I'm a man In “real life,” I've always played female characters in video games. More and more people are saying this means I'm secretly gay/transgender or just a total creep. Should I just like it? —Gender Player
Dear Player,
Player, it seems like there are a lot of people around you who think they know better than you. I don't claim to have any insight into your deepest self, but I can offer some thoughts on your choices.
- Fantasy and fiction provide an escape from our usual perspectives and allow us to explore perspectives different from our own. Choosing a droid as your avatar doesn't mean you're a robot at heart. Reading a novel that depicts the world through the eyes of a female narrator doesn't mean you're secretly a woman (or a “freak”). The pioneers of the Internet hoped that digital spaces would liberate us from everyday life and allow us to experiment with assumed identities behind a veil of anonymity. It's certainly not the utopia we ended up with (instead, we are often sorted into rigid boxes by predictive engines and targeted advertising). But video games still hold the promise of costume balls, places where you can put on a costume, download a new skin, and pretend to be someone else for a while.
- Of course, pretend play and role-playing can reveal deeper desires, especially desires that the conscious mind refuses to entertain. If you feel an overwhelming sense of euphoria while playing a female character, or find yourself fantasizing about being that avatar in real life, your friends are probably right and something deeper is going on. There may be.
- Gender itself is, as it is often said, a “script”, a kind of socially reinforced performance that forces people of all genders to conform to standard binaries. Choosing a female character may simply be acknowledging a part of yourself that you've felt forced to suppress in your everyday life. It's not necessarily a sign that you're living in the wrong body, it may just be evidence that your way of expressing your gender is wrong. Too narrow. “Avatar” in its original sense refers to the multiple forms/genders a god can take. The character you choose may be an attempt to recognize your own multiplicity and embody only one of the many within you.
I'm a vegetarian, but I also eat lab-grown meat. Does that make me a hypocrite? —Chicken Little
Seeing that you are not disgusted by the idea of meat raised “on peachwood plates,” as Marjorie Taylor Greene put it, your vegetarianism is not ethically or religiously motivated. I think it's due to. Hence the fear of hypocrisy. But I don't think that's the right word to express exactly what you're feeling. A hypocrite is someone who claims moral standards that are directly contradicted by their own actions, and who, if you believe the hype, promises that lab meat is humane and sustainable. Masu. Like many technological solutions that turn vices into neutral alternatives (clean energy, NA beer), it counteracts moral calculations and removes us from the obligation to make sacrifices for a better world or a better self. release. You can also raise and feed happy cows.
The hypocrisy you fear is more subtle and insidious. You might think the idea of eating lab meat is a bad deal, akin to bombarding a chatbot with abuse. The technical fact of “doing no harm to anyone” doesn't have to stop us from feeling uncomfortable about our motives or the implication of anti-social desires that would probably be better suppressed. As you know, Mr. Chicken, it is possible to push the Frankenmeat thought experiment into darker territory. Would you rather eat human meat grown in a lab? Would you rather eat meat grown from your own cells? Or would you rather eat meat grown from your baby's cells?
If you only care about the practical consequences of your actions, then you certainly aren't betraying any of your values.What are you teeth Betrayal is some kind of idea about yourself. You became a vegetarian not because you truly believed your actions would change the world, but because you liked the idea of being the type of person who was willing to do difficult things and make sacrifices for higher ideals. think. Perhaps the abstentions made the challenge of unwise consumer choices feel a little more meaningful. Maybe they are more willing to do other difficult things in order to maintain moral consistency. If you only focus on the consequences of your actions, you will continue to search for ethical loopholes at the expense of your soul. Virtue has its own rewards, even if they are arbitrary and meaningless.
Now that AI can fake almost anything, we assume that everything we see or read on our screens is fake until proven to be real.Is that rational or cynical? –Doubting Thomas
I think you're right in your suspicions, Thomas. Your namesake apostle refused to believe in the miracle of the resurrection until he saw the evidence with his own eyes. But if there is solid evidence to convince us of anything in the year of the Lord 2024, what is it? Pictures lie and machines hallucinate. Social science is unable to reproduce the most basic experiments. Data analysis can be used to prove basically anything at a certain scale. It's easy to feel like something has been lost, that our faith in consensus reality, or any kind of reality, is diminishing.
