~Identity, The Internet, and Computer Gaming
The Problem of Subjectivity
On this, first of all, I should point out that, while in doing this I have
attempted to inhabit another life, I would say that literally doing so it
quite impossible. As much as I may wish, I will always know only and exactly
one subjective experience: my own.
And so, however much I may
try to play a role as similar as possible to some other life, I am still the
one doing the living, and my experience will always be unlike others' because
of that.
Another argument against the usefulness of this role-playing, something that
we do every day of our lives and not just in strange groups and computer games,
is that we do not change ourselves at all; just as we change our roles for
different areas of society and different societies we are a part of, this
switching of roles merely adds yet another context in which we are the same
as we always are.
So then, are we in this self-delusion
inhabiting another life? Have we become another person, in any sense of the
idea? Or are we just playing with another, more peculiar possible idea of
society?
Certainly we change ourselves to the world around us- that adaptability has served us well over the years. I think, though, that these changes are more drastic within us than we think. And, indeed, we as subjective beings are much closer to one another's idea of reality than many of us will ever admit.
I think that in taking on these roles, we come close to approximating that elusive subjective experience others feel, and so I continue to attempt to don the roles of those unlike me, be it through books and games as I mentioned at the beginning of this project, or, increasingly, through my own life and other more complete and personally controlled lives like it. For, ultimately, it is by checking these other lives against our own that we can eventually know ourselves.