Abstract
It is common in the cognitive and computational sciences to regard virtual reality (VR) as composed of illusory experiences, given its immersive character. In this paper, we adopt an ecological-enactive perspective on cognition (Sect. 3) to evaluate the nature of VR and one’s engagement with it. Based on a post-cognitivist conception of illusion, we reject the commonly held assumption that virtual reality experiences (VREs) are illusory (Sect. 4). Our positive take on this issue is that VR devices, like other technological devices, can be embodied during use, which is why they can be the source of experiences (Sect. 5). We then propose a new concept to interpret VREs, namely, allusion, which means that the subject acts as if the virtual experiences are real (Sect. 6). This kind of engagement has a volitional aspect, which is evident in the onboarding of VR devices and which allows us to distinguish VREs from other experiences. We conclude that, even though we have experiences that afford certain interactions in VR, the strong continuity between cognitive and biological processes is not sustained therein. This characterizes a difference of kind—given the current state of technology—between VREs and fully fledged cognitive states, which nevertheless allows for constrained experimentation in cognitive science.
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During the 1990s, VR was associated with widely different experiences, from the manipulation of 3D models in a computer screen using mouse and keyboard to experiences with CAVEs or systems composed by head-mounted displays (HMDs) and other accessories (Cruz-Neira et al., 1992; Robertson et al., 1993). In this paper, we are interested in the current use of the term VR, which is used exclusively in relation to experiences with HMDs and with handheld controllers that simulate the user’s hand movements.
“Immersant” is a neologism created by the VR artist Char Davies to describe a person that is immersed in VR.
Moreover, given the organism’s developmental history and its acquired dispositions and abilities (which include culturally acquired ones in our case) different subsets of affordances may be detectable by individuals with a similar bodily morphology. Baggs & Chemero, (2021) explain this possibility by a distinction between the environment as the habitat, where affordances exist in relation to a typical or ideal member of a species, and the environment as the umwelt, where the habitat is considered as the point of view of a specific individual.
These ideas are related to autonomy and closure, two concepts central for early enactivist accounts. As Moreno & Mossio, (2015) carefully discuss, however, their account differs from the original construal of biological autonomy found in autopoietic theory. These differences are not relevant for our purposes here.
For simplicity, we conceive other organisms and social relations as part of the environment when it comes to organism-environment relations.
Gibson concludes this passage with a high note that is not directly relevant for our purposes in this paper, but which should not be neglected. He writes: “There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. We have done so wastefully, thoughtlessly, and, if we do not mend our ways, fatally” (ibid.).
Notice that we are not advocating for the extended mind thesis (Clark & Chalmers, 1998), which says that minds can be extended by external devices that play the same function as biological ones. Although very similar, a crucial difference is that the extended mind relies on functionalism, which says that what matters for some structure to earn the title of cognitive is the function it performs, regardless of its materiality. It is well-known that functionalism is inimical to embodied cognition (Rowlands, 2010) and that is why we do not treat VR devices as extending one’s mind, but as becoming embodied or incorporated during use (see also Sterelny, 2010).
For the VR experience to happen flawlessly, there are other conditions that should be met; otherwise, the user can experience what is known as cybersickness—a phenomenon similar to motion sickness that causes eye fatigue, disorientation, and nausea (LaViola, 2000). Cybersickness is usually associated with high-latency time, or the delay between the user performing an action and the corresponding system response. However, a recent work by Chang et al. (2020) demonstrates that latency is just one of several variables that could interfere in VREs. Aside from latency, authors identify other hardware-related causes for VR sickness (e.g., display type and mode, field-of-view, flickering), as well as causes related to content (e.g., graphic realism, duration), and also human factors (e.g., age, gender, prior experience with VR or lack thereof).
To put matters into perspective, Sutherland, (1965) already envisioned this possibility, which he describes as the “ultimate display.” In the ultimate display, whatever happens to the avatar also happens in real life. It is not an exaggeration to say that current technology, almost 60 years later, is still far from achieving what Sutherland imagined. Despite many researchers’ optimism, olfactory and gustative simulations (see Maggioni et al., 2019; Ranasinghe et al., 2011), for instance, do not capture the rich phenomenology of our senses of smell and taste, and do so often through cumbersome equipment (e.g., electrodes connected to one’s tongue) that is hard or even impossible to abstract during use.
This is similar to Chalmers’s, (2005, 2022) take on that matter. Although here is not the place to offer a systematic review of Chalmer’s claims, we should mention that he advances a form of metaphysical realism about virtual objects which he calls “simulation realism.” Simulation realism applied to VR is the view that virtual objects are as real as material ones and that they are made of a digital material, namely, bits. In his recent book (2022), Chalmers claims that our actual experiences, out of VR, could also be simulations. He argues that we cannot rule out the possibility that we live in a simulation, in a Cartesian-like skeptical scenario as illustrated by the film The Matrix. Thus, his rejection of the idea that VR objects are illusory is based on a radical commitment to simulation realism applied also to non-virtual reality. We think that entailing skepticism is a high price to pay for the non-illusory nature of VR, and it falls prey to the false dichotomy indicated above that either VR experiences are real or they are illusory.
The looming skepticism and solipsism in this account (see Mingers, 1995) is a complicated matter at the heart of the relation between enactivism and autopoietic theory, and we do not intend to tackle this issue here due to space constraints (see Barandiaran, 2017, for an extensive discussion of this issue).
One possibility is to explore the idea that we are interpreters of ourselves in a non-intellectualist and non-cognitivist fashion (see Di Paolo et al., 2018). This implies a substantial review of what language is.
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The authors are grateful for two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions have greatly improved this paper. We are also thankful for the support provided by the FAPEMIG grant (project APQ-00394-22) and by the support provided by CAPES (Finance Code 001). Finally, we thank Yen-Tung Lee and the rest of the audience at the Consciousness and Reality conference held at the University of Bucarest for discussing an earlier version of this paper.
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Rolla, G., Vasconcelos, G. & Figueiredo, N.M. Virtual Reality, Embodiment, and Allusion: an Ecological-Enactive Approach. Philos. Technol. 35, 95 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00589-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00589-1