MicroMUSE Case Study
Submitted for T-504: Transformations of Mind: The role of media and culture in learning
Instructor:
Introduction
This case study looks at MicroMUSE, a text-based Multi-User
Simulated Environment, and its use in
I base my description and analysis upon five key experiences with MicroMUSE that spanned one month of the T-504 course:
- An initial set of explorations of the MicroMUSE environment, conducted in a computer lab alongside my fellow students. During these initial stages I created my avatar, BodhiTree.
- A session with MicroMUSE in the computer lab when Barry Kort, its creator and steward, was physically present as well as sharing the virtual space. During this session I had my avatar carry out a violent attack on Barry’s avatar, Moulton, in order to experiment with the social dynamics of MicroMUSE.
- A session, again in the computer lab but with Barry logging in from another location, during which I built a room in the “Harvard” section of the MicroMUSE environment. In the same session, a group of us went into a “Narnia” simulation built by a young student in the MUSE and followed a few steps of the adventure laid out before us.
- An exploration of LambdaMOO, a similar kind of text-based shared virtual environment, for the sake of comparing the tool, environment, and community.
- Viewing
two videos of middle school students at
- Perusal of an online discussion archive about MicroMUSE by MicroMUSE participants.
MicroMUSE: Tool, environment, and community
To begin, it is worth clarifying that there are three different ways to describe and define MicroMUSE, depending on your angle of view. MicroMUSE is:
- An interface for building a virtual world in a computer database. At a technical level, MicroMUSE is a muti-user database that sits on a server and contains information about rooms, exits that connect rooms, avatars that represent users and automatons (bots), and objects that can be carried by avatars or placed in a room. Each of these entities in the database has a set of basic properties (description, ownership, dates of creation and modification) as well as a set of programmable behaviors. That database can be accessed through PC-based terminal programs that provide a text-based interface. Through a set of pre-programmed and user-definable commands, users can:
- Examine the properties of rooms and explore objects
- Create and program objects and rooms (if given sufficient permissions by the managers of MicroMUSE)
- Design avatars and command them to perform various actions, including object manipulation, communication with other avatars, and interaction with programmed objects.
- An environment in which people can explore, create, and communicate. Here I emphasize the phenomenological experience of the MUSE rather than simply seeing it as an object. Although technically a MUSE user is simply manipulating an avatar as a puppet or, more technically, an object in a database, there is also a sense that the user inhabits the avatar and, by proxy, inhabits the environment of MicroMUSE.
- A community of people who use the tool and inhabit the environment. Created by Barry Kort and a few others at BBN, MicroMUSE has been used by numerous groups of K12 students and teachers, as well as individuals and communities like our own T-504 class who have explored and helped build the virtual world. Like any community, this disparate group of people has both an “emic” (an interior, a system of meaning) and an “etic” (a set of properties and behaviors that can be viewed from the outside and compared to other sociologies).
In my discussion of MicroMUSE, to help further define what
it is and how it can be used, I will be highlighting its various affordances. In
doing so, I am implicitly referring to Gibson’s original coining of the term
“affordance” to discuss the perceivable properties of landscapes that are
relevant and useful to evolving organisms (Gibson, 1979). This recognition of the word’s ecological roots,
combined with the three descriptors of MicroMUSE above, adds particular flavors
to my analysis:
·
Like any interface, MicroMUSE has affordances for the user.
·
As an environment, MicroMUSE also has affordances for the inhabited avatar.
·
As a community, MicroMUSE has affordances for human beings forming relationships.
·
Just as a physical ecology contains specialized niches for diverse
organisms, the MUSE has various affordances depending on the distinctive
characteristics of users, avatars, and relationships.
Inhabited avatars
When a user connects to MicroMUSE, he or she is required to take on an avatar, or alternate identity in the simulated environment. Avatars have names, written descriptions that other characters see when they type “look <avatar-name>,” and other characteristics such as programmed behaviors (E.g. “Khabaloo stumbles out” when Khabaloo leaves a room). Although MicroMUSE only allows one avatar per user, other text-based multi-user environments allow multiple avatars, sometimes accessed simultaneously.
An avatar might bear close similarity to its user’s physical presence and behavior in the “RL” (Real Life) or it may diverge. Sherry Turkle writes extensively about people who take on characters with personality traits and gender different from their own in order to explore dimensions of self that lie dormant in everyday life (1995). For some, this exploration takes on an escapist character, and little integration of the real and virtual personae occurs. For other users, the MUSE proves a healthy and productive way to explore new traits such as extroversion and humor that gradually weave themselves into the RL. Creating these diverse avatars is a central affordance of the MUSE as a tool for the human user.
For my own avatar, I decided to try something unusual, something to which we might not normally attribute personhood. A plant of some kind seemed a good candidate. Given my interest in eastern philosophy and Buddhist spiritual practice, I chose BodhiTree in reference to the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment:
At first glance, you see a tree, its roots curled
beneath it, branches reaching toward the lights above. Then you realize that
there is something peculiar, that despite there being no wind, the leaves
rustle gently and the wood shifts and sways. When you look closely at the bark,
you see eyes and the hints of faces, all of which seem to share a peaceful
smile. When it speaks, its voice comes as a whisper from its leaves or as the
creaking of the wood within its trunk.
Whenever my avatar would teleport into a room, others present would see this:
A shimmering green light emanates from the floor,
from which a small stem grows rapidly into a tree. Its branches stretch towards
the sky then settle in with a final rustle of its leaves. The tree smiles from
every part of its bark and waves a branch gently at everyone in the room.
Let me be clear that I am not, in fact, a tree. BodhiTree does, however, represent an aspect of my personality, one of many “selves” that I could present in MicroMUSE.
Regardless of the similarity or dissonance between a person’s real-life identity and the on-line persona they create, it is only through an avatar that a user can explore the MUSE environment. It is the avatar that moves from room to room when the user issues commands to walk. It is the avatar that holds and manipulates objects discovered in the space. In listening to people’s descriptions of interactions in the MUSE, however, I found that users consistently use the words “I” and “me” to describe what is happening to their avatar. Observe the following interaction:[1]
take
Taken.
inventory
You are carrying:
leaf(#10443v)
TeleHat(#10440vI)
You have 1881 Credits.
In this sequence, “
In the face-to-face interaction surrounding the computer,
the RL Erin said “Hey!” somewhat indignantly alongside these online events,
implying an emotional engagement with the avatars’ interaction. To me this implies a strong sense of embodiment
in the virtual space, of the avatar as subject rather than pure object.
Like an organism in Gibson’s landscapes, the inhabited avatar itself can adapt and transform itself as it explores the MUSE. It can modify its appearance (name and description) to be engaging and attractive to other inhabited avatars. It can develop habits of behavior to amuse and provoke other characters; some can be programmed in digital code like Khabaloo’s exit, others ingrained in the user’s habitual commands and interaction style. A character can manufacture objects that carry out special functions, for example puppets that passively observe rooms from a distance. This composite appearance (of the avatar, its behaviors, and its possessions) constitutes the outward identity of an inhabited avatar as it adapts to the social landscape of the MUSE. What, then, does that landscape look like? Who are the other characters and what is their purpose in getting together?
Intentional community
One prominent identity in MicroMUSE whom we had the fortune to meet is founder Barry Kort. In both live incarnation during visits to our class and inhabiting his avatar Moulton, Barry revealed the history, intentions, and philosophy behind MicroMUSE. In these conversations, an important dimension of the environment came to light – MicroMUSE is an intentional community with some quite Utopian aspirations.
Barry explained to us that the MUSE does not have laws and punishments. Instead it is based upon a social contract, an agreement to behave according to a civil code. If disputes between members do arise, there is a conflict mediation process that members can carry out. Barry was careful to emphasize that MircoMUSE does not behave according to the rule of law, because he feels that law-based societies (by analogy to rule-based systems in some computer simulations) devolve into chaos.
In a rebellious effort to test the limits and boundaries of acceptable behavior in MicroMUSE, I carried out the following (quite un-BodhiTree like) actions:
Moulton has arrived.
:punches moulton in the stomach
BodhiTree punches moulton in the stomach
:kicks moulton in the head
BodhiTree kicks moulton in the head
"WHERE'S THE RULE OF LAW NOW?!
You say "WHERE'S THE RULE OF LAW NOW?!"
Newland says ""I better get my bookshelves
out of here"
Khabaloo looks for an exit. is this some sort of
prison?
NewLeia says ""Now we are in chaos"
Newland has left.
At this point Barry, who was physically present in the computer lab and reading the actions on a projection screen said, “Come on guys, let’s keep it clean. If you want to do that, you can go to Osama Bin Laden’s MUSE.” After this comment, I typed the following:
"you're trying to exclude me from the MUSE because
of my behavior
"that's exactly what they did to the Columbine
kids
Although I am not violent by nature (and certainly “BodhiTree” implies a peaceful character), I found myself wanting to see what would happen if I carried out violent and disrespectful acts. As it turned out, Barry never responded to these comments during our MUSE session. When I ran into him again on the Harvard campus, he asked me to read the rules and etiquette guidelines for MicroMUSE; he said that if I had done so earlier I never would have taken the violent action I did.
This episode is fascinating on several levels. First, it is worth remarking that the punches and kicks in the MicroMUSE have no real impact on the Moulton avatar. I entered these “emote” commands the same way I would to generate “BodhiTree smiles” or “BodhiTree rustles its leaves.” It is a testament to how thoroughly Barry inhabits the avatar of Moulton that he became upset about my impotent actions.
It is also remarkable how quickly the other characters reacted as well; erin, Khabaloo, NewLeia, and Newland all sought to flee. Reflecting on my actions and experience, I do not blame them, and in fact I feel a reasonably strong sense of shame every time I read the transcript. No matter how “simulated” the actions may have been, and with whatever ironic or experimental intentions I may have had, there really seems to be a violence that transpired. Although I did go back and read the social contract for MicroMUSE (which simply says “Respect others”), it is not because of the contract that I would inhibit myself from future aggressive actions. Rather my shame stems from the fear I invoked in colleagues that I care about.
In this situation, it became clear to me that an inhabited avatar is very much a person, endowed with the full emotional capacities of its human half. Even when a violent action has no genuine impact on the digital avatar object, the intense negativity makes it through from heart to heart. This fact highlights the critical dimension of the MUSE as community, a landscape with affordances for human relationships. It is a testing ground for ways of acting and being as an individual, an environment for communication, and a place for experimentation with new social and governmental forms.
Social ecologies and ghost towns
Given these affordances for social experiments and relationship formation, a problem does arise when MicroMUSE remains so sparsely inhabited. During the times that I logged in, it appeared that the users present had always been idle for several hours. Barry Kort was the only person outside of our class that I ever encountered inside. Although I enjoyed creating a distinctive avatar and inhabiting it to explore what other people had built inside the space, I did not find myself motivated to really dig deeply or invest in building something new. The only building project I undertook was a “room” in the Harvard section of MicroMUSE:
That's funny... it didn't look this big from the
outside. In fact, BodhiTree's room could scarcely be called a room at all.
Rather, you find yourself in a forest that seems to extend infinitely towards
the horizon. Sunlight filters in through the canopy of maple leaves above.
Beyond that description I did not build further, because it seemed that few if any people would ever visit the forest. The MicroMUSE felt like a virtual ghost town.
Perhaps the most engaging activity I did undertake in MicroMUSE was an exploration of a Narnia adventure created by a junior high school student. Three colleagues from my class and I all entered this area of the MUSE together and enjoyed the quite creative environs. At one point, because I did not address a (programmed) queen as “your majesty” I was transported into a castle dungeon and my companions had to toss me a rope from a high balcony to rescue me. All of this quite immersive experience occurred without the need for complex 3D graphics, highlighting the imaginative work afforded by text-based environments.
Still, this adventure did not touch upon my distinctive online identity. My companions were all in the room with me face to face (f2f), and although I appeared in the MUSE as BodhiTree, it was difficult for them to think of me as other than Jason, and it felt uncomfortable for me to behave as an alternate identity. Given our slow typing speed, oral conversation was constant, thus keeping me grounded in my RL identity. In a sense, the best way for us as inhabited avatars to adapt to the social ecology was to remain well anchored in f2f dialogue and identity. If people had been present in the MUSE that were not also present face to face, the situation would probably have been different – more conversation would transpire online, and I would be more conscious of my appearance within the world.
This situation was quite different when I took a couple of hours to explore LambdaMOO, another text-based shared virtual environment. Relative to MicroMUSE, Lambda is generally teeming with activity, with people logging in from around the country. My conversations there varied from the inane to the risqué, but are generally engaging. Some places such as the “Beelzebus” are well-populated hang-out spots, rich in conversation and littered with programmed objects. The environment is full of peculiar objects, some of which can be entered as if they are rooms, giving the entire space a highly surrealist character. In the following transcript, I am Technicolor_Guest:
BeelzeBus
You
see
pool, trans-1.2-dichalk-turpentine, and
Official Mr_Conservative-Wants-Me-Dead
(tm) button here.
PerkyPat,
iBoy (distracted), RiotKrrn (distracted), h0m0g4y, Jerri_Blank
(daydreaming), Obvious, Kerry (out on her
feet), prak (out on her feet),
cretin (out on its feet), and maggot (out on
his feet) are here.
Tessien
(asleep), vol (sleeping), Ruscha_Too, Dream (asleep), hhsb, Eurydice
(asleep), Biz (sleeping), Ratty (asleep),
TMFKAN64 (asleep), Kylie (asleep),
Makonan (asleep), and Dr.Phil (asleep) are
sleeping here.
You
see Mariland out the windows.
iBoy
says, "We will never get this passed as long as they continue to
disenfranchise the stoner by not permitting
voting via PS2."
Outside,
Jaybird says, "I'll ask *curr."
-iboy
good call on voting by ps2... what issue are you talking about?
Technicolor_Guest
[to iBoy]: good call on voting by ps2... what issue are you
talking about?
Lavender_Guest
teleports in.
iBoy
says, "Legalized Pot."
Lavender_Guest
aims its Existential Watergun at iBoy.
iBoy
gets a spritz of angst on the chin!
iBoy
squints at Lavender_Guest.
Lavender_Guest
whacks iBoy with Two by Four of +8 Dorkiness.... iBoy says,
"Bonking is cool."
"i
don't know that guy
You
say, "i don't know that guy"
Lavender_Guest
says, "I don't know him either."
-iboy
are you in the
Technicolor_Guest
[to iBoy]: are you in the
iBoy
says, "Yes. I am in the Pacific
Time Zone."
-iBoy
says, "Specifically Las Vegas."
-iboy iBoy says, "So is my partner,
Roy."
Technicolor_Guest
[to iBoy]:
Obvious
says, "fagnitz"
RiotKrrn
say, "
RiotKrrn
say, "they do not wish to be interrupted"
In LambdaMOO, I found myself struggling to understand the topics of conversations, the character of the inhabitants, and the norms of behavior. The social ecology was rich, with myriad affordances and possibilities for adaptation, identity play, and dialogue. Given my busy schedule and existing social ecology in RL, I did not spend extensive time in LambdaMOO. If I were to delve into multi-user environments in greater depth, however, I would certainly choose LambdaMOO over the uninhabited MicroMUSE.
Specialized affordances
Even after lengthy discussion and exploration of these environments, I have not chosen to become a “citizen” or regular guest in either. Why not? Clearly there are people who spend significant amounts of time in LambdaMOO and even MicroMUSE, characters who have carved out a “niche” for themselves in the social ecology. Is there something different about them as “organisms” that causes the MUSE “landscape” to have more compelling affordances for them than it does for me?
In most cases, I would conjecture that people’s use of simulated environments is based on their affordances for socializing across distance and anonymity, and on the rich sense of play and fantasy that the virtual worlds inspire. Inhabited avatars that I encountered in LambdaMOO were having fun, discussing topics like drugs and homosexuality that might be taboo in RL. The vast array of curios and gadgets laying about the environment also hinted at people’s fanciful enjoyment of the space. Given enough free time, my own sense of curiosity about new people in distant places might draw me in the same way. If I spent more time learning the mechanics behind programming objects and rooms, I might also enjoy the creative tinkering that a MOO/MUSE makes possible.
Aspberger’s Syndrome
I did come across one hint, however, that simulated environments might have unique affordances for particular kinds of people. While exploring an online forum about MicroMUSE to which Barry Kort referred me, I discovered a discussion about Aspberger’s Syndrome. In it a conversation had transpired among three members of the MicroMUSE community who were talking about their struggles with Aspberger’s; Barry Kort himself claimed to have Aspberger’s-like symptoms but had never been diagnosed with the Syndrome (MUSE forum).
Aspberger’s, they said, interferes with people’s ability to understand emotional cues in f2f conversations. Gestures, facial expressions, and subtle body language all require their careful, conscious attention. Often the subtexts and nuance of conversation elude people with the syndrome, an experience that seems very frustrating and confusing. One woman complained that difficulties in business relationships can arise from misunderstandings and thereby the disorder can be a source of career and financial problems.
For this particular group of people, MicroMUSE provided a very comfortable and safe environment. No one using its text-based interface gets the benefit of gesture and facial expression in communicating with one another. It is, therefore, a kind of level playing field for inhabited avatars. All are equally “gesture-blind.” In fact, people with Aspberger’s Syndrome might even be at an advantage in MicroMUSE, because they are used to being explicit about asking for and giving emotional cues. The intentional, symbolic, metacognitive relationship with emotion necessary in a text-based environment is their normal state of being.
Returning to our ecological metaphors, we could say that like a finch in Darwin’s journal that was well adapted to a different island, I left the MUSE behind; its lack of rich cues in interpersonal communication made RL far too distracting and attractive. This Asperger’s subculture, however, found a great advantage in exactly the same MUSE characteristics. They were well adapted, so they settled into a consistent pattern of use and exchange – they found a niche.
Engaging minds
Catalina showed us a video of a middle school classroom that revealed another kind of specialized MUSE niche. In it we saw a group of students, each at a classroom computer, typing away at terminals connected to a local database server. An older student, Lucia, answered questions and gave tips as they experimented with wandering around, interacting with one another, building objects, and programming. One African-American boy was particularly engaged, tinkering away and occasionally asking detailed questions about how to program the objects that his avatar was building. Catalina revealed to us that this boy did not usually engage in class and was at times disruptive; it was therefore somewhat remarkable that he dove so eagerly into this activity.
Without knowing the boy or the context better, it is difficult to infer exactly why he seemed to find a “niche” in MicroMUSE. We can infer, however, that the MUSE was more compelling than the usual classroom activities, perhaps because of the novelty and rapid rewards of programming and the open-ended nature of the environment. Characteristics like a sense of humor, creativity, iconoclasm, adventurousness, and even mischievousness also gain social rewards in the MUSE where teachers might normally see them as disruptive. Still, it is possible that the boy was simply a computer enthusiast and would have engaged more completely with any activity employing a favorite tool (or toy).
Philosophical reflections – my own niche in MicroMUSE
Regardless of the fact that I have not re-entered MicroMUSE after my first few experiences, I still find myself thinking about it a great deal. Perhaps I should add one more “angle” on MicroMUSE to my original list of interface, environment, and community. In its totality, MicroMUSE is a concept that fits into a wider philosophical landscape, one that has affordances for my mind as I contemplate the meaning of simulation, the inhabitation of avatars, and the construction of virtual community.
The key feature of MicroMUSE that gives it these philosophical affordances is its equivalence of person and object. As I demonstrated earlier with the example of placing “erin” in my “inventory,” everything in the MUSE database is an object to be manipulated, carried, or queried. I can “look erin” to see a more detailed description of her just as I can “look tree” to get a more detailed description of a tree. If I “shake tree,” its leaves might rustle. If I “whisper erin hello” she will whisper or say hello right back. Although my classmate inhabiting her avatar will be a great deal more complex and less predictable than the tree, both exhibit a kind of stimulus/response behavior.
At first glance, it seems that the key difference between erin and the tree is that I can type “examine tree” and see all the programming code that gives rise to the tree’s acceptable stimuli and characteristic responses. If I do the same for erin, I might see some code (for example, an action she always takes when entering a room), but the code will only pertain to the digital component of the inhabited avatar. In Don Norman’s terms, erin will only have a “surface-level” representation available to me where I can get a slightly deeper and complete picture of the tree’s interior (see Norman, 1993 for discussion about surface and interior representations).
In order to “understand” an inhabited avatar, to form a mental picture of its “interior,” I have to ask it questions and engage it in dialogue. I can not simply “examine” it as if it were an object. If I encountered a character in LambdaMOO, for example, I might ask them where they are from, what kinds of activities they engage in, what they think about politics, relationships and sexuality, religion, and a host of other topics. I might constrain the conversation to the fantasy world of LambdaMOO (being true to the game of “my avatar talking to your avatar”). More likely I would ask questions about the user’s existence in RL. Sometimes I would take their word at face value, other times I would question whether they were playing a role with their avatar, and other times I might suspect an intentional and even malicious deceit.
Still, in my post-industrial revolution frame of mind, I would always be trying to answer the question “what makes them tick,” referring implicitly to the mechanisms of a watch. What are the psychological mechanisms at work in their thinking? What are their patterns of intention, thought, emotion, and action? Even if I could truly “examine” them, I would be attempting to form a mental model of person-as-object.
Now, when I read those last words person-as-object, I cringe. I know intellectually that an avatar is an object (at least a symbolic one) in a database. I also know that the person inhabiting that avatar is a biological organism with neurological mechanisms that are at least correlated with their mental phenomena. But there is a serious taboo against seeing a person as an object. I would much rather see them as a subject, someone with perspective and phenomenology, with feeling and intention. I want to see them as someone making meaning about me as I am making meaning of my experience with them. In so doing, I respect them, I regard them morally, and I open myself to connection, relationship, and intersubjectivity.
What I find interesting is that it is equally taboo to attribute subjectivity to an “object.” In RL, if I sit in one place for hours and attempt to engage a lamp in dialogue, passersby will look at me curiously at the very least. If I speak with concern about how the lamp perceives me, whether it thinks my life has any meaning, and whether I am treating it with adequate compassion and integrity, I will likely be committed to a mental institution.
In the MUSE, however, the boundary of person and object, or subject and object, is blurred. I might be having a conversation with a lamp and be totally sane, because the lamp is actually the avatar of a close friend of mine. In MicroMUSE it could also be a “puppet” of an avatar of a friend of mine, broadcasting everything it sees to the avatar’s inhabitant. Particularly in a place like LambdaMOO, where radically creative object and avatar descriptions are the norm, such behavior might not draw a second glance from other inhabited avatars. Figure 1 below touches on this complexity.
Bots, Turing tests, and the spirituality of simulations
The reality of these environments becomes more complex when we recognize the potential of creating “bots” or objects that simulate inhabited avatars. Whoever created the tree could have blocked an examination of its programming code and even programmed the object to display an avatar-like description when examined. They could have created a rich set of responses to a large variety of potential commands that an avatar might issue in its presence. “Climb tree,” “scratch tree,” “kick tree,” and “carve initials into tree” could all draw different responses. It is also possible for a user to write a program on their PC that itself interfaces with the MicroMUSE terminal, thus inhabiting an avatar with a computer program. Turkle (1995) describes text-based “psychoanalyst” software that responds to users’ descriptions of thoughts, feelings, dreams, and experiences. This software could be used to drive an avatar’s behavior in MicroMUSE, and might be quite convincing as a human-inhabited avatar.
It strikes me then that a fascinating activity in the MicroMUSE would be a Turing test designed to explore this issue of personhood. Based on Alan Turing’s writing about artificial intelligence (AI), the Turing test requires someone to sit at a teletype machine and exchange words with an entity on the other end of the wire. Their conversation partner might be human or it might be a computer programmed to act intelligently. If the user mistakes a program for a person, the program is a true AI in Turing’s view. The MicroMUSE interface, as a kind of rich chat client, is an ideal tool for the Turing test. In some ways, it might be more challenging to AI programmers than a simple teletype tool because a computer-inhabited avatar would have to interact intelligently with other objects and spaces, not just with the interlocutor. On the other hand, the role playing dimension of MicroMUSE potentially makes AI easier – if the avatar is a lizard, other inhabited avatars might not expect complex responses from it in conversation.
Along with the Turing test, here is the philosophical challenge I would pose to future MicroMUSE users: if you regard a computer-inhabited avatar (bot) as “intelligent” and having “personhood” or “subjectivity,” where does that personhood reside? Figure 1 highlights the different layers of “self” from person to inhabited avatar to programmer-bot-avatar hybrid (cyborg).
Figure 1 - Boundaries of self in MicroMUSE
One answer to the question of bot intelligence would be “in the bot code,” the way some people might say that intelligence resides “in the brain.” I would call this view of intelligence and personhood strongly embodied, encapsulated, and mechanistic.
A more complex answer would be that the intelligence lies “in the interaction between the bot and the MicroMUSE environment.” In this answer, the intelligence and/or knowledge of the computer program is situated. We might say that intelligence is a measure of how adapted the bot is to its niche in MicroMUSE.
A still more complex answer would be that the intelligence resides in the intersection between MUSE, bot program, and bot programmer. Even though the bot could continue to run even if the programmer died, it still derived its basic structure and understanding of the world from the programmer. We might even say that its personhood and subjectivity are the programmer’s by proxy.
If we follow this line of thought, we ask where the programmer’s subjectivity “comes from” and we start to look closely at our attribution of personhood and intelligence to her. We will look at her interaction with the physical environment and with other people who have credited her with personhood and perspective since birth. We might even trace a chain of intersubjectivity to parents, grandparents, and beyond, all of whom had roles in laying down the “code” for this present human being. Although we began by looking at the connections between human and digital intelligence, we end up looking at a tapestry of mind and perspective that extends through space and time. At the risk of hyperbole, I would say that in so doing we would peer in the direction of the mystic’s insights about the unity of all mind and spirit. Must we then say that a fantasy game for fast typists has affordances for the soul?
Bibliography
Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
MicroMUSE forum. http://www.neopoeia.com/motet/.
Norman, D. (1993). Things That Make Us Smart: Defending human attributes in the age machine. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen. New York: Touchstone.