Avatar as an out of body experience

My thinking; (My old boss Honda san used ot say this to me in his polite Japanese your-idea-is-full-of-shit tone)

Are virtual worlds, particularly ones like Sl part of our evolution? How long does it take for an avatar to become self conscious? There is a point where how your avatar looks begins to really matter.

How many avatars do you have? Maybe in SL you have only one. Maybe your first avatar was the Adventure text game you played as a kid on your dad's computer. Then there are all your IM avatars, still text base avatars with simple numeric or eight character names if you were in any many of the old Bulletin Board Forums. Your AOL screen name, your IRQ name, are all Avatars representing you at one time or another. Lets not forget your single player video game avatar that branched eventually to multi player games.

Second Life and other virtual worlds take the Avatar so much further than anything in the past. This is happening on several levels. If you have been in Second Life a few months think about how much your avatar has grown and become self conscious, almost self aware. She or he may be an extension of you as Lazlo is of me, but as a friend pointed out, she feels like she is being rewired.

The fact is we are being rewired. In Second Life we live with much more freedom of movement, of experience. We have unlimited free travel. We can't be physically harmed. We are able to create virtual physical objects out of nothing. We are able experience what we would never dare in RL. This is feeding our brain with new challenges and goals to achieve or overcome. Each new experiences, each new goal or challenge we over come, dumps dopamine into our system and makes us feel good so our brain lays down new neural pathways to get to that dopamine faster. The fact is our Avatars create a new freer sense of immortality.

Is this a step in human evolution? Are we at the beginning of humans letting go of their bodies. Is this just the first step? I am not saying it is my goal or it is anybodies goal but as cyber biology and neural technology allows us to experience touch, scent and taste in virtual worlds the possibilities are wide open. I am saying Second Life may be the point that we as humans began to leave our bodies. In addition consider the number of dis sabled people flying around Second Life free confinement enjoying Second Life being treated the same as everyone else.

It is all just a theory and I might just be full of horse pucky but theories are there to be proved of disproved.