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I'm taking an ethics seminar, and a fascinating topic was bantered about today. I'll ask a few questions and then drive on to the ethical-social consideration. This should prove interesting.
Disregarding online services (i.e., internet matchmaking services):
Has anyone in Paizonia fallen in love online?
Did the relationship develop completely online?
Did a serious commitment (such as marriage) result from the online romance?
Did you appreciate a desire to have a serious relationship before you may have physically met the other individual?
I met my future wife online five years ago or so. My roomate and I would get bored, log on to an AOL chat room and stage fake arguments condeming each other loudly. We'd wait and see who'd chime in on either side of whatever inane point we were attempting to make.
I was poor and couldn't afford nickle beers and the gas to get to the University Pub. We had to make our own fun. Like a cardboard box fort when you were a kid.
Regardless, I ended up trying to get this one girl to side with me. She was becoming increasingly annoyed with my advances. Two years later we were married. She is still annoyed.
as to your other questions..... we only talked for a month or so online before we met and our relationship wasn't particuarly serious over the phone and the internet.
I had what might be called a romantic relationship with someone online. It was in the AOL RPG Chat Rooms. The relationship started out in character, but eventually, the two of us started emailing one another, sending letters to one another, and even calling each other. It was never meant to be, though. The woman was quite a bit older than me, and she lived in Texas. She also got married not long after I met her. Nevertheless, I felt very close to her all through our relationship, and would consider the feelings we shared very real, even if they evolved entirely in an online fantasy setting.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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My best friend had been involved in two prior relationships with women he met through MUDDing back in the 90s. Both failed spectacularly after a weekend or two of real life encounters. So, when he told me he met a girl playing Final Fantasy Online and was going to go to Hawaii to meet her, I think my exact words were "Are you really that f!+%ing stupid? Don't do it."
Anyone who guessed that he married the girl last year after a four year relationship wins a cupie doll.
Met a friend's mom while playing "Team Fortress Quake", dated for 2 years... relationship suffered death by long distance. (California & Pennsylvania)
I also met someone in AOL chat, lasted about 3 months. Insanely cute... did I mention the insane part?
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Topic that came up in the seminar:
You engage in an online romance where, after some time (perhaps several years), you become completely enamored--you have fallen in love. The two of you have decided to marry and you will meet for the first time tomorrow.
Background:
-It is sometime in the future and VR is commonplace; it is the current standard method of online interface (think V-World in the TV show Caprica, or The Matrix, as references to the realism of the VR environment).
-You have been conducting virtual dating for the majority of your relationship, and even participated in virtual vacations.
Ask yourself the following, and be as honest as possible:
-Do you value appearance? To what degree? What are you attracted to?
-What is your sexual orientation?
-Are you racially-motivated or do you have an otherwise racist mindset? Be sure to identify whether or not you would likely marry outside your race.
The meeting:
The individual you have fallen in love with turns out, in person, to be the physical polar opposite of how you answered above; this includes their gender.
Ask yourself, ignoring the fact that the other individual has deliberately misled you for several years: How do you feel? What will come of the relationship?
Of course, this is a thought exercise and I'm not expecting anyone to actually respond (though you should feel free to do so).
It's hard for me to imagine I would ever agree to marry someone that I've never met in real life. I think there's a lot of room for fantasy online, and while I think that's fine, I do think that reality is very different, and you need to know if you can relate to the person outside of the virtual world before you can ever agree to marriage. I would therefore probably want to date for a while and make sure that this person is someone with whom I can see myself spending the rest of my life before I ever agreed to marriage.
As far as physical traits, I think it really depends on what the person has already told me. If the person sends me a picture of a beautiful girl, and it turns out that they don't look anything like the picture they sent me, I'm going to be pretty upset simply because the person lied to me. On the other hand, if the person never told me anything about how they look, and I never asked, then it's my own fault for not asking.
As far as our relationship is concerned, it really depends. Since I'm a heterosexual, I don't think I could engage in a sexual relationship with a man. The reason I say that is because I don't think sexual orientation is a choice, and as such, I don't think I could ever be sexually attracted to someone of the same sex, even if we had a very intimate relationship online.
If it's a woman, even if she's not what I would consider physically attractive, I might try to give the relationship a go. I've had friends in the past whom I didn't consider attractive, and yet for whom I had intimate feelings. The only reason those relationships never went anywhere is because the other person never expressed any attraction towards me.
As far as race is concerned, I can't imagine that would be a problem. Granted, I've only had one girlfriend who isn't white, but I have been attracted to girls from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, so I can't imagine that would bother me at all.
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The 'Matrix' quality of the experiment is key--in this scenario, VR is assumed to be so advanced that it is 'virtually' indistinguishable from 'real-life.'
The scenario asks the question, essentially, how might a homophobe or racist react when they realize that the real-life person they've fallen in love with necessarily puts them at odds with their fundamentals? Could it be enough to force change ( a kind of love conquers all).
I think it's arguable that the average individual notices appearance first, and character (or personality, if you prefer) second; but in Western cultures, at least, it's the character one falls in love with.
Thus, in a future scenario with ubiquitous, real-to-life VR interface--where someone might live an entire virtual life observably indistinguishable from reality (in this scenario, only intellectually does one know that VR is artificial)--it is entirely possible to experience the gamut of human emotions and sensations. Quite literally, it would be possible to fall in love with someone you've never actually met. Psychologically, it is the individual's personality you become attached to, not their blonde hair and smooth complexion.
Alternatively, what psychological effect would there be if you learned the person was not a person at all, but machine code; a program?
Interesting thought experiment. Let's see. Presuming I could get past the lying, which is a pretty big assumption since dishonesty is pretty much a dealbreaker for me....Well, I'm bisexual, so I could deal with either gender, although I would be more likely to be okay with a 'man' who turned out to be a woman than a 'woman' who turned out to be a man since I'm in general more attracted to women than men. But it's conceivable that I could accept the change either way. Appearance, well attraction has some to do with appearance, but if I was in love with someone obviously I would see them in the most positive light so would likely find them attractive still once I'd gotten over the shock of the reality differing from my expectation. And race is a non-issue for me when it comes to attraction since any race can be attractive.
But if the 'person' turned out to be a computer program...that would be utterly devastating. I mean, this person isn't really a person at all.
The 'Matrix' quality of the experiment is key--in this scenario, VR is assumed to be so advanced that it is 'virtually' indistinguishable from 'real-life.'
I don't think this is in any way 'key.' As I said before, if someone deliberately strung me along, making me think that they look like their avatar, then I wouldn't be able to continue a relationship with them. If they're hiding something like that from me, what else are they hiding? Financial problems? A criminal history? Sexually transmitted diseases? How can I be in a relationship with someone who can't even trust me enough to show me what they really look like?
On the other hand, if the person explained to me beforehand that they don't look like their avatar, then I would be a little more understanding. I might not be able to continue the relationship if it turned out that the person is really a guy, because as I said, I don't think sexuality is a choice. You either feel a certain way about a particular gender, or you don't. The rest of it, though, I think I could handle.
Again, though, I wouldn't want to marry anyone without first spending some time with them in real life. After all, living with someone is very different from dating them, and spending time with a person outside of a computer environment is very different from spending time with them in reality, I don't care how realistic it is. If you want to use the Matrix as an example, just think about how different the world is outside the Matrix. Does anything inside the Matrix prepare you for what you're about to experience once you leave?
Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Take them for what they're worth.
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The 'Matrix' quality of the experiment is key--in this scenario, VR is assumed to be so advanced that it is 'virtually' indistinguishable from 'real-life.'I don't think this is in any way 'key.' ...
Ethics arguments require parameters and restrictions and constraints, as in this case requiring that the argument ignore the underlying deception.
Without such a constraint, the argument never evolves past that one point of contention. One of the parameters of this argument is that you ignore the lie and focus on the other areas. Thus, for the purposes of this argument, the nature of the perceived reality goes toward the degree of severity to which you would experience genuine emotion for the other party.
The point of using the Matrix and V-World as referential examples was merely to impart the degree of realism experienced in this future VR construct.
Another key to this argument you should use while thinking on it--this is a future environment, so your contemporary ideas and feelings may be supplanted by time and changes in social norms.