D2.13: Virtual Persons and Identities

D2.13 Virtual Persons PHYSICAL ENTITIES AND VIRTUAL ENTITIES

Physical entities and virtual entities

As already mentioned, the basic conceptual elements of the proposed model are called “entities”. An entity is anything that has a distinct existence; it is the fundamental “thing” that can be identified. The nature of the existence can be material or abstract. In the former case, in which some sort of physical constituent is compulsory, we call it a “physical entity”. Examples of physical entities are specific living organisms (e.g., human beings, animals or plants), concrete non-living objects (e.g., stones, buildings or clouds) or instances of other physical phenomena (e.g., sunbeams, wind or the terrestrial magnetic field). Human beings, a particular type of physical entity, are closely related – if not equivalent to – physical persons. A “physical person” is the legally living body of a human being. It can be seen as a kind of mask: ,

The existence of a physical entity is time-dependant and the lifetime of a physical entity is usually bound in time. At any specific point in time, a physical entity either exists or not. For example, a physical person will no longer be considered as a physical entity after her death, when her body will have disappeared. In 2000, the physical buildings known as the Twin Towers were still existing physical entities. In 2008, they do not exist as physical entities anymore.

In case the existence is abstract, which means essentially that the entity is or has been a product of the mind or imagination, we call it a “virtual entity”.

Virtual entities are thus entirely detached from any physical reality. They typically belong to concepts, thoughts, perceptions, illusions, categories, or abstractions. Examples of virtual entities are specific roles (e.g., the French President), concrete classes, categories or groups (e.g., the female Harvard students, the Swiss citizens), legal persons (e.g., Microsoft Corp.), objects in a virtual reality environment (e.g., a specific mountain in Google Earth), avatars in online games (e.g., in Second Life), pseudonyms in anonymous internet or web applications (e.g., in chat rooms, eBay or Skype), autonomous software agents or the virtual image in a mirror. In 2008, the Twin Towers still exist as a concept, as a virtual entity. They have been existing as a virtual entity way before they were ever built, actually since the very first time somebody imagined them.

Each virtual entity requires at least someone’s mind by which it is or has been perceived or produced. This means that virtual entities never disappear; they outlive their physical originators.

Virtual persons

Some virtual entities can have rights, duties, obligations and/or responsibilities associated to them: for example, “the CEO of Apple Inc.”, “the President of France”, “the owner of a house”, avatars in online games, etc. Other virtual entities cannot have such rights, duties, obligations and/or responsibilities associated to them: for example, “the Sun”, “a white sheet of paper”, etc.

This allows us to make a clear distinction between those two categories of virtual entities. A virtual entity that can have rights, duties, obligations and/or responsibilities associated to it in a certain context is called a “virtual person”. This is one of the key concepts of our model that relates identities with rights, duties, obligations and/or responsibilities.

Avatars are a special kind of virtual persons. However, the concept of virtual person is much broader and should not be reduced to avatars only.

Legal and digital entities

Two types of entities are worth being mentioned explicitly. First, if an entity has some sort of legal subjectivity or if it is legally recognized in a judicial system, we call it a “legal entity”. Legal entities can be physical (e.g., a specific physical person) or virtual (e.g., any specific legal person). Second, if an entity primarily exists in some digital context, e.g., as digitally encoded information or as a running computer program, we will call it “digital entity”. Again, digital entities can be physical (e.g., magnetic storage of bits on a hard drive) or virtual (e.g., one bit of information or a specific avatar in a computer game). The sets of legal and digital entities are mostly disjoint, but there are a few important exceptions (e.g., a legally binding digital signature, DRM protected files), which clearly belong to both sets.

Other types exist: inert entities, living entities, etc. But again, on top of this, any entity is either physical or virtual.  

Physical world and virtual world

For any specific point in time, the collection of all existing physical entities is what we call the “physical world” at that specific time and the collection of all existing virtual entities is what we call the “virtual world” at that specific time.,

Both worlds are time-dependent, but only the virtual world is cumulative (monotonically increasing) as virtual entities never disappear. This makes the virtual world much less time sensitive than the physical one.

We say that an entity belongs to the physical (resp. virtual) world if there is at least one point in time when this entity belongs to the physical (resp. virtual) world at that point in time.  

In our model, we suppose the physical world and the virtual world to be exhaustive and exclusive, i.e., anything considered being an entity belongs exactly to one of the two possible worlds. More precisely, the exhaustivity condition means that, for any entity, there is at least one point in time when it belongs to one of those two worlds at that point in time. The exclusivity means that if an entity belongs to one of these two worlds at a certain point in time, then it cannot belong to the other world, even at another point in time.

The model proposed in this document has two distinct, but interconnected layers at any specific time T.

Figure : The physical world and the virtual world are time-dependant