82. IS ALL REALITY VIRTUAL? - Reflecting On My Lack Of Concern About VR

I was asked this week if I'd ever thought about the philosophy of virtual reality technology and its relation to ideas of authenticity.  To be honest, I haven't, but admitting that I haven’t made me consider why I haven’t.  I had, after all, considered the philosophy of other aspects of modern technology.  Artificial Intelligence, for example, has fascinated me for many years - from the initial problem of its very possibility given what David Chalmers has coined "the hard problem of consciousness" (if consciousness is an organic and emergent property which necessarily supervenes on organic and specific physical matter, such as the brain, then is it even possible to artificially create it in a non-organic machine?), to contemporary ethical conundrums over self-driving cars and moral accountability in the event of an inevitable - but statistically less frequent - fatal road accident (with human agency we may have more deaths, but would each death bring with it more accountability than the randomised probability of death by sheer computer-error?)  More recently I have become interested in the idea of replicating repression through computer programming: if we as human beings hold unconscious - and conscious - biases and live in structures which may be inherently racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, etc. then how can we prevent those biases, prejudices and discriminations being replicated in, or informing, the artificial intelligences we design?  (For example- facial recognition software which can't distinguish between black faces as well as it can between white faces. If that feeds into the AI programming of self-driving cars do we now have statistically less roads traffic deaths, but statistically more deaths of black people the cars do not recognise as people? Would the self-driving cars be racist?).  Give me any of these issues and I'm all over them.  But when a close friend tells me that they are developing the skills to programme virtual reality my thoughts don’t get particularly critical. They only drift to the great innovation the artist B. Dolan came up with during lockdown of holding a music festival virtually, within the world of Minecraft.  We chatted about immersive experiences - being able to "visit" places from the comfort of your own home - even potential "reality" television formats which could incorporate the virtual reality into it - but at no point in our conversation did I raise any ethical objections or philosophical caveats about his new endeavour.

I guess that part of it is that virtual reality only seems capable - in its current form - of deception by consent.  One needs to be strapped into a VR headset and maybe into some other haptic clothing to be "tricked" by what it offers.  Although the illusion may be very realistic, the set up is essentially no different from going to a magic show, wrestling match, play or movie where you know you are about to be deceived and are choosing to have that deceptive, inauthentic experience.  There is little more to say on that account therefore that hasn't already been considered regarding why we as humans might sometimes enjoy intentional self-deception or aspire to fantasy. VR is just more of this same, well-trodden path philosophers have been worrying about since Plato first raised his objections about mimesis.  

Another reason the VR hasn't caught my philosophical attention is because, to me, the VR aspect merely reflects whatever real-world phenomenon it has been chosen to virtually resemble and the philosophical discussion comes from analysing the reality, not its virtual approximation.  So in the B. Dolan/ Minecraft example - that the festival was virtual didn't cause me much thought qua virtual reality. Instead I wondered about things like charging money for watching what was essentially pre-recorded musical performances and whether the lack of travel/ lack of equipment and set up etc. was considered in the ticketing to the event.  A real-life festival, for example, needs to cover within the cost of a ticket not only the fee for every performing band, but for every tech, engineer, medic, security guard, etc. working the venue. The same question is asked of a festival in the real world: are the tickets too expensive? And festivals themselves raise questions in the real world about the commodification of art (why is the expensive festival format preferred over cheaper, smaller gigs?), the purpose of the event (is it to hear great music or get drunk in a field?), and fairness and authority in music (who decides who plays?), etc.  When my friend and I discussed virtually being able to visit a museum, we saw the virtual rendering of the wonders of the world merely as a means by which perhaps now historic stolen items could be returned to the countries and peoples they were taken from.  The British Museum, for example, made virtual, does not need the stolen hoarding of empire to remain in the UK to attract visitors and tourist income and loses what little leg it may have left to stand on regarding its continued profiting from colonial conquest. While one could ask if “seeing” an artefact virtually instead of really seeing it is the same experience - but as I ask my students each year when we discuss replacing the Mona Lisa in the Louvre with a perfect forgery replica: how do we even know the “original” is not already a replica?

The more I pondered on the question, the more I realised that the whole virtual bit of virtual reality probably hadn't bothered me philosophically because worries about "reality" being made "virtual" presuppose a definitive knowledge that "reality" is something permanent and non-virtual.  As a philosopher, too many years of Descartes' evil demon or brain-in-a-vat thought experiments have put me at peace with the notion that the world I perceive may not, in fact, be “real” already (if by “real” we mean mind-independent).  Concerns about the constructed nature of core concepts which shape our so-called reality - and the subsequent fluidity such constructivism entails - have already undermined many notions of ontological "authenticity" surrounding many of my day-to-day experiences.  We have all hypothesised the possibility that we may be stuck in the Matrix or Plato’s cave.  And what philosopher isn't haunted by not only the notion of Plato's prisoners, staring at shadows playing at the cave walls, but the further, more horrifying idea, that the freed prisoner who sees the sun may, themselves, one day come to realise that even the world outside the cave was merely a second illusion, reflecting a truer reality that lies elsewhere?

My response to all these frequent philosophical canards has always been the same: maybe my so-called "reality" is just a dream?  Maybe I am merely an unwitting participant in The Truman Show?  But if the world as I have come to understand it is all that I know then, until I awake, until the lighting rig falls from the sky, until I find myself crawling out of the cave, perception is reality.  There may not "really" be a chair I am sitting on and a desk in front of me - but in whatever false reality I am currently stuck in, through the perceptual tools that I have, a chair and a desk is what I perceive and, so far, there seems to be a happy correlation between what I think is real and what I appear to be able to do.  I can sit on the chair and write at the desk.  When I am thirsty, I sip what seems to me to be a real drink and my apparent physical body - which may not actually exist - appears to be sustained.  Such coherency - no more and no less than that which can be achieved by the VR headset, a thoughtful camera cut, or a magician's trick - serves me well and, not having access to anything beyond that immediate understanding of what I believe "reality" to be, it doesn't really matter beyond its potential as interesting trivia whether or not there is, in fact, something "truer" out there unknown to me beyond the veil of my perceptions: actual reality.  I am not there, I am here.  My reality therefore is this reality.

This is not an appeal to total subjectivity and self-delusion.  Within the framework of the reality I believe to be real - the world I appear to be actively living in - there remain truths over which I appear to have no control.  Science, engineering, mathematics, but also contingent truths.  In my reality - the results of last Thursday's local elections across the UK remain an objective fact - I cannot dispute a particular ballot I disagree with just because I don't like it, even while I could possibly endorse the idea that the ballot, the society, the voters and myself may all be a figment in the imagination of an evil demon.  Within the game, the rules of the game can't be broken.

All of which is a way of saying that I suppose I haven't been too bothered by the inauthenticity and virtual nature of virtual reality because I am just as epistemically concerned by what is happening once the VR headset comes off as I am when it is on.  At least in the virtual world I am consenting to the deception and may even be able to speak to the programmer to be deceived in a way bespoke to my requirements.  Here, outside the VR, I am stuck with the potential that this merely a simulation whatever happens, whether it is a simulation or not.  I can never say that I know it is not. can "infer to the best explanation" that reality is real, I can posit it as a "best hypothesis" and provide arguments which give me "license to assent" to the proposition - but can I ever truly know that this reality is any "truer" than VR?  Not really. 

Which, like I said, is fine - because even if it is false, to me, in this reality, it is nothing but real.  In the theatre they call it "suspending your disbelief".  In philosophy we might call it "sanity-preserving bracketing of the legitimate challenge of scepticism".  We must do it or else we lose our minds - just like David Hume, deciding there is no basis by which he can empirically believe in causation yet accepting the "custom and habit" of using such language will remain.  There is no basis on which to say causation is a thing - but we must live our lives as if it is. And when the grim revelations of philosophy prove too much, Hume doesn’t prescribe committing oneself to the truth but rather stepping away from the philosophy: “I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.“

One could swap out causation for ethics, for god, for aesthetics, for identity - there are many philosophical anti-realists who accept the non-existence or possible non-existence of widely believed concepts or experiences and yet advocate living as if they are real nevertheless, for a wide range of reasons. So while it is true that virtual reality poses the potential, for example, of inauthentic experiences: of falling in love with a person who turns out - in reality - not to be who you thought that they were or thinking you have experienced A when, in fact, you have experienced B, such disappointments - or inauthenticity - also happens in "real" life all the time.  Knowledge of others, knowledge of everyday phenomena, knowledge of reality itself is often far beyond our reach.  To worry about a reality which is virtual is to worry about reality itself.  And as philosophers we have already been doing that since long before virtual reality was even a concern and will likely still be asking those questions about reality long after the last VR headset has been landfilled. It’s not that I’m not concerned, it is that I am concerned already. 

Now, time to go play some socially distanced backgammon with my friends...

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE