Abstract
Recent discussions in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind have defended a theory according to which we live in a virtual world akin to a computer simulation, generated by our brain. It is argued that our brain creates a model world from a variety of stimuli; this model is perceived as if it was external and perception-independent, even though it is neither of the two. The view of the mind, brain, and world, entailed by this theory (here called “virtual world theory”) has some peculiar consequences which have rarely been explored in detail. This paper sets out virtual world theory (1.1) and relates it to various central philosophical problems (indirect realism (1.2), the role of the perceiver (1.3) and the problem of the existence of the external world (1.4)). The second part suggests three interpretations of virtual world theory, two familiar ones (a strong and a weak one, 2.1) and a somewhat less familiar one (the irrealist interpretation, 2.2). The remainder of the paper argues that the irrealist interpretation is the one we should adopt (2.3–2.6).
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Notes
Metzinger (2010: 23).
Metzinger (2010: 6–7).
Dawkins (1999: 284).
Dawkins (1999: 278).
Lehar (2003).
“Träume sind also nicht epistemisch vollkommen leere Artefakte ohne biologische Funktion, sondern ein ganz bestimmter Typ von exklusiv internem Realitätsmodell, das nicht als solches erkannt wird. […] [Sie] zeichnen sich gegenϋber dem Wachzustand durch eine Reihe kognitiver Defizite aus. Das theoretisch interessanteste dieser Defizite ist ein metakognitives: Das entstehende Realitätsmodell wird vom System selbst irrtümlicherweise in die Standard-Kategorie „Wachzustand“ eingeordnet”. (Metzinger 1993: 149).
“How do the signals that come through those nerves give rise to our sense of “being in” the outside world? The answer is that this is in a sense a complicated illusion. We never actually make any direct contact with the outside world. Instead, we work with models of the world that we build inside our brains” (Minsky 1988: 110).
See Metzinger (2003b).
A phenomenologically opaque state, on the other hand, is a representational process that is consciously experienced as a representation. A good example is a lucid dream, in such a dream we are simultaneously dreaming and aware that we are doing so.
Metzinger (2003b: 363).
Hohwy (2014: 5).
See Martin (2000: 222) on the incompatibility of sense-data and naturalism.
Place (1956: 49): “If we assume, for example, that when a subject reports a green after-image he is asserting the occurrence inside himself of an object which is literally green, it is clear that we have on our hands an entity for which there is not place in the world of physics”.
There are good reasons why an indirect realist would not consider the perceiver to be known via a representation. It would be unclear why we can be directly acquainted with one ‘inner’ thing (a percept of a teacup, say), while another ‘inner’ thing (the perceiver or self) cannot be directly known, but can only be known via a percept of it. And if there is no clear difference between the two cases we might then worry that we cannot be directly acquainted with the ‘inner’ teacup-percepts either but need another layer of teacup-percepts-percepts and so on.
Metzinger (2010: 108).
Dennett (1991: 418).
This possibility is considered in Nozick (1997: 313–316).
One might argue that the epistemic subject is in fact not the simulated perceiver on the left-hand side, i.e. the self that is part of the model, but the modelling system as a whole, something which we might then be more justified in considering as fundamentally real. The difficulty with this idea is that ‘the system as a whole’ has very few properties we want to identify with us. It is then unclear what is to be gained by saying that there is a fundamentally real self, though this lacks practically all of the properties that are commonly associated with a self.
Lovejoy (1930: 15–16).
The only way the direct realist can get round the argument from illusion seems to be a move towards disjunctivism, where being in a state of having an apple-appearance is understood as being in a subjectively indiscernible disjunction of states that either connects us perceptually with a real apple, or is an apple-hallucination. For comprehensive discussion see Haddock and Macpherson (2008), Byrne and Logue (2009). A noteworthy difficulty for the disjunctivist approach is pointed out by Wright (2002), (2008).
Kant would have agreed: "The understanding accordingly bounds sensibility without thereby expanding its own field, and in warning sensibility not to presume to reach for things in themselves but solely for appearances it thinks of an object in itself, but only as a transcendental object, which is the cause of appearance (thus not itself appearance) […]" Critique A 288.
Metzinger (2010: 23), italics in the original.
On this see Metzinger and Windt (2014).
"Appearances are the only objects that can be given to us immediately, […]. However, these appearances are not things in themselves, but themselves only representations, which in turn have their object, which therefore cannot be further intuited by us, and that may therefore be called the non-empirical, i.e., transcendental object = X". Critique A 109.
A similarly Kantian picture is defended by Lehar who claims that the divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal is "one of the essential facts that make sense of our experience of this world" (Lehar 2003: 7).
Dawkins (1999: 281–282).
Dawkins (1999: 276–277).
Lehar (2003: 8) is similarly clear that there is “your real head in the external objective world” standing behind the “miniature perceptual copy of your head in a perceptual copy of the world”.
Thus Revonsuo’s point that “the most reasonable scientific hypothesis for explaining the complex regularities and coherent organization at the phenomenal level during perceptual states is to suppose that there is an organized external physical world out there” (2009: 123) if of course correct, though it is a mistake to assume (as he seems to do) that this tells us that “the internal surrogate of the external world corresponds to the external world as it is in itself” (italics in the original), rather than that our internal model of the surrogate of the external world is such that it represents the surrogate as corresponding to the external world as it is in itself.
Note that when Kant argued in the Critique that we must be able to think of things in themselves, as "otherwise there would follow the absurd proposition that there is an appearance without anything that appears" (B xxvi) he refers to a cognitive necessity, not an ontological one.
One way in which this argument for the existence of non-sets could fail is if all chains of set-membership looped back on themselves, another if every set contained a further, distinct set. See Aczel (1998).
Identical in kind, not in complexity.
It does not help much if we assume entire scientific communities, instead of individual persons as epistemic subjects. To appeal to an intersubjective form of knowledge of this kind we have to presuppose first that the community exists outside of the model. For if it is only part of the model, why would if have any better claim to speak about whatever is outside than the individual has?
Nagel (1986: 54–66).
Nagel (1986: 57), note 1.
Nagel (1986: 61).
“[b]eliefs, in the shape of prior expectations, are capable of determining perceptual content in quite profound ways […]. […] [c]onscious experience arises as the upshot of the brain’s appetite for making the best sense it can of the current sensory input […]. This fits with the idea that conscious experience is like a fantasy or virtual reality constructed to keep the sensory input at bay” Hohwy (2013: 137), see also 72–73.
Putnam (1983: 12).
The irrealist would therefore make the same point about perceptions that Oliver Sacks (2012) made about hallucinations: “Yet while it is understandable that one might attribute value, ground beliefs, or construct narratives from them, [they] cannot provide evidence for the existence of any metaphysical beings or places. They provide evidence only of the brain's power to create them”.
As Metzinger’s elimative phenomenalist does: “’Eliminative phenomenalism is the thesis that physics and the neuroscientific image of man constitute a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by a completed science of pure consciousness’. All reality, accordingly, is phenomenal reality”. “No such things as brains or physical objects ever existed. The contents of consciousness are all there is” (2010: 147).
This implication of VW theory is very close to the notion of “Kantian angst” Button introduces in (2013: 57–58). The worry behind this anxiety is that our words and concepts may never be able to refer to objects given that all reference-fixing mechanisms we have are yet more linguistic or conceptual items. (To use our terminology, the worry is that we never manage to get out of the VW to connect the elements of the model with objects outside of the model). The key difference is that Button asserts, and I deny, that Kantian angst is incoherent.
Vaihinger (1935: 74–76, 151–153, 313–315). In this context I am not interested in the question whether Vaihinger's interpretation is a defensible or even the most preferable reading of Kant. My aim is rather to introduce it as one example of how the idea that the external world is part of the VW and not a fundamental reality can be spelt out.
We should note, however, that Vaihinger's own development of his interpretation of Kant appears to constitute a version of an idealist, strong account of the right-hand-side. For Vaihinger, once the things-in-themselves disappear into the realm of the fictional, sensations (Empfindungen) remain as the "sole reality". He writes "Kant introduces a device in the form of the Ding an sich, as an x to which a y, the ego, as our organization, corresponds. By this means the whole world of reality can be dealt with. Subsequently the “ego” and the Ding an sich are dropped, and only sensations remain as real" (Vaihinger 1935: 75–76); and "Kant allowed the tacit provisional assumption that there are egos and things-in-themselves, to remain as a scaffolding. Had he destroyed that scaffolding and rejected them both he would have found that sensation [Empfindung] was the sole reality left"(Vaihinger 1935: 151).
Vaihinger (1935: 76).
See also Reflection 5554 where Kant states that the transcendental object of sense intuition is not a "real thing", but a concept.
Vaihinger (1935: 74–75).
Vaihinger (1935: 75). Though our aim here is not to assess the accuracy of Vaihinger’s interpretation, we should at least note that there is a multitude of Kant’s characterizations of the Ding an sich which are most straightforwardly interpreted in this way. See e.g. the references collected in Eisler (1979: 97).
This is the difficulty Strawson (1992: 64) has in mind when he points out that a claim of a correspondence between perception and the world perceived cannot be cashed out as "an invitation to step outside the entire structure of the conceptual scheme which we actually have - and then to justify it from some extraneous point of vantage. But there is nowhere to step; there is no such extraneous point of vantage" Searle (1995: 174) holds the weaker position that the (hardly contestable) claim that cognitions do not occur in isolation ("Any cognitive state occurs as part of a set of cognitive states and within a cognitive system") entails the inaccessibility of such a vantage point ("It is impossible to get outside of all cognitive states and systems to survey the relationship between them and the reality that they are used to cognize").
The VW thus functions like the map of the empire the size of the empire mentioned in Borges' "On Exactitute in Science", with the difference that as Borges' map is two-dimensional it makes sense to speak of the real mapped terrain as lying below it. A wholly accurate map would of course be three-dimensional and would therefore displace the terrain it is supposed to map.
Searle (1995: 175).
Of course the VW theorist would prefer to speak of the VW that has generated the simulated I.
We are thus not able to give a simple disquotational truth definition ("The apple is red" iff the apple is red) but require an extended version that takes into account that our language is operating within the VW ("The apple is red" is true iff the VW-apple is VW-red. Cf Khlentzos 2004: 201).
Priest (2002: 89).
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Westerhoff, J. What it Means to Live in a Virtual World Generated by Our Brain. Erkenn 81, 507–528 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9752-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9752-z