Pål Antonsen: Self-location in interactive fiction

Sammendrag

"This talk is about how to make sense of the idea that interactive fiction essentially involves adopting self-locating counterfactual attitudes, and how we can use this idea to characterise some parts of our talk and thought that have resisted standard methods.

A counterfactual attitude is one that you can coherently adopt while taking its content to be false. This includes imaginings and desires. Knowing I don't have a chocolate chip muffin is no obstacle to me wanting one or imagining that I did. Knowing that I don't (but noticing that you do) may in fact be what prompted my desire and imagining to begin with. These attitudes count as self-locating when they are thoughts one entertain in a characteristically first-person manner and express using first person pronouns ('I', 'me', 'myself').

Let's do an example. Imagine you are Lady Dedlock from Dickens's Bleak House. You are standing by the window, your calm demeanour concealing the turmoil inside. The family lawyer has just uncovered your past secret; the one that will destroy you. Your hatred for this cold blooded snake has become tainted with fear. As your world is falling apart you ​graciously turn to the lawyer asking him to stay for dinner.

You can entertain these thoughts if you want to, but reading Bleak House doesn't require that you do. This is what makes interactive fictions special. They do ​actually ​require that we imagine ourselves occupying the perspective of others. What I am calling counterfactual self-locating attitudes are implicated in several traditional puzzles, such as personal identity, metaphysics of the mind, moral psychology, and intentional explanations of action and emotion.

A recurring strategy in these debates is denying the possibility of adopting attitudes of the kind that I am invoking. Therefore, I will be mostly concerned with refuting this argument. The refutation will consist in explicating how we can coherently imagine being someone else."