how to get rid of the hidden killer in ourselves

"Man is an enigma to himself" - Carl Gustav Jung (1958), The Undiscovered Self.

In the astounding movie on top of this post, mentalist Darren Brown has an unsuspecting bar visitor participate in a first person zombie shooter arcade game. Brown then plays Wizard of Oz with the gamer in that he sends flashes of light out of the device that bring the gamer into a catatonic trance for a few minutes, just enough to bring him into another room that looks just like the virtual one he had just been in. The participant wakes up with an airgun in his hand in a room full of people dressed like zombies. What happens is shocking. In a pandemonial panic the protagonist starts screaming and running around shooting the zombies, and the realization that he is actually killing people seems to bring him into an even more extreme state of terror. He has just discovered the hidden murderer in himself, and before figuring out how to solve the situation, he blindly accepts this short-sighted role. To me, this is the story of humanity up to now.

People can be highly manipulated by their environments and lack a consistent internalized fundament to guide them in every situation. Because people's inner selves are largely undefined and people are insecure of them, they can easily forget about them and be absorbed by behavioral patterns that are biologically or socially ingrained into them. It often seems more like these patterns evolve through us as mostly blind individuals, instead of us completely mastering ourselves.

This also seems to be happening with the digital mediaspace we have created; it is running out of control but dramatically changing our lives mostly outside of our own awareness. Our digital technologies are mostly alien to us, but because they provide us shortcuts to pleasurable states of being, we accept them into our lives in the conviction that it is good. This is an illusion though, just another trick of the selfish brain, which becomes apparent in cases like the one mentioned above, where the boundary between projected and real fear blurs. Our technologies create temporary lifeworlds for us that often seem innocent and neutral, for they are often only the means to fulfill a purpose in the 'real' world. But they never were neutral; the way we act in digital realms influence the way we act in what we perceive as reality. A projected action can easily become a real one, since we have already adopted it mentally, activating the same neural patterns that would have been activated had we really performed the action.

Where virtual, computational environments seem distinct to us, we must realize that this is not so. The dichotomy between 'real' and 'virtual' is merely constructed by us, to make our lives manageable without having to expand our sense of self. We must realize that there is no such thing as virtual; all is just data we simultaneously perceive and act upon, and that we can derive happiness out of by creatively organizing that data so that we transform our lifeworlds into ones that we feel more at home in, and that we can more easily incorporate in our sense of self. There is no such thing as a simulated world, for it relates as much as the 'real' world does to the optimization of our experiential patterns towards ones in which we are happy.

Along the same line, it is not very useful to wonder if we are living in a real or a simulated universe. If we discover that we are in a simulation, and find a way to live outside of it, nothing really changes. Still, we will be conscious, creative patterns that act upon experiential data, but only this data will transgress its borders and we will need to learn to incorporate it into our sense of self in order to become one with it. Trying to figure out whether or not we already live in a simulated world then, is an act stemming from an inacceptance of the current experiential lifeworld, an act of seeking happiness in something outside of what we already have, in the silent hope that there is more. More than that, if there appears to be more, this is a mere creation of ourselves, not a discovery. It will be the result of the search, that we already created with the creation of the search itself. The universe is not outside of us; we have created our own universe by means of our own loops of action and reflection in which we continuously shape it.

Then if we realize that nothing is outside of us, we come to realize that we are already everything. We are not distinct from anything we perceive as outside of us unless we choose to perceive it as outside of us. The illusion our social brain imbues us with is that we are people inside a physical body, who identify with a certain group of people and objects but not with others. This alienness to others creates an unconscious aversion to them that, in critical moments where resources like time are scarce, will result in actions like that man in the experiment aforementioned, who attempts to murder what he perceives as zombies.

As long as we identify with our own bodies, we will maintain a fear of death, which in the end is the cause of all suffering and misery. When we see that also the body is a mere concept constructed by us, we can mentally let go of it, and it is only then that we can live fully, and have the energy that is already within us guide our actions instead of illusory concepts we at some point have pasted onto our existence, as a patch to make a seemingly inherently hard life more liveable and pleasurable. When we lose our fear of dying we transcend a life in between pleasure and pain, reward and punishment, good and bad, but we see that everything is the way it should be already, and we can be invulnerably happy at every moment, only acting from a love and compassion towards everything, without first making the comparison as to whether some perceived entity or concept is similar enough to us.

We then can even come to see that there is no difference between life and death, but that this also is a constructed dichotomy stemming from a narrow self-identification with the body concept. When somebody dies, be it you or somebody else, what really dies is the concept you have of that person. The body just remains part of life in that it will get transformed into other organisms. As long as we try to condense ourselves into a concept, yes, we will inexorably remain an enigma to ourselves. But if we throw away all concepts as necessities for a good life, and act based on the creativity that stems from pure being, we know everything that there is to know already and we will act out of compassion instead of confusion and anxiety.

Self-Expansive Mirrors

Here are a few brilliant projects on mirrors that show an image you can project yourself into in a different way than a usual mirror does. Hence, they can make you see yourself in a different way, and change your behaviour or even attitudes.

Shown above is the work of Daniel Rozin, who pioneered the area of interactive mirrors. His famous installations subtly play with distortions and abstractions in size and shape, while still mostly pertaining to the perceived data. To me, his mechanical mirrors especially emphasize in an ambiguous manner that in the future, technologies can learn to reflect parts of our inner selves in any means that it can find to accomplish this with. Even waste material we have thrown away might directly make an unexpected turn and start behaving in a possibly rather confronting way.

Rozin's software mirrors also reflect a quite realistic self-representation of the viewer, but as well make him more sensitive about other parts of life instead of how he looks. His shaking time mirror, for example,  shows in a rather exaggerated way how time affects us, and how easy it is to use time for active self-transformation, as if we could just shake off our inner tensions, bad habits, traumas or other kinds of mental debris that seemed stuck to us.

Furthermore, Rozin made a few low-tech sculptural pieces that explore the role of mirrors in providing us with different self-representations than we would expect. A counterexpected effect is most strongly embodied in Rozin's 'Broken Mirror', which consists of a fragmented mirror, that through an ingenious physical configuration of the fragments shows not a reflection of the viewer, but an image of an old woman that is printed in fragments on a wall behind the viewer. Hence, for a moment the viewer is tricked, although it will probably not be impacting to an extent as to really make the viewer ponder existential issues of any kind.

Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman have approached the same line of work from a more social perspective and make construction of the self-representation a collaborative project. Their installation 'reface' takes samples of video directly from viewers who stand before the wall-hung device, and mixes up parts of video from different viewers, so you might see yourself as you are, but with the hair of your, say, american-indian grandfather and the surgically altered lips of your twin sister who also happened to be at the exhibition. This way of altering self-representations, to me, is on the edge of gimmickiness because of its obvious artificiality and would be much stronger if a database of recorded videos was input for a system that would dynamically morph your face, and change temporal and spatial parameters for example as a function of how you behave in front of the 'mirror', of how you feel or even of how or what you think.

Then another installation by Golan Levin, the Optoisolator, is less obviously a mirror, but definitely offers people a means to project themselves into an object and evoke focused self-reflective thought. It consists of a black box, attached to a wall at eye level, in which a mechanically moving eye resides that looks straight towards the viewer and follows him around the room, thus engaging him as in a game of staring. An even stronger connection is made by having the eye blink one second after whenever the viewer blinks their eyes, employing a technique called eye blink detection. By putting the viewer inevitably in the center of attention, he becomes an intrinsic part of the artwork, which makes it impossible to take on a detached, third person perspective of that of a mere observer, or even as an interactor without individuality. With technologies behaving like this, people would definitely be more invited to overcome traits like shyness.

To conclude on the psychological impact of such technologies, Yee and Bailenson's 2007 study showed that people conform to the expectations and stereotypes of the  identity of their self-representation, which gives me faith in that these kind of technologies can have a truly immense transformative impact, if designed well for specific people in specific contexts. Considering the latter issues, these artistic translations of technology can merely be seen as explorations into a new paradigm where technologies are purposefully designed and even learn to guide and change people in direct and personal ways that people comply with much more than with conscious transformations through more semantic means like advertisements, therapies, or even laws.