Art Caged by Life

This fascinating article, “Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters”, is a discussion of ways in which people who have become residents of “Second Life” have slavishly imitated the consumerism and personal vanities of real life (“RL” to the initiated) rather than creating a truly brave new world. The emphasis of the article is on the mass craving for conspicuous consumption, and for spending money on things which are necessary in RL but completely unnecessary in Second Life (“SL”). It's a good study in human nature.

In short, most people are as depressing and unimaginative in SL as in RL because they’ve ignored an opportunity to break the bonds of social customs and pressures, not to mention gravity. It’s like what a spiritualist said to me about people’s spirits in the afterlife: “If they’ve been nasty here, they’re not suddenly going to become nice on the Other Side.” I hope that if we do design our own Heavens I don't keep running into other people's malls and wig shops as I do in SL.

The first thing that struck me along that line, when I’d been in SL only a few days, was the fact that much SL architecture imitates RL architecture even though the laws of SL physics provide much more freedom than those of RL.

THIS COULD BE NEW JERSEY

Things will stay where they are placed, whether above, on, or under the surface of the SL earth. SL structures, therefore, do not need the supporting, load-bearing elements used in the real world. . . and yet most SL structures are redundantly burdened with all the foundations, pilings, columns, and braces which have challenged RL architects for centuries.


THESE WOULD HAVE DONE JUST FINE WITHOUT THE PILINGS

Likewise, a door or other object in SL can be made “phantom”, meaning that one can simply walk through it like a ghost, and yet all the paraphernalia of house doors that have to be opened and closed are encountered throughout SL. True, a phantom door can’t be locked, but most people don’t lock doors in SL anyway. Stairs are generally unnecessary in SL because one can simply float up, and yet stairways abound in SL even though they are often difficult to negotiate.


THIS ONE IS MORE ADAPTED TO ITS ENVIRONMENT, BUT STILL STUCK WITH SUPERFLUOUS SUPPORTS

Everyone can fly, soar, and hover in SL, and yet helicopters and other aircraft are not uncommon. The climate is (as far as I know) pleasant short-sleeve weather all the time, with never a drop of rain and no insects, and yet windows are covered with “glass”, and some of the clothing would make an Eskimo keel over onto the Arctic ice from heat prostration.

It’s hard to say whether people who enter SL and want things done in exactly the same way they are done in RL are simply victims of habit, and inability to think outside the box, or whether the socially conditioned worry about seeming “different” keeps them in bondage in both worlds.

When I told my neighbor in SL – who has created a lush, lavish South Seas paradise on the slopes leading up from the sea, complete with lava-bubbling volcano – my criticisms of obeying RL physics when designing SL buildings, he disagreed with me. I said I felt the way Frank Lloyd Wright had felt about the use of Greco-Roman columns which held nothing up. My neighbor said he didn’t feel comfortable unless a structure looked as it would look in RL. The hotel he built could be a Florida Ramada Inn. A residence which mostly hovered beyond the edge of a cliff would drive him crazy, even though the view would be superb and the design would be free of unsightly pilings and struts. He has an imaginative tropical bar built around the steep peak of a mountain, but all the braces are there “to hold it up”.

The bird, freed from its cage, refuses to fly.

Creation

When the Source first stirred the primordial soup, and Is folded back on itself to know itself – and there were two points where there had been a single point, creating space, and then the expanding, evolving plenitude of visions – it must have felt as I do in 'Second Life' when I stretch out my arm and materialize a sphere, make it rise into the air and float, expand it, turn it into stone and place it on a wall I’ve made.


Creation growing from imagination seems to me the most godlike activity of humans. The author who fantasizes people and places which he later holds in his hand as his book, a woman painting colors on canvas to portray her night’s dream, Mozart pouring out as sound the product of his genius, an architect seeing his incorporeal images move from mind to lines on paper to a breathtaking gleaming building, a computer programmer watching his fancied world coming into colorful being on a screen . . . those are people echoing the nature of God.

A person who follows a recipe to make a cake, or a carpenter who obeys a construction plan build a shed, are somewhat removed from that godlike activity but are nevertheless creating, while the person who merely amasses money, or whose ego feeds on humiliating or tormenting others, is far removed from the divinity of creation.

What about human imagination which does not go beyond an individual’s subjective experience – for example the self-proclaimed writer who always has a novel in progress but never writes anything? I’m sure there’s going to be disagreement about this, but I think that merely dreaming without more is not the equivalent of bringing a dream into some tangible form. We creatures and our surroundings may exist only in God’s dream, but for us the dream is obviously a reality, as much as the Taj Mahal is a reality which rose from an architect’s dream.


There are probably no humans more often accused of “wasting time” than those with imaginations reflective of God’s who are in the process of creation. It is difficult for some parents and teachers to realize that staring out the window at rain, or going for long aimless walks, are essential parts of creating the Taj Mahal or the Ring of the Nibelungen or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.


My time spent creating and transforming objects in a computer world, and making more and more elaborate forms and structures from them, is undoubtedly a complete waste of time by some standards, but to me it is a thrill, an elation, because I feel in my experience the echo of God’s unbounded creativity. Yes, from an objective point of view it is a step below bringing a poem or a painting into the real life human world, but as a personal experience it is gratifying and exciting to see the fruits of my imagination grow in a visible computer world.

It occurs to me that there is one way in which my Second Life creation might satisfy the clods who always want practical results. Some presumably enlightened people tell us that we create our own heaven, that what we experience in an afterlife beyond this plane is fashioned entirely by our own desires and imaginings from a vast reservoir of possibilities. If so, then ‘Second Life’, with all its possibilities for realizing fantasies, is an excellent training ground for our creation of our next life. What could be more frightening to most of us than to bear the sole responsibility for deciding what we want to be and to experience? What a multitude of questions flood our thoughts when we accept that we are personally responsible for designing our future life! A little orientation and practice in ‘Second Life’ can’t hurt.

Reading and Writing and . . . Uh, What Was That?

Harking back to my posts of August 11 and 15, which were about mathematics, I want to express some thoughts about math and me, and the teaching of math in general.

Pardon me for saying so, but I was an exceptionally intelligent child, and yet almost from the beginning I became apprehensive when numbers were mentioned in a classroom. If the chalk squeaked on the blackboard and words appeared, I perked up, but if the chalk formed numbers, I cringed. I might be able to explain that better if I could remember the very first experiences, but I can’t.

Try as my arithmetic teachers might to make numbers interesting, I was a lost cause. One problem was that I’ve always needed to understand the foundation, the most basic principles, of anything I set out to learn. While a teacher was setting us to memorize multiplication tables, I was still asking questions like, “What is a number?” I didn’t really know how to formulate the questions, but I felt that I was being thrown into the middle of a chaotic mystery rather than starting to build from the electrons, protons, atoms, and molecules.

Whether not the need to begin with basic principles is a defect in my thinking I don’t know, but it’s there, and very insistent. . . and in my first twelve years of school, very inconvenient. I suspect that it was related to my dislike of hypothetical practical applications.

One way the schoolbooks of the 1940’s and 50’s tried to interest students in math was to pose “problems” in everyday practical terms. “If a farmer has twelve bushels of wheat. . .” “If train A leaves station A at 11:12 a.m. and travels at 60 miles an hour, and if train B. . .” “You have $12.10 in your pocket, and you . . .” Even at this moment I can feel my stomach shrink as I write those words. Why is that?

Oddly enough, I begged to have number manipulation taught to me in abstract terms, for the numbers’ own sake so to speak, and for the interest that resulted in wondering what would happen if this or that mathematical operation were applied. I literally pleaded for abstraction, but my feeling was that the teacher didn’t comprehend what I was talking about and didn’t know how to answer me. The result was that I took almost no mathematics courses.

Leaving my attitude aside, it makes sense that most children will be more interested in something they can use than in something they’re just required to memorize and parrot back, but practical applications arising from a farmer’s truckload of produce or a train schedule were not things we needed to know then. What I have learned in suffering from my ignorance of math in “Second Life” (“SL”) today is that the motivation to learn about numbers (if an exciting abstract approach isn’t taken) comes from a present desire to do something which one really wants to do out of personal enthusiasm, and cannot do without knowledge of mathematics.

To take a simple example which reveals my abysmal ignorance: The basic size of a parcel of land in SL is 512 square meters. If the parcel of land is square, how long will the boundary lines be in meters? I have no idea, but I need to know, now, because I’m looking into buying a piece of land today. How do I even estimate the boundary lines of a rectangular piece of land of 3320 sq. meters? It’s not an activity that sounds fun, but it is necessary in light of my enthusiasm.

And if I want to put a roof on an SL house whose frontal width is 9.3 meters, using two pieces of roof which will rest on the existing house sides and meet in the center, how long and wide should those roof sections be? Even I soon recognized that it depends in part on the angle of the roof, which gave rise to many interesting abstract questions in addition to the practical ones.

See what I mean? As far as practical applications are concerned, a present need to know, based on personal enthusiasm for accomplishing something now, seems to me the key to motivation in learning math.

A Second Life in More Ways than One

The online world Second Life is so named because its residents can lead a second life alongside their real one. Thus you can have two (or more) homes, and two wives or husbands, without going broke or to jail for bigamy. And in that second world everybody is young and all the women and all the homes are pretty – or as pretty as their creators can make them.

I now have a different meaning for “second life”. In learning how to create objects and to build things in the game, I am being given a second chance in life. I am now devouring mathematical formulae as if they were chocolate cake, and for the first time I’m experiencing the joys of geometry.

I hated dealing with numbers from the time they were first forced on me by a schoolteacher. I was a reader, a person whose aptitudes ran to the arts and philosophy, and my brain reacted to numbers as if they were poison. I devised ingenuous ways of avoiding required classes in mathematics and of getting through the courses I was forced to take without impeding my advancement to the next grade. I’ve never cheated, but strange things are possible. For example, I was totally lost during my one semester of high school algebra, and flunked the mid-term exam. My friend Everett Yon, who was bound for West Point and never made less than an “A” in mathematics, spend the better part of a day before the algebra final exam with me, drilling me on all the things I had totally ignored throughout the semester. Suddenly it made sense, and I actually scored an “A” on my final. . . after which all recollection of algebra faded away within a few weeks. Years later, after I had taken an IQ test I realized that I had invented, improvised, a kind of algebra to answer some of the questions – and I’m sure that Everett’s forgotten teachings played a role. I cannot take full credit for having invented algebra.

So, I approached creation of objects in Second Life with not one day of education in geometry or trigonometry, and almost no knowledge of other mathematics. Now I eagerly run to Google for the meaning of “chord” and “circle of latitude”. I feel the joy of the sun breaking through clouds when I suddenly comprehend some mathematical formula or see how different shapes interact. I’m as happy as a child on a Christmas morning full of new toys.

This kind of mental activity is said to be good for (I hate to say it) an older person, so you can’t accuse me of wasting my time. But even if you did accuse me of wasting my time, it would be nothing new to me. People have been accusing me of that most of my life. I was a writer, after all, and a hedonist, a person who thought that love and freedom were more important than any job.

Pegasus and I believe that you are never wasting your time if you’re doing something you really enjoy. Pegasus wants me to study and practice so that someday I may be able create him in Second Life and let him soar through new skies.

Second Life

I had planned to write a description of “Second Life” this morning, but then I discovered that Freyashawk has already posted a wonderful description and discussion . Of course her approach to the “game” is different from mine, but before I write my essay on “Second Life” I recommend that you read the one on "Thoughts from Freyashawk".

MY FIRST CREATION, THE UPSIDE-DOWN PYRAMID WITH OBJECTS ON TOP . . . LIKE MY FIRST DAY AT KINDERGARTEN

Freyashawk and I agree that “Second Life” is not a game. It is another world largely created by its inhabitants (I suppose we should consider the original creators/owners of the game its gods). The inhabitants/members are visually represented there in the form of the “avatars” they choose. The most difficult thing for me to remember when exploring “Second Life” is that every person on the screen -- walking or flying, creating things, dancing, talking via typed chat to other people nearby -- is a real person sitting at a computer somewhere in the real world at that moment.

To me the most remarkable and interesting thing about “Second Life” is not anything in it, but the fact that it exists – that such a fantastically complex and coordinated virtual world can exist, and how it can exist.

Reality and I

A few mornings ago I had the strong feeling of how strange it felt to be in this body, this fuel-absorbing tube held up by a rigid frame which was capable of motion, how strange to look out through something we call “air” at incredibly complex arrangements called “trees”, and beyond that, lights moving slowly above in periods of darkness and daylight, lights which I’m told are balls moving in nothingness.

Imagine that you raised your hands right now and saw large lobster claws instead of hands. To me it felt about the same to see ten fingers as you would feel seeing lobster claws.

I know from blog comments as well as from published accounts that some people share my sense that there is something strange or unreal about “reality”, while others are convinced that the body and what we call the material world is all there is. That such differences can exist among humans who are presumably experiencing the same universe is in itself interesting. How can it be that our perceptions tell us to disagree on such profound questions as whether we are spiritual beings inhabiting bodies, or simply physical bodies and nothing more? Or whether there is more to the universe than insentient building blocks tossed about by something called “chance”?

Which brings me back to a conclusion I’ve expressed here before – that we understand absolutely nothing, and that one person’s reality is another person’s illusion, maya.

Which brings me to the subject of computer games. I was a game addict for months before blogging captured my attention and enthusiasm. I played some Nintendo games with console and TV screen -- "Tetris", various Super Marios, “Harvest Moon”, “Animal Crossing”, “Legend of Zelda”, etc. – but many of the games resided on my computer – the “Age of Empires” series, “Pirates”, “Roller Coaster Tycoon”, “The Sims”, “Flight Simulator”, etc.


Maybe my circuit breaker flipped from overload, but at the time I began this blog I was nervous and uncomfortable about computer games. After I had been away from them awhile I felt real unease about returning to them.

Then a few days ago a friend persuaded me to try a free download (which like many “games” isn’t’ a game at all) called “Fish Tycoon”. At about the same time a repairman told me how he and his wife had become addicted to the online games “Everquest” and “World of Warcraft” and had made a meaningful amount of money through them, even thought it meant spending so much time online that they had to give up their children (almost).

Thus the gaming world’s gravity drew me subtly back into orbit. “Fish Tycoon” is a beautiful virtual aquarium. Harmless, relaxing. Nothing to worry about there. Right.


Evidence of the fragile nature of “reality” as I know it is shown in my experience at a pet shop a couple of days ago, where I found myself looking at a display of aquarium plants and thinking, “I’ll buy one of those for my fish tank.” It took maybe one second to recall that my fish are make-believe, but the proof that the brain (or at least my brain) has trouble distinguishing between imagination and “reality” had been established.

With the repairman’s stories in mind, I urged my perennially over-budget friend who had lured me into the aquarium to try making money with online games like “Everquest”. She is, I should add, a computer game expert to the degree that she writes published guides, but she had not played “massively multiplayer” games before. She quickly found something called “Second Life”, and once more I heard the Siren sweetly call: “Try it, Fleming, it’s free and there’s no stress.”

I slipped as easily into “Second Life” as a lobster into a baited trap, and for three days I’ve had trouble concentrating on blogging. I’ve neglected my friends’ blogs and done little with my own. After all, there’s a whole new world out there to be explored, a new body to learn to move and use, new ways of seeing to be perfected. . .

SCENE FROM "SECOND LIFE"