Until recently, the direct pick-up of feelings and intentions was mysterious, but neuroscience has now cast light on the subject. Researchers have found brain cells that they appropriately call mirror-neurons. These neurons fire both when you make a meaningful movement and when you see another person make that movement. That suggests that whenever we see an action we are directly put into the brain state that causes such an action. So, if not inhibited, you would imitate an action upon seeing it. Yawning is a case where the inhibition seems to be missing: Seeing someone yawn directly makes you yawn. Moods, like yawning, are contagious, and such direct body-to-body sensitivity is impossible for an isolated computer user deliberately controlling his public avatar.

The current Cartesian model for expressing emotion in Second Life thus poses an insurmountable barrier to genuine communication. But Rosedale tells me that the programmers at Linden Lab are now working on just the sort of direct communication I would have thought impossible in Second Life. His programmers, he says, are developing software that, if you train a webcam on yourself, will enable the computer to pick up and use your head and upper-body movements to control the movements of your avatar directly. In this way, your avatar could directly manifest your spontaneous feelings.

Still, even if the camera captured your posture, style, speed, energy, and facial expression, it is an open question how much of that information could be manifested by your avatar. The avatar's body, especially its face, would have to be sufficiently human-like to reproduce your subtle body movements. If that were possible, people at their computers, already in a mood although they didn't know it, would smuggle their moods into their avatars' reactions without realizing they were doing so, just as they now smuggle in distance-standing practices from real life. Like an atmosphere, such a mood would be beyond the control of any one person and would draw in each new participant's avatar like a raindrop into a hurricane.

Given the current Cartesian model, however, the best one can do is direct one's avatar to go through the motions of a wedding, a funeral, a sporting event, or a family dinner, but there is no possibility of a global atmosphere. Moods can be experienced only as private inner feelings communicated between isolated individuals by controlled body movements, just as Cartesian philosophers have held. There can be no contagion, no excitement of being swept up into a shared atmosphere, no self-contained world, and no sense that something important and gratifying is happening. So, as long as Second Life avatars operate within the Cartesian framework, a valuable, cross-cultural, ancient and modern way of making life worth living will inevitably be unattainable. If we want to live life at its best, we will have to embrace our embodied involvement in the risky, moody, real world.

Adapted from the forthcoming new edition of On the Internet (Thinking in Action), reprinted with permission from Routledge and Hubert Dreyfus. Watch Professor Dreyfus's podcasts.

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