turn off your computer and smartphone, the mean Facebook post that upset you disappears. You can’t go out and find it. You can’t touch it. You can’t go to the place where it is. It doesn’t have any physical place, and in that sense, it isn’t really there. If you read an article that upsets you, you can close the tab. Then it’s gone. Sure, it’s still there on the Internet. But where is that? If someone sends you a rude DM on Twitter – well, Twitter isn’t a real place.
Every time I read an article proclaiming that it’s “impossible to be alone anymore,” I wonder whether the author has ever left his or her device at home for a long hike in the woods. Likewise, when I hear that devices with GPS have made it “impossible” to get lost, I think, “Well, only if you bring them with you.” In truth, the internet hasn’t really changed much about the physical world – at least not those parts of it that matter. The sun, the wind, the rain, the snow, the trees, the grass, the dirt, the frost, the leaves, the rocks, the ocean, the sky are all untouched.
Still, I do wonder about troubling trends. Apparently, some members of Generation Z have become so attached to their digital personas that virtual “death” (i.e., deletion of an account) is something to be feared akin to real death. As hard as this is to believe, the phenomenon appears to involve identifying more strongly with one’s digital persona than with one’s physical body (perhaps due to feelings of shyness or physical insecurity or inadequacy). Digital life can be intoxicating for some, and so I can imagine that someone might associate their “self” more closely with their “digital self” than with their physical mind and body (i.e., their actual self).
Perhaps this trend is uncommon. I have a hard time imagining too many people can actually mistake their TikTok account for their life. Back in college, I think I remember hearing about how users of Second Life could suffer from extreme mental and emotional anguish at the thought of the “death” of their avatars.
Some people would have us believe that we’re living in a Simulation. Others tell us that consciousness is a myth. And still others believe there is no such thing, really, as an individual self. I suppose if you believed any of those, you might be less skeptical towards this identifying-as-a-virtual-being trend. After all, if we were living in a simulated reality, we would all be virtual beings already.
Previously, I’ve referenced a book I read this winter, by mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy, called The Great Unknown. At one point, Du Sautoy recounts his experience in an experiment designed to raise questions about the nature of consciousness. He puts his hand into a hole in a wall and, in a trick involving mirrors and an optical illusion, he looks at what he knows to be a fake hand, but which his brain tells him is the one he put into the wall. He is horrified and frightened when he sees a researcher stick a fork into the fake hand, and he flinches.
Notably, if it had been his real hand that had a fork stuck in it, he wouldn’t have had any trouble distinguishing the two. However, he is shocked at how easily his brain is fooled by the optical illusion, and he leaves convinced that this experiment in dissociating identity is raising hard questions about the nature of individual selves. This seems rather unscientific to me, a wild leap to conclusions on the basis of a rather simple and easily-explained experiment, akin to overinterpreting numbers that might better be attributed to instrument imprecision. Besides, as I said, nothing bad happened to his real hand.
Mind tricks aside, real world consequences (such as asking, “Why didn’t my hand hurt?”) are the ultimate reality check. A person may “identify with” his digital avatar. But if the avatar is erased, he will not die. He may feel profound regret or sadness. But he’ll get over it. Because, ultimately, his avatar is not him. And even if he doesn’t get over it, he will still be alive in the real world.1
On the other hand, if a person decides that her digital persona matters so much more than her body that she “no longer identifies as a physical being,” she’ll still be living in the real world no matter how much she wishes she weren’t. If she decided to prove the point by ceasing to eat, sleep, and drink water in the real world, she would die. That her digital persona might go on would be little consolation.
Which brings me back to the Simulation – the least-interesting conspiracy theory (yes, it’s a conspiracy). Not only is the Simulation Hypothesis and unscientific (i.e., unfalsifiable) fantasy, it’s irrelevant. If it’s unfalsifiable, it’s impossible to prove or disprove. But if the hypothesis were proven, nothing would change about our behavior – we would still have to get up, go to work, eat, sleep, etc. And if the hypothesis were disproven (as some would say happens on a daily, or even minute-by-minute, basis), nothing about our lives would change.
To the extent that digital life is real, it is as a construct that is separate from the real world we live in. It is, as it were, less real. Akin to a picture of a photocopy of a painting of a real place. It is therefore, far less relevant than the real world.
Not only does the real world (the material world), matter more than the digital one, one might even go so far as to say that the digital world doesn’t matter at all. Not in the ways that count. None of the functions of life can actually be performed in the metaverse. Not the baser ones. And certainly not the higher ones.
Besides, the metaverse doesn’t even really exist yet.
In Closing:
Thank You and Until Next Month,
Ben Connelly
Naturally, a few readers will ask a question like, “but what if he is so moved by sadness at the loss of his avatar that he ends his own life?” That would be a terrible tragedy. But it actually proves the point. Death is physical. The erasure of the avatar didn’t end his life. His actions did.