avatar

An avatar is the computed character you play in a virtual reality (VR). In our Physical Matter Reality (PMR), your avatar is your physical body.

According to My Big TOE, we are Individuated Units of Consciousness (IUOC) playing avatars in the VR we call our physical universe (PMR). Just like we humans can choose to play characters in a video game, the “real us” – that is, our IUOCs – chose to play our physical bodies in this PMR.

Moreover, just like avatars in a video game, our physical-body avatars have certain abilities and limitations. Crucially, they have to obey the PMR ruleset (which we colloquially call the “laws of nature”). They thus represent a part of the external conditions which define our individual decision space while we are logged on to PMR.

Because the PMR simulation is so convincing, most people identify with their avatar almost completely, building their fears, ego and beliefs around it. In many people, the identification has even become so strong that they believe there’s nothing more to them than their physical body.

To a certain extent, such identification with the avatar is necessary for the PMR simulation to be efficient, because it makes us take the choices we make in PMR seriously. On the other hand, an excessive identification with the avatar driven by fear, ego and beliefs can become an impediment to the evolution of our consciousness (the lowering of one’s entropy).

In the My Big TOE model, both human and animal bodies represent suitable avatars for IUOCs to log on to (or more precisely, for Free Will Awareness Units to log on to). At the lower end of the animal kingdom, it may seem unclear which life forms are actually conscious (that is, whether an IUOC is playing them or whether the organism is actually a non-player character that is “played” by the system). However, it seems reasonable to assume that most animal avatars, just like human ones, are being played by IUOCs with the same goal of making good choices and lowering their entropy – albeit to a much smaller degree.

The main criterion My Big TOE proposes for deciding whether an avatar can in principle be played by an IUOC is the question whether it provides a large enough decision space for IUOCs to make free-will choices that afford them the opportunity to learn and grow their quality of consciousness.

According to My Big TOE, therefore, computers and robots may in the future “become conscious” if they represent suitable non-carbon-based avatars – that is, if they don’t operate deterministically but contain so much uncertainty in their internal decision-making that they provide sufficient decision space for an IUOC to log on and make choices for them “from the outside”. These reflections are at the heart of the My Big TOE Conscious Computer project (see the Volunteering page on this website).

(Note that the term avatar as used in My Big TOE is unrelated to the way the word is used in the Hindu tradition. My Big TOE refers exclusively to the avatar concept used in modern video games and virtual reality applications.)

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