It had to have happened
by Bob on September 6, 2007
Well, it had to have happened. After all I wrote about Dr. Alan Turing and the "Turing Test" for distinguishing real people from computers mimicking a human. And taught my university students about it for years.
It had to have happened. It apparently did.
I got a MySpace message from someone who said that one of my MySpace friends was an imposter. She was a he, and had faked everyone out. And not only that, but "her" photos were not really of the person, but of a professional model, or even yet, of several different models and people.
I knew that was very possible and likely in the MySpace kingdom well before this person wrote to me about the "lady".
He proved it by showing the origin of the photos on professional websites.
Still, I assure you, as a metaphysician and logician, and former med student and rock musician, which is a really intellectually lethal combination, I still didn't know who to believe. The person who was writing this and proving this I didn't know, although "his" proof and logic seemed impeccable.
What it all means is that Dr. Turing was right. In the MySpace kingdom it is very hard to tell who is real and who isn't. So I consider real all those people who I know personally, carnally, in the flesh, so to speak. And a few others I have written postal mail to, and spoken to on the telephone, although that's not absolute proof, it's good enough for me.
So even when we get an email we really can't know it's from the person we think it is since so much email spoofing is done.
Like when the great magician Harry Houdini died, he left his wife a secret password, so that in seances and spiritual sessions where the medium was to be talking to him as a dead person, his wife could see if the medium could say the secret word Harry left his wife. It never happened.
In that vein, we see that most people we know in online social interaction networks we have no way of knowing anything about them -- just what they say they are and what photos they look like. It might even be someone's dog just randomly typing on a keyboard with his paw.
There's an illusion going on here in the modern world. And we had better get hip to it and deal with it. Who are you ? We really want to know. The Who sang this and it was pre-sagacious of our times.
We all know that logic works as an imbedded system but has faults in the real world, which as Camus and Sartre happily pointed out, is absurd.
I mean, the great playwright, Eugene Ionesco, in his "Rhinoceros", had the logician prove that a cat must have five paws, impeccably and flawlessly using a chain of Aristotelian syllogisms, into an enthymeme. And a whole village gets turned into rhinoceroses.
So we must take a hint from Mr. Ionesco, and treat online social interaction networks as a modern "theatre of the absurd", for the most part.
We knew it was going to happen. In the movie "Crocodile Dundee", the Australian Mick had the same problem at a New York City avant-garde party. He wasn't sure who the real women were from the fakers. So he devised a rather straightforward test, which we can graphically see in the movie. There is no such test online. And Mick later did beer commercials gleefully. So we all have to have a laugh at ourselves.
But there are a lot of good people who take it very seriously. The human interactional algebra, in that we are dealing with lots of unknowns like simultaneous equations with many unknown variables, when we are dealing with e-people online. They can make perfect sense, and be contextually very consistent, but they are not real.
Keep your heart locked up or at least under close guard. These are perilous times.
And too bad Clarabell the clown isn't here with his seltzer water squirter and horn to tell us it's all a magical and comical illusion. Oh well. Life goes on. Maybe. Like the famous commercial on TV way back when, "Is it live or is it Memorex [tape]" as the glass shatters from the vocalist's high note.