Is it the real deal? Perception of virtual characters versus humans: an affective cognitive neuroscience perspective

Recent developments in neuroimaging research support the increased use of naturalistic stimulus material such as film, animations, or androids. These stimuli allow for a better understanding of how the brain processes information in complex situations while maintaining experimental control. While avatars and androids are well suited to study human cognition, they should not be equated to human stimuli. For example, the Uncanny Valley hypothesis theorizes that artificial agents with high human-likeness may evoke feelings of eeriness in the human observer. Here we review if, when, and how the perception of human-like avatars and androids differs from the perception of humans and consider how this influences their utilization as stimulus material in social and affective neuroimaging studies. First, we discuss how the appearance of virtual characters affects perception. When stimuli are morphed across categories from non-human to human, the most ambiguous stimuli, rather than the most human-like stimuli, show prolonged classification times and increased eeriness. Human-like to human stimuli show a positive linear relationship with familiarity. Secondly, we show that expressions of emotions in human-like avatars can be perceived similarly to human emotions, with corresponding behavioral, physiological and neuronal activations, with exception of physical dissimilarities. Subsequently, we consider if and when one perceives differences in action representation by artificial agents versus humans. Motor resonance and predictive coding models may account for empirical findings, such as an interference effect on action for observed human-like, natural moving characters. However, the expansion of these models to explain more complex behavior, such as empathy, still needs to be investigated in more detail. Finally, we broaden our outlook to social interaction, where virtual reality stimuli can be utilized to imitate complex social situations

“More Human Than Human”: Lacan’s Mirror Stage Theory and Posthumanism in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

In my thesis, Philip K. Dick\u27s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is examined using French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan\u27s mirror stage theory. In the novel, humans have built androids that are almost indistinguishable from humans except that they lack a sense of empathy, or so the humans believe. The Voigt-Kampff Machine is a polygraph-like device used to determine if a subject shows signs of empathy in order to confirm if one is an android or a human. Yet, should empathy be the defining quality of determining humanity? In his article The mirror stage as formative of the function of the ‘I’ as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, Lacan refers to a particular critical milestone in an infant\u27s psychological development. When the baby looks in a mirror, they come to the realization that the image they are seeing is not just any ordinary image; it is actually themselves in the mirror. This a-ha moment of self-realization is what Lacan\u27s Mirror Stage Theory is based on. According to Lacan\u27s theory, the image that the child sees in a mirror becomes an Other through which they will always scrutinize and pass judgment on, for it is not how they have pictured themselves to be in their mind’s eye. I hypothesize that the androids are humans\u27 artificial and technological Other. It is my thought that Dick uses the conflict of determining the biological from the artificial, the effort to differentiate humans from androids and biological animals from artificial ones, to illustrate Lacan\u27s psychoanalysis of the mirror stage and its importance in our continual search for determining what humanity is and who we really are

Time to Play the Religion Card: Messiah Complexes in Battlestar Galactica

In 2003, Battlestar Galactica (BSG) was re-invented from its 1978 roots and updated to a post-apocalyptic narrative that reflects numerous issues in current American culture, including the influence of religious rhetoric in post-9/11 politics. As theorized by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the fictions of a culture reveal the subconscious values and beliefs of that culture, 1 and BSG has proven fertile ground for such investigations. Four major compilations of critical essays on BSG have been published to date, with some articles analyzing the post-9/11 politics and others on the use of religion in the narrative, but few examine these elements in conjunction with each other or how the characters use them. This combination of political and religious rhetoric is especially important in how BSG cultivates multiple messianic characters to drive its narrative and resolve complex issues for its characters - yet the published scholarship remains silent on this. For a single narrative to contain multiple messianic characters is a rare phenomenon, for as mythologist Joseph Campbell observes, such salvation figures operate on global and cosmic scales. 2 Yet BSG transforms the characters of Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar into a space-age Moses and Christ, respectively, and more importantly it makes their tag-team messiahships a necessity for the narrative. In creating this messianic multiplicity, BSG suggests that a single individual cannot address all of the needs of a desperate people - a messiah can function either in the political realm ( serving as an agent of physical salvation) or on a spiritual level (delivering emotional redemption), but not both. Much of this messianic dualism emerges in the characters' rhetorical strategies - relying on classical Aristotelian forms vs. Judeo-Christian sermonic oratory, how they address underlying needs to appeal to the people, and in the ultimate 'scope' of their messianic influence on their societal and cultural history. Their messianic transformations and the mythic nature of the BSG narrative itself take a modem twist on Jungian archetypes and Campbellian universals, and thus guided by the same theorists that influenced their construction, I analyze the messiahships of Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar through their use of political and religious rhetoric, how that rhetoric transforms them and their followers, and what this unique storytelling reveals about post-9/11 American perspectives

Assessment of Society\u27s Awareness, Acceptance, and Demand for Robotic Wait Staff in Restaurant Operations

This research study consists of an assessment of participants\u27 awareness of robotics in general and also their acceptance and consumer demand for mobile, humanoid robots in the role of robotic waiters in restaurants. The study also includes the awareness and consumer demand for Microsoft Surface Computers to be potentially used as restaurant tables capable of electronic order entry, payment, and entertainment. The social impacts of such high technology upon the human occupation of waiter or waitress were also examined relative to the resistance to automation from current human wait staff. The overall results of the study were luke-warm demand for robotic waiters, strong demand for Microsoft Surface Computers, and resistance to robotic waiters among most wait staff

Metamorphoses of the Pygmalion Myth in French Literature 1771 – 1886

Writers have long explored and attempted to portray the visual artist’s challenge of creating the ideal in the real world through art. My thesis asserts that the Pygmalion myth, originally told in written form in Ovid’s 8 A.D. Metamorphoses, is the quintessential model to explore the changing, and sometimes problematic, relationships between the artist, the creation, and the creative process. The three main characters in the Pygmalion myth – the sculptor, the sculpture, and the divine intervention – each appear, albeit in different manifestations, in its later adaptations. Throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in French literature, authors explored this tripartite relationship in their texts. I claim that the retellings in my corpus attest to a renewed interest in Ovid’s myth at a time when ideologies and conceptions about the creative process underwent significant changes. Plato’s conception of the ideal in The Phaedrus and The Republic serves as a grounding for each of my texts. I begin my examination with an exegesis of the Pygmalion poem in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Chapter two explores the creation theme at the heart of Pygmalion’s quest in eighteenth-century theater to indicate the point at which French literature saw a marked increase in Pygmalion adaptations. Here, I introduce L’Amante statue (1774) and La Fausse statue (1771) into the Pygmalion corpus. Looking at the ways in which the creator figure attempts to control the potential of the ideal object through destructive means, I turn to nineteenth-century fantastic short stories in Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille (1837) and Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831/7). A final chapter reveals how innovations in technology and artifice aid the artist in reconstructing the ideal in two decadent novels: Villiers’s L’Eve future (1886) and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus (1884). This dissertation will contribute to nineteenth-century French literary studies and eighteenth-century theater as well. Adding criticism of two eighteenth-century plays to the already significant body of Pygmalion retellings underlines the myth’s renewed popularity at the time. Each chapter examines these adaptations as part of a greater metamorphosis of the Pygmalion story itself. From creation to destruction to reconstruction, the creator figure adapts - with varied results - to a changing artistic, technological, and cultural environment

Cyber-Narrative in Opera: Three Case Studies

This dissertation looks at three newly composed operas that feature what I call cyber-narratives: a work in which the story itself is inextricably linked with digital technologies, such that the characters utilize, interact with, or are affected by digital technologies to such a pervasive extent that the impact of said technologies is thematized within the work. Through an analysis of chat rooms and real-time text communication in Nico Muhly’s Two Boys (2011), artificial intelligence in Søren Nils Eichberg’s Glare (2014), and mind uploading and digital immortality in Tod Machover’s Death and the Powers (2010), a nexus of ideologies surrounding voice, the body, gender, digital anthropology, and cyber-culture are revealed. I consider the interpretive possibilities that emerge when analyzing voice and musical elements in conjunction with cultural references within the libretti, visual design choices in the productions, and directorial decisions in the evolution of each work. I theorize the expressive power of the operatic medium in dramatizing and personifying new forms of technology, while simultaneously exposing how these technologically oriented narratives reinforce and rely upon operatic tropes of the past. Recurring themes of misogyny and objectification of women across all three works are addressed, as is the framing of digital technology as a mechanism of dehumanization. This analysis also focuses on the unique sung and embodied aspect of opera, and how the human voice shapes concepts of identity, agency, and individuality in the digital age. All three case studies demonstrate how opera gives the cyber-narrative every possible mode of expression to explore the complexities and anxieties of human-machine relationships in the digital era, as all three operas question how the thematized technologies may come to re-define our perception and experience of humanity itself

Anxieties and artificial women: disassembling the pop culture gynoid

2018 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis analyzes the cultural meanings of the feminine-presenting robot, or gynoid, in three popular sci-fi texts: The Stepford Wives (1975), Ex Machina (2013), and Westworld (2017). Centralizing a critical feminist rhetorical approach, this thesis outlines the symbolic meaning of gynoids as representing cultural anxieties about women and technology historically and in each case study. This thesis draws from rhetorical analyses of media, sci-fi studies, and previously articulated meanings of the gynoid in order to discern how each text interacts with the gendered and technological concerns it presents. The author assesses how the text equips—or fails to equip—the public audience with motives for addressing those concerns. Prior to analysis, each chapter synthesizes popular and scholarly criticisms of the film or series and interacts with their temporal contexts. Each chapter unearths a unique interaction with the meanings of gynoid: The Stepford Wives performs necrophilic fetishism to alleviate anxieties about the Women's Liberation Movement; Ex Machina redirects technological anxieties towards the surveilling practices of tech industries, simultaneously punishing exploitive masculine fantasies; Westworld utilizes fantasies and anxieties cyclically in order to maximize its serial potential and appeal to impulses of its viewership, ultimately prescribing a rhetorical placebo. The conclusion synthesizes each chapter topically and ruminates on real-world implications. Overall, this thesis urges critical attention toward the gynoids' role in oppressive hierarchies onscreen and in reality

The Image of Rebirth in Literature, Media, and Society: 2017 SASSI Conference Proceedings

Conference proceedings of the 2017 meeting of the Society for the Academic Study of Social Imagery (SASSI). Selected, refereed essays on the conference theme of The Image of REBIRTH in Literature, Media, and Society

How Oracle erred: The "Use/Explanation Distinction" and the future of computer copyright

In Oracle v. Google (2015), the Federal Circuit addressed whether the "method header" components of a dominant computer program were uncopyrightable as "merging" with the headers' ideas or function. Google had copied the headers to ease the ability of third-party programmers to interact with Google's Android platform. The court rebugged the copyrightability challenge; it reasoned that because the plaintiff's expression might have been written in alternative forms, there was no "merger" of idea and expression. But the Oracle court may have been asking the wrong question. In Lotus v. Borland (1995), the owner of a dominant spreadsheet program sought to prevent a new competitor's program from making available a set of "command menu" headers based on the dominant program's menus. The defendant also wrote its own, original command menus, but provided the copied menus as an option to relieve customers who, migrating from the dominant spreadsheet, would otherwise have had a substantial burden to master new terms and rewrite macros. In assessing the legality of the copying in Lotus, the First Circuit started its inquiry not with a question about how the plaintiff's program might have been written, but rather with how the program actually was written. It then identified the menu commands as "methods of operation" because they were necessary to make the actual program operate a computer. The copyright statute renders "methods of operation" per se uncopyrightable, regardless of the possibility of alternatives. Debates over the conflict between Oracle and Lotus have largely ignored a middle road that supports the Lotus result without the potential for overkill some observers see in Lotus. This middle road is a doctrine known as the "explanation/use" distinction. Laid out in the classic Supreme Court case of Baker v. Selden (1880), and ratified by statutory provisions of the Copyright Act including the much-ignored section 113(b), the "explanation/use distinction" specifies that a copyright owner has no power to control behaviors that belong to the domain of utility patent. Like "merger" and "method of operation," the "explanation/use" doctrine implements the deference that, pursuant to Congressional command and Supreme Court precedent, U.S. copyright law must give to patent law. However, the explanation/use doctrine operates by limiting the scope of the exclusive rights a copyright owner might otherwise possess, not by targeting the copyrightability of what plaintiff produced. This chapter examines justifications for the "explanation/use distinction", and suggests a two-part test for implementing that doctrine. The chapter argues that a copyright owner should have no prima facie rights over copying behavior where (1) the goals of the copying are "use" (behavior in the realm of utility patent) and (2) the copying is done solely for goals unrelated to the expressiveness of the plaintiff's work of authorship. (The copying of Oracle and Lotus seem to have been fully indifferent to expressive values; the result might be different in a case where defendant's goals are mixed.) This two-part test is met by the defendants in Oracle and Lotus. (1) Making a machine operate is clearly utilitarian. And as for (2) indifference to expression, both Lotus and Oracle involve someone copying a computer interface to enable users to interoperate: third-party programmers could use or design Java-enabled programs on Android, and spreadsheet users could use their prior macros on a new spreadsheet program. Interoperability is one of the few areas where indifference to expression is clear: After all, when one wants a spare key made, the elegance or beauty of the key's shape is irrelevant -- all that matters is that the shape fits the lock