The Reality of the Virtual

by David Bruce Albert Jr., Ph. D.

 

I. Introduction

 

When we use the phrase “virtual reality”, we use it in such a way as to imply a distinction between what is “virtually real” and what is “really real”.  To understand what we mean by “virtual reality”, it is, therefore, perhaps best to start by asking what we mean when we talk about just plain old everyday “reality”.  It’s an idea that we take for granted as meaning something specific - meaning something about the way the world is.  When we say to someone, “Get real,” we are chiding them to stop living in some fantasy world and come down to the world where the rest of us live.  When we think about the difference between what goes on in a dream, or in our imagination, and what goes on in the world where we eat, work, study, and so forth, we draw a sharp line between the two - between the world of our private minds, and the world in which we interact with one another, and with physical objects.

 

This line that we draw in the metaphysical sand between the world of the mind and the world of the body does not come to us arbitrarily.  It is a product of a long history of philosophical thought on the nature of the world and what makes it up.  When we think in terms of the mind being something distinct from the rest of the world -- from “reality” -- we are echoing a philosophical tradition which taught us to draw that line.  In this talk, I want to discuss how that line came to be drawn, some of the various ideas about “reality” that have come out of having drawn that line, and whether, in the light of what we think today about the way the world is - including the existence of “virtual realities” - continuing to think in terms of that line between mind and world still makes sense, or whether there might be a better alternative to thinking about what we mean by “reality”.  Throughout this historical examination of the notion of “reality”, we must keep in mind the question of how we came to distinguish reality from non-reality, and how virtual reality fits into this picture.

 

II. Classical Views of Reality.

 

                A. The “Objectivist” view.

 

If I were to ask you, “What’s the difference between things that are real, and things that are not?”, you might respond by saying that “real things” are things that actually exist, out there in the world, and things that aren’t out there in the world aren’t real.  In other words, “reality” consists of those objects that actually exist.  I think what’s at the bottom of that way of looking at the world is the intuition that there are things out there in the world, that would be there whether we are aware of them or not, and it’s those kinds of things that make up “reality”. 

 

If I hold an apple in my hand, we would say that the apple is real because it’s a thing that’s a part of the tangible world.  On the other hand, if I were to say “There’s a pink elephant hanging from the ceiling over there”, we would be inclined to say that pink elephant isn’t real, because it just isn’t a part of the tangible world.  We could further verify this intuition by observing that there are “empirical traces” left by the apple - that is to say, it affects the world, and our experience, so as to verify its presence.  We can take a bite out of the apple and taste it, we can drop it and hear the “thump”, we can weigh it, measure it, and so on.  Now if there really were a pink elephant hanging from the ceiling, we would also expect to find empirical traces of it, too.  But we don’t find those traces, which lends credibility to the belief that it isn’t there -- it isn’t part of the “real world”.  We would say that the pink elephant exists not in the world, but in the mind.

 

In looking at the world this way, we have drawn a very sharp line between what we think is “out there” in the world, and what is “in here”, inside the mind, and we have asserted that they are very different places, the mind, and the world.  The mind is the place from which we observe the world, sometimes seeing things that are really “out there”, sometimes not seeing things out there, and sometimes seeing things that aren’t out there at all.  What’s in the mind is a product of our own thoughts.  On the other hand, the things out there in the world are there whether we are aware of them or not, and they have certain characteristics, about which our minds may be correct or mistaken.

 

One of the best known advocates of this view, which supposes a sharp demarcation between “mind” and “world”, was a 17th century philosopher named John Locke.  According to Locke, there is a world of objects out there, with things that have certain well-defined characteristics.  In our minds, however, we perceive  - that is, we are aware of and we understand - those objects according to the way our senses transmit information about the world to our minds.  Objects have certain characteristics in and of themselves, but we understand those objects based upon the information about them our bodies send to our minds.  This view is an “objectivist” view, because it asserts that “reality” is made up of objects, as opposed to things in the mind.

 

Take the example of the apple again.  We see a red, round, shiny thing.   The “reality”, according to Locke, is that the apple has certain physical characteristics that cause our senses to react in such a way as to produce that image of a red, round shiny thing.  Apples are not really red, they have certain physical characteristics - absorbing and reflecting certain wavelengths of light - that cause our senses, and consequently our minds, to perceive them as red.  Roundness, on the other hand, is a physical attribute of the apple - it’s “really” round, but not “really” red.

 

Locke divides the characteristics of things into two categories.  The first, which he calls the “primary qualities”, are the actual physical attributes of things themselves - the “reality” of the way the world is.  Locke lists these:

 

Bulk, what we might call its mass;

Figure, its shape and dimensions;

Extension, its size, how big it is;

Number, how many of them there are; and

Motion, whether it is moving or not.

 

Locke says these are “real”, because they are characteristic of things, and have nothing to do with the mind that perceives them.  They are characteristics of objects; these are the way things in the world are.

 

Now in contrast to these primary qualities, Locke goes on to list what he calls “secondary qualities”; these are things like color, sound, taste, smell, warmth or cold, and so forth.  These secondary qualities are the effects that the primary qualities of objects have upon us.  That is to say that while apples are not red, the structure of their physical surface - their “figure” - effects our senses in such a way that we perceive them as red.

 

This business of distinguishing the qualities of objects from the qualities of the mind is very important to Locke, because he didn’t just dream this up for the fun of it.  Locke’s philosophical mission, as was the mission of many philosophers during that time, was to come to grips with the information that was coming out of the rapidly developing physical sciences of the time.  Having emerged from the thought of the middle ages, the intellectuals of the time were very concerned about just how much trust to put in the sciences.  After all, if angles and demons weren’t good explanations of the world, why should “particles in the void” be, either?  Think about what was going on at the time - astronomical observations and calculations, laboratory experiments, medical research; all of it hangs upon our ability to trust our empirical - meaning, based upon our experiences - observations.   So philosophers such as Locke set about trying to establish a “grounding”, some kind of basic understanding, that would allow the sciences to be taken seriously.

 

As such, the distinction between mind and world was absolutely critical, because it allowed philosophers to argue that even though all information comes to us through our senses, we can trust certain kinds of information because they have a basis in the physical structure of objects themselves.  We can be skeptical about things like color, smell, and so on, because they are creatures of the mind; we can be certain of other things, like size, motion, and so on, because they are characteristics that reside in the objects themselves.  But what Locke’s theory allows us to do is to trust our measurements and observations of things, because there is a direct link between the things and the effects they produce in the mind: according to Locke, we see red because there is a direct, physical link between the structure of the apple and the effect it has upon our senses.  Where there is no link, there can be no certainty, but where we can show a physical link between object and effect, we can be sure of what we see.

 

So the “reality” of the world, according to Locke, is a rather small set of physical characteristics of objects.  ”Reality” is a bunch of objects out there in the world, that cause us, via their physical characteristics and the characteristics of our senses, to perceive them in a certain way.  Reality has no color, no smell, and so on, it has shape, mass, size, number and movement.  Now I think that the off-the-cuff view of reality that we have today - that there are things out there in the world that are a certain way, independent of how we understand them - really comes from this 17th century philosophical view that served to underwrite the physical sciences.  Most of us have grown up in a “scientific culture”, which is founded upon, among other things, the view that the world exists in a certain way, and that if we come to know it in that way, we will have arrived at the truth.  This view comes directly from Locke; it’s a hand-me-down from the days in which science was in its infancy.  Our modern culture, so dependent upon the sciences and technology for defining its place in the world, has adopted the view of reality that goes along with them.

 

B. Refutation of Objectivism.

 

While we may appreciate the convenience that a view such as Locke’s provides - it readily allows us to distinguish between apples and pink elephants - were it correct, we wouldn’t have things like virtual reality.

 

For Locke, it is essential to show that things out in the world have certain characteristics that lie in the things themselves - the “real world” -,  that we have access to those things through our senses, and that we can certify the connection between the two so as to be able to trust that our observations give us correct information about the way the world is.  If there weren’t things out there in the world, independent of the mind, there would be nothing for science to observe; if there weren’t things that are in the mind but not out there in the world, we wouldn’t have any need for science in the first place, because we would already know everything from birth; and if there weren’t a way of certifying the connection between the two, such that we could trust our observations, there wouldn’t be any possibility of knowing anything - there would be no way of getting accurate information about the world into the mind.  The line between mind and world must be very clear, for it’s the only way to validate the “reality” of scientific observation.

 

But what if that line weren’t so clear, after all?  What if the distinction between mind and world didn’t hold up in such a way as to allow one to distinguish clearly what is in the mind, and what is out there in the world?  For one thing, it would mean that, as far as science and observations are concerned, there would always be an element of doubt as to whether our “science” is really telling us what’s in the world, or what’s in the mind, or some combination of both.  More importantly for us, though, it would mean that the idea of “reality” as something distinct from the mind that understands it is in serious trouble.

 

It was not long after the publication of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that another view arose to challenge it.  This view, professed by an Irish bishop, George Berkeley, specifically challenges the distinction between Locke’s primary and secondary qualities, and, therefore, the all-important distinction between mind and world. 

 

Berkeley asks us to consider: why should we privilege one set of perceptions over another?  Why, for example, should we consider our perception of two things, any more “real” than our perception of red things?  The information we receive about objects comes through exactly the same sensory apparatus - what enables us to see two things also enables us to see red things; what enables us to feel weight enables us to feel hot and cold, and so on.  In other words, Berkeley is asking us, what reasons do we have for trusting one kind of perception over another?  Locke hasn’t really given us any reasons why, as it turns out; he has simply stated the distinction, which makes some sense from a certain point of view.  But once we get outside that point of view - as Berkeley has asked us to do - all of a sudden it starts to seem a bit arbitrary.

 

For Locke, “reality” works like two sides of a fence: the mind on one side, objects on the other.  Once we figure out how to see the other side of the fence from our minds, we have access to “reality”.  But for Berkeley, reality is more like peeling the layers of an onion.  If we peel away our various perceptions, like color, smell, and so on, we get closer to the core of the onion - to “reality”, if you will.  The problem is that our perceptions of things like number, extension, figure, and so forth - are perceptions, just like any other.  There is no reason why our perceptions of those things should be any more trustworthy than our perceptions of heat, color, and so on.  So, according to Berkeley, if we continue to peel away our perceptions, what we finally find when we get to the center is - nothing.

 

And this is the lethal point against Locke - that there really is no way to distinguish between our perceptions of things Locke says are “of the mind”, and perceptions of things Locke says are “of objects”.  There is no way, according to Berkeley, to draw the line between mind and world in the way Locke needs to draw it, because perceptions are all on an equal footing. If this separation between mind and world doesn’t work, and according to Berkeley, there isn’t any such separation, then the view of reality this separation supports doesn’t  make sense.  It really doesn’t make sense for us to draw the line between what we think is in the mind and what we think is in the world, because there is no way to tell the difference; indeed, there is no way to tell, in the rubble of Locke’s view, whether there is any world at all.

 

C. The “Idealist” view.

 

Berkeley doesn’t just offer criticism, he has a positive thesis, too.  His theory boils down to this: since perceptions of the world are all we have, then why not define “reality” in just those terms.  Why not consider the “real world” to be the world of perceptions, since that’s the only reality that we, as human beings, with senses, nervous systems, and so forth can have.  In other words, why not think of “reality” as being something within the mind, instead of something completely outside it.

 

There is a certain appeal to this view, because it means that reality is defined by our own experiences in the world.  That is, ironically, a bit more realistic than Locke’s view, because it makes reality something tangible, something we can experience and understand, instead of something from which we are at some fundamental level completely isolated.  The problem with it is that it runs afoul of our common-sense intuitions about what is real and what is not - we are inclined to think of objects as the real world, and not our mental perceptions of them.

 

I hope that through the use of some examples, I can show that this view, known as “idealism”, is not as far removed from our ordinary experience as one might think.  Let us suppose that you wanted to drive someplace 200 miles away.  Let us also suppose that, because you have done the necessary experiments, you know that your car gets about 25 miles to the gallon.  If you knew that you had 4 gallons of gas in your tank, you wouldn’t make the trip; if you knew that you had 12 gallons in your tank, you probably would go ahead and make the trip. 

 

Now, on what basis have you made that decision?  Not because you know anything about the primary qualities of gasoline or engines, not because you believe that molecules, which you can’t see, will be bouncing around the void, of which you can only be secondarily aware, in such a way as to get you there.  You made your decision not based upon any facts about gasoline, cars, roads, or anything else.  You made the decision because you believe in this:  Gallons x 25 miles/gallon = miles.  In other words, you believe that a certain mathematical equation accurately describes the situation.

 

Where is this equation located?  Is there anything about gasoline, about car engines, about the physics of internal combustion, or the like, that gives us this equation?  If we peel away our perceptions of cars, will we, at the center of the perceptual onion, find this equation.  No, not likely.   If the equation isn’t a function of the physical characteristics Locke describes, then it isn’t out there in the world.  So where is it?

 

The equation is located, of course, in the mind.  It’s not out there in the world; it isn’t contained in the physical structure of objects.  It describes, for us, how objects in the world behave, in such a way that we can predict and understand how the world works.  But it’s more than just a description.  Consider another equation: f=ma.  Or E=mc².  These are, for us, more than just descriptions.  Remember the experiments you did in introductory physics classes, where you were trying to see the “laws of physics” in action?  You may also remember that those experiments never quite came out right, did they?  The results never really agreed with what the “laws” predicted; so, we made up stories about why - effects of friction, of elastic or inelastic collisions, the magnetic field of Jupiter, or whatever.  We made up excuses why the real world - the world in which we did the experiment - didn’t match up to the theory.  But, in so doing, what we are saying is that the “real world” - the “reality” - is the world of laws and equations, and the physical world just, for various reasons, doesn’t always behave as it “should”.

 

What this reveals is an underlying commitment to the reality of the abstract - a very deep seated belief that the “real world” really is the world of ideas, and that the world of things merely copies that world of ideas, often imperfectly.  This idea goes back to the ancient Greeks, and specifically to Plato.  Plato’s idea is roughly this:  consider a triangle, many triangles, of different sizes, shapes, etc.  They all look different, yet they all have something in common - something that enables us to readily identify a triangle, no matter what its size, shape, and so forth, as a triangle.  According to Plato, that “something” is what we might call “triangularity” - an underlying, abstract principle that defines what triangles are, and of which individual, physical triangles partake to  greater or lesser degrees.  In other words, the things we see in the physical world are imperfect copies of these general principles or ideals, which Plato called the “forms”.  For Plato, the forms are “reality”, the “world of being”, as he called it, whereas the world of physical objects, the “world of becoming”, only imperfectly copies the forms.  We come to know the forms, not through experience with physical objects, because they are only imperfect copies, but through the mind, where we discover the “reality” that underlies everyday experience.

 

That’s how we think of things like the “laws of physics”.  Even though, in our ordinary experiences, we never encounter “laws”, nor do we often encounter actual cases where we can see the laws working as they should, we still  believe that the world works according to those laws, because they are, to a greater or lesser extent, good predictors and explainors of the way the world works.  To return to Berkeley’s idealism, we do, in fact, think that reality is something that ultimately lies within the mind, in the realm of things like laws and equations, along the lines of analogizing objects to players, and the mind as the playwright.  Whatever the world ultimately “is”, it is more like laws and ideals than like the things which imperfectly represent them.

 

D. Refutation of Idealism.

 

Nonetheless, I think this view leaves us a bit uncomfortable.  In particular, it leaves us wondering just how we tell fact apart from fantasy.  Even though the mind is able to discover things about the world that seem to be very true, it also quite often cooks up ideas about the world that are not, and we wonder how this view can tell the difference between the two.  There are facts about the physical world that often intrude into the contents of the mind, whether it wants those facts there or not. 

 

The most serious problem, for us, in the context of this discussion, is that it makes it impossible to distinguish between “virtual reality”, and what we might call “concrete reality”.  If we really take the idealist view seriously, there is no difference between shooting castle guards in Wolfenstein, and shooting people on the street.  That should be very disturbing to us, because we think that, in terms of the way the world is, there are differences between the two.  But it isn’t clear that the idealist view lets us separate them out.

 

It is said that Samuel Johnson, when asked how he would argue against idealism, kicked a rock and said, “I refute it thusly!”  What Dr. Johnson meant, of course, is that there are things about the world that happen, whether we believe them or not, and a view of reality that is limited to the mind alone is nothing but a fantasy.  Idealism reached its peak in the work of Hegel, whose work is often referred to as “objective idealism”.  Hegel’s view is that the world really is, ultimately, made up of ideas, and that things behave in the world according to a kind of logic.  Consider two ideas, say on what would make a good dinner.  I think steak, you think vegetables.  There then occurs a kind of give-and-take between the two ideas, and what comes out of it - the “real” good dinner, is some combination of those two ideas, having merged into one.

 

That works for ideas.  The problem is that Hegel thinks the world of objects behaves in the same way.  Consider this table, and myself.  Two things.  Now, when I try to do something with the table, according to Hegel, there is a kind of give-and-take interaction between myself and the table, such that the “reality” of the situation is a kind of synthesis between myself and the table - that in some sense, the table and I merge together into one functional, ideal entity.

 

Well, I don’t know about you, but I think there is absolutely no sense, that there is nothing resembling anything that could be called “sense”, in which this table and I merge into one thing.  This is the kind of thing that motivated much of the work of the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard’s famous phrase, “A logical system is possible, an existential system is impossible”, means that in the world of abstract ideas, idealism looks plausible, but when it involves things that exist, it doesn’t work.  You can’t take things that exist, and in the mind, combine them into other things that don’t exist, and hope to have any foothold in any kind of “reality” that matters.

 

Kierkegaard thinks that this idea, that you can mentally combine things into the world together into abstract objects, and that somehow has something to do with “reality”, is the stupidest idea ever concocted.  It is stupid because it ignores the role of the world in our thoughts.  Kierkegaard uses the example of someone sitting in his chair, smoking a cigar, thinking about Hegel, about how various things come together, and OOPS!, he has to stop thinking about that to relight his cigar.  Then he goes back to thinking about Hegel, has to stop and relight his cigar, and so on.  The point being that, no matter how good you think you may be in terms of manipulating ideas, there is, what Jean-Paul Sartre called, a certain “facticity” about the world that gets in the way.

 

What’s a “facticity”?  If I have a rotten apple in my hand, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that it’s edible, it will still be rotten, and will still make me sick if I eat it.  No matter how nice a landscape I may draw with Vistapro, when I’m done, I’m still sitting in my chair.  Those are “facticities” - things about the world that are true, whether we believe them or not. 

 

This sort of thing signals to us that the idealist view of the world really isn’t an all-encompassing theory of reality, for there are important things it leaves out.  It is also true, however, that the objectivist view isn’t really an adequate view either, because there are important things that it, too, leaves out.  What we have is a situation, a kind of tension, between two views of “reality” - one that it’s in objects, and the other that it’s in the mind - where each seems to account for some things, and fails miserably under other circumstances.

 

III. Transcendental Idealism.

 

A. The Problem of Separating Mind and World.

 

It has been said that, “If a computer gives you a stupid answer, it’s because you’ve asked it a stupid question.”  Similarly, if a philosophical theory gives you a stupid conclusion, it must contain a stupid premise somewhere.  If we take the objectivist view seriously, we wind up with a reality of objects with which we can never interact, because all we have are perceptions; on the other hand, if we take the idealist view seriously, we wind up with a reality cluttered with these weird entities made up of people and tables, and so on.  It appears that neither Locke’s objectivism, nor Berkeley’s idealism, give us a workable conception of “reality”; therefore, according to the principle articulated above, it makes sense to ask what is wrong with the picture into which those theories try to paint the world.

 

One thing that both theories have in common is the demarcation they try to draw between the mind and the world.  Having drawn that line, and having claimed that one side or the other is “reality”, and the other side is not, it really isn’t very surprising that both theories come up short - both theories try to set the universe right by excluding one part of it or another.  Whichever way we draw the line, we invite problems when we either exclude ourselves, or the outside world, from the picture.

 

On the other hand, we were drawn to this picture in the first place by the intuition that there is some kind of difference between the contents of the mind, and the contents of the world.  What we need, to save this picture, is a theory that will allow “reality” to contain both sides of the fence, in some way, yet preserve the difference that seems so important.

 

B. Kant’s Attempt to Overcome the Problem.

 

One way to make this kind of “reality” work, is to argue that while the mind and the world remain distinct entities, the line between them is not so sharp as the other views would draw it.  If we could show that the world has something to do with the way the mind works, such that the things in the mind are somehow connected with the rest of the world, we could argue that weird objective-ideal entities like table-people don’t exist.  If we could also show that the world is somehow interconnected to the mind, in such a way that the perceptions we have of the world are framed in a context that, although mental, is consistent and is in fact necessary for us to comprehend the world at all, we could argue that our perceptions of objects have a continuity with the world that is guaranteed by the framework in which we perceive it. 

 

I know this is a little obscure, so let me put it this way:  it might turn out that we see the world through rose-colored glasses, but if we can show that the only way we can see the world at all is through such rose-colored glasses - that we couldn’t see the world at all without them, then we might as well deal with the world in terms of rose-colored images, because there’s nothing else to deal with.  This is to say that our perceptions of the world, necessarily, come to us framed in a certain way, but it’s a framework we can define and understand, and we can account for.

 

What this view essentially proposes is that there is a kind of feedback mechanism between the world and the mind, such that the way the mind works is in part controlled by the world, and the way we observe the world is in part controlled by the mind.  The two sides don’t oppose each other, they work together to give us a coherent picture of “reality”.  Such a view was offered by the 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

 

What Kant proposes is essentially this:  Underneath the working of the mind, there are certain rules that it follows when thinking.  These are very general rules, that we use when evaluating experiences.  They are not things that you specifically think about; rather, they are the rules you apply when thinking about other things.  Kant calls the rules “categories”, and there are 4 groups of 3 categories, 12 in all:

 

of Quantity: Unity, Plurality, Totality;

of Quality: Reality, Negation, Limitation;

of Relation: Inherence and Subsistence, Causality and Dependence, Community (reciprocity between  agent and patient); and,

of Modality: Possibility-Impossibility, Existence-Non-existence, Necessity-Contingency.

 

“These are the twelve...”  Remember, these are rules that govern the way you think, and not necessarily what you think.  What Kant says about the categories is, that they are a priori.  Now that’s the phrase Kant is probably best known for.  What it means is basically this:  These categories are necessary for the possibility of thought to occur.  Therefore, they cannot themselves be the products of thought.  They must have gotten there before any thought occurred; indeed, they must have gotten there before there were any experiences, as they are necessary to understand experiences.  They must, therefore, be there prior to the having of thought or experiences.  Hence, they are a priori: they are there prior to the functioning of the mind.

 

Well, if the categories control the way the mind works, but they aren’t products of the mind, where do they come from?  That question is a very sticky point in the scholarship of Kant’s works.  The way Kant writes, sometimes the categories are like Platonic forms; in other places, they almost sound like parts of the body.  It probably doesn’t matter much for us here; what does matter is the insight that something very basic about the way the mind works has its origins outside of the mind itself.  This is to say that the categories represent the influence of the outside world in the workings of the mind.  The importance of that is pretty obvious - we now have a way of arguing that things like table-people aren’t really out there, we never perceive them in experience, because the world has a hand in controlling the way the mind works, and such things do not exist in the “real” world.

 

The flip side of the coin - how the mind gets into the world - goes under the foreboding name of the Traanscendental Aesthetic.  No, this isn’t an art exhibit of pictures of angels.  The Transcendental Aesthetic refers to the conditions that must exist in order for us to perceive anything at all.  We had the categories, which are the a priori conditions for the possibility of thought - this is the way the world controls the mind; now we have the transcendental aesthetic, which are the a priori conditions for the possibility of perception - the way the mind controls the world.

 

The idea is this: think of anything, or any combination of things.  What Kant says is, it is impossible for you to think of any object, without thinking of it as situated in space and time.  When we think of objects, we always think of them as situated in space and time; this becomes even more clear when we think of more than one object - it is impossible, says Kant, for us to think of more than one object without also thinking of those objects being separated in space and or in time.

 

According to Kant, we can only be aware of the outside world when it comes to us in some form or other.  That is, we aren’t aware of the outside world directly, but through perceptions.  In a move very similar to the one he uses for explaining the categories, he says that in order for us to perceive, there must be, a priori - that is, before any perceptions occur - something that allows us to sort out our sensations from one another.  Now Kant says that, following along the lines of Berkeley, if we strip away everything we perceive about objects - color, heat, solidity, etc., - what we find at the center of the “onion” are the “pure intuitions” of space and time - they are there, independent of any perceptions, but must be there in order for perceptions to occur.  Since those things can’t be there are a result of experience - they are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience - then they can’t come from the outside world.  Hence, they are, like the categories, a priori; unlike the categories, they are features of the mind that control how the world appears to us.

 

Here’s how Kant’s theory works: Information about the outside world comes to us through our senses, framed, according to the principles of the transcendental aesthetic, in a matrix of space and time.  That information is then processed by the mind according to certain rules - the categories.  What emerges from this process are concepts, ideas of what the world is all about.  The categories, then, represent aspects of the outside world that provide checks and balances on how we think, while the transcendental aesthetic places checks and balances on how we can perceive the world.  The whole thing functions as a kind of feedback mechanism, with mind and world working together to paint, for us, a picture of reality.

 

What does this reality consist of?  Kant tells us that there may be objects out there, or there may be characteristics of objects, of which we cannot be aware.  What ever is true of objects, in and of themselves, Kant calls the “thing in itself”.  But “things in themselves” are not the constituents of this picture of reality; those things which our minds cannot place in a space-time framework, just never make it into our minds for consideration.  Above all, what matters in this picture are those things that affect us; things that don’t affect us, just get left out of the picture.  Reality, on this view, doesn’t include objects of which we cannot be aware, any more than it includes table-people.  While things may be, in themselves, whatever they are, “reality” is a kind of interactive medium in which we, and the world, interact with one another, and those things that aren’t players in that interaction, just aren’t a part of that reality.

 

Is that a plausible view?  Do we need to worry about “things in themselves”, of which we cannot be aware?  At first, I think, this view is a little unsettling, for there is this nagging concern about things out there in the world being “real” even though they don’t affect us in any way.  But, we must also ask, is it reasonable to be overly concerned about things which do not affect us, which do not play a part in the world in which we live?  There may be table-people floating around the dark side of the moon, I don’t know, but, does it really matter?  If it matters, it would have to affect me in some way, and then I would be aware of it.  If it doesn’t affect me, or the way in which I interact with the rest of the world, does it matter whether those things are there or not?  In short, if there are things out there that do not relate to me in terms of space and time, should I really, at the bottom, be including them in my picture of reality?

 

My guess is, there are probably quite a few things out there that have nothing to do with the world in which I think and act.  I don’t include them in my “reality”, as it is, because not only am I not aware of them, but they don’t affect me or anything around me.  So, maybe it is plausible, after all, to not worry about things that aren’t a part of the space-time world, if it also means I don’t have to worry about becoming a person-table.

 

C. Refutation of Transcendental Idealism.

 

Of course, that’s not the end of the story.  Scholars have been arguing over Kant’s view since it was first published, and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  Why?  Because Kant’s view is, if nothing else, extremely clever, intricate, complicated, and even enchanting.  But there are also voices of disagreement.  I don’t want to delve into the details of scholarship on the subject; instead, I want to show what I think are some rather obvious problems; problems that should cause us to step back from the beauty of the theory and ask whether it really is believable after all.

 

It is perhaps all-important to remember what the agenda is for this particular historical thread in philosophy.  From the time of Descartes, through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel and others, the thrust all along has been this: to show that the world described by the physical sciences is the “real” world, and the world described by medieval theology is not.  That’s it, boiled down to its essence -- that the study of physical objects tells us something about reality, and the study of angels and demons does not.  Granted, there is much more to say on this topic, but at bottom, I think that’s the story.

 

With that in mind, let’s revisit what Kant has said.  Take the categories first.  Kant’s discussion of the categories, which he calls the “Transcendental Deduction”, is a classic of complexity, and the subject of prolific commentary.  Let me quickly just draw attention to two points.  Firstly, it is not at all clear how the categories ever got there.  For Kant’s purposes, it’s enough to show that the categories are a priori; but for us, in attempting to assess the plausibility of Kant’s theory, we need to know how the categories get into the mind in the first place.  To simply say they are a priori is not enough.  It’s a little like the famous “watchmaker” argument from theology: if one stumbles across a watch, one can infer there is a watchmaker.  But it is another thing to infer from the need for a watchmaker that there is a God.  Similarly, one may be able to argue that certain cognitive faculties must be in place in order for thought to occur, but it is quite another thing to show how they got there, where they came from, and particularly that they are not themselves constructs of the mind; “bootstrap” processes, for example.  As I said before, this part of Kant’s work is very difficult and confusing, which suggests that Kant may have been a bit confused himself on this matter, for most of Kant’s other work is very clear.  

 

Keeping in mind the overall goal of this thread in philosophy - the vindication of science - a close exammination of the categories themselves leaves us a bit suspicious.  They seem to be just the right faculties one would need, in order to carry out the science of the 18th century.  Indeed, the match is a bit too close for comfort - it looks like, from an examination of the categories, that the science of the time was inevitable.  And that’s not good, for it makes us wonder, in the absence of a clear and unambiguous “deduction” just where they came from.  Even worse, it is hard to see how, if these are the rules that govern our thought, how we could ever have gotten relativity theory, chaos theory, or some of the other innovative concepts in physics.

 

While none of these arguments are decisive, they do suggest that we should view the categories with a certain amount of suspicion.

 

But a more obvious problem exists with the transcendental aesthetic.  My particular interest in philosophy is mystical experience.  There are many kinds of mystical experiences, many different aspects and features to it, but there is one thing that is consistent about it across the board, and that is, the absence of guess which two qualities?  Space and Time.  Mystics use word like “eternal”, “infinite”, “everlasting”, “omnipresent”, and so forth.  It isn’t that these things describe just lots of time or space; they describe a reality in which time and space don’t exist.  Eternity is not a long time, it’s the absence of time.  If we take mystical experiences seriously, then Kant is fundamentally wrong in his assertion that we cannot have perceptions in the absence of a space-time framework.

 

There’s another problem with the theory, and one that directly concerns us today.  What is the status of “virtual reality”, in Kant’s theory?  Virtual reality is, in many ways, the flip-side of mystical experience.  Where in a mystical experience, we encounter a world of which we were never aware, in virtual reality, we generate that world and project ourselves into it.  As such, the space-time framework is something we have projected outward, it is not a feature of our interpretation, but rather a condition we have imposed.

 

Now if Kant is wrong about either the categories, or about space-time, or both, then his theory begins to unravel like Berkeley’s onion of perception.  In the end, it means that the world isn’t there in the mind to certify our thoughts, and the mind isn’t there in the world to certify our perceptions.  The feedback mechanism Kant proposes just isn’t there, and we’re left with “reality” being a worse limbo than when we started.

 

IV. Participatory Reality.

 

It might be useful, at this point, to return to the idea that, if a philosophical theory gives us an absurd or stupid conclusion, it must have an absurd or stupid premise in it somewhere.  But where is the problem?  Locke’s objectivism fails because it ignores the fact that “reality” for us, has an inescapable mental component.  Similarly, Idealism fails because “reality” contains an inescapable non-mental component - the “facticities” we mentioned.  Kant’s transcendental idealism fails because, in trying to intermix the two, it also remains faithful to the mind/world duality, and inherits the problem of both views that precede it.

 

Nonetheless, Kant seems to have been right about two things.  First, that “reality” has something to do with things that affect us or matter to us.  I don’t know whether there are cows jumping over the dark side of the moon or not, and it makes very little difference to me.  Now, if I were to observe them doing so, then in order to observe it, it would have affected me, and hence become part of my “reality”.  “Reality” is, therefore, not a set of external objects that certify the functioning of my mind, or visa versa; rather, it’s a kind of interactive environment, a sphere of activity in which I am a participant, along with other objects, other persons, and so on.  “Reality” is my participation in the cosmos, and it’s participation in me.

 

The second thing Kant was right about is that, except under very unusual circumstances, we don’t have what philosophers call “privileged access” to the world;

ordinarily, we don’t perceive the world directly, such that the world somehow appears to us as it is, independent of our abilities to observe it.  Rather, everything we observe about the world comes to us in a context, or from a point of view, framed by the way our senses work and by the way the mind works.

 

If we can accept these two ideas - that “reality” is interactive, and is contextualized - then, we must ask, does it make sense to draw the line that separates the mind and the world, in the way that classical philosophy has drawn it?  If there are so many problems with this approach to understanding “reality”, why do we continue to follow it?

 

The answer, I think, has to do with some very deep-seated convictions we have about the way the world is; convictions that we have inherited from antiquity - from philosophers like Plato, but also, from the science of the Enlightenment period that has framed many of the discussions in modern philosophy.  In particular, from the mechanics of Isaac Newton, we have inferred the assumption that the world exists in a certain way, independent of how we look at it, and if we want to get things right, we have to refer out to that world, to certify our beliefs.  This, which we can call the “Newtonian view”, assumes there are certain absolutes about the world - including the framework of space and time - which are “real”, and our job is to bring our minds into “sync” with those absolutes.

 

Well, beginning in the late 19th century, among some scientists and philosophers, there was a growing awareness that this Newtonian view was fundamentally flawed; that the idea of  “reality” being fixed and unchanging, and, somehow, completely independent of us, is seriously wrong.  Early experimental work in electromagnetism and subatomic physics, along with advances in mathematics and other areas, suggested that the world “out there” isn’t the kind of solid rock the Newtonian view had assumed.  With the publication of Einstein’s work in relativity, and subsequent work in quantum and relativity physics that continues today, it has become obvious that a new way of looking at “reality” is necessary, because the old mind/world view is no longer capable of describing the world as we have come to understand it.

 

What does this “new reality” look like?  There really is nothing difficult or complicated about it.  The only problem is, understanding it requires that we give up the ideas of “reality” that have been passed down to us from antiquity, through the Enlightenment, and through most of our basic textbooks of science.  To see the world as theoretical physics now sees it, we have to give up the Newtonian model of reality, and particularly, the distinction between mind and world that is so firmly entrenched in our socially communicated notion of reality.  That’s a hard thing to do, and a tall order to ask for.  What I want to do in the remaining time is try to give you, using some examples, a brief glimpse into this “reality”, and show how it relates to the topic of virtual reality.

 

One of the most basic insights into this “new reality” comes from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  Here’s what this is all about:  Suppose we want to measure something, say the mass and velocity of a subatomic particle - two aspects of it that Locke would call “primary qualities”.  The obvious way to do this is to shine light on it.  But light can only measure things within a certain limit of accuracy, that depends upon its wavelength.  If we think of light as a wave, the wave has crests and valleys; the distance between the crests is its wavelength.  We can only measure the motion, or the size, as accurately as the distance between the crests. To measure our particle more accurately, logic tells us, we must use a shorter wavelength of light. 

 

Here’s the catch:  light can behave both as a wave and as a particle itself, and the shorter the wavelength we use, the more energy the light particles have.  Since the light particles we are using to measure have, themselves, a certain mass, the more energy they have, the more they will impact, and thereby disturb, the object we are measuring.  There is not an infinitely small light particle; there is some minimum size, called a quantum, which means there will always be some mass, and consequently some affect on the object measured.  So, when we shine light on something, we disturb it in proportion to the energy of the light we shine on it.  This presents us with the following paradox: the more accurately we try to measure something, the more we disturb it, and hence, change the value of what we’re trying to measure.

 

Thus, the more accurately we try to measure it’s size, the shorter wavelength of light we must use, and therefore the more we disturb the object’s motion.  Similarly, the more accurately we try to measure the object’s motion, the lower wavelength of light we must use, and hence the less accurately we will be able to determine the object’s mass.  Since mass and motion are both, for Locke “primary qualities”, we have a situation in which observing one primary quality necessarily alters at least one other. In a theory such as Locke’s, we are just passive observers of reality; this turns out not to be true, for, according to the Uncertainty Principle, the more closely we study the “reality” of an object, the more we change, fundamentally, the structure of that reality.

 

Let’s try a little more concrete example.  Suppose I have a watermelon, and I want to measure its mass, size, and so on.  I do this by firing baseballs at it, and measuring how the baseballs are scattered about when they collide with the watermelon.  It’s obvious that my measurements will be limited in accuracy by the size of the baseballs.  Now suppose I want to measure the watermelon’s dimensions more accurately.  I would fire smaller things at it; golf balls maybe.  But to get the golf balls to reach the watermelon, I have to shoot them harder.  Let’s say I go to something really small - a 9mm bullet.  To get these to hit the watermelon, I have to fire them much harder, so much harder, in fact, that some of them go through the watermelon, some blow pieces of it off, and so on.  That’s a crude example, but it does illustrate how the more accurate I try to be with my measurements, the more I alter the thing I’m trying to measure.

 

Now the problem is this: the amount by which the object of our measurement is disturbed cannot be accurately predicted.  So, not only do we disturb things when we try to measure them, but we can never really know how much we have disturbed them.  This is not a feature of how we try to measure things, or of what we try to measure, as Stephen Hawking said, “Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world.”

 

What does this mean to our notion of “reality”?  It means, for one thing, that Locke is just wrong about the notion of primary qualities - there are no characteristics of objects that affect us in ways so as to certify our perceptions.  Quite the opposite: there is a fundamental inaccuracy in our perceptions that is caused by the act of observing in itself.  This means that, as Kant suggested, “reality” is a kind of interaction.  But, as Kant did not suggest, it also means that a better view of “reality” is one that includes us in the picture.

 

In the history of philosophy, this is certainly a novel idea: that reality includes us!  If we generalize Heisenberg’s principle, it means that when we move about in the world, observing, acting, whatever we do, we are constantly, by our activities, changing the world in which we move.  When I use the phrase “participatory reality”, this is the notion I am trying to get across: that it’s just impossible to conceive of “reality” on the mind/world picture; we have to look at it as one big melting pot.  We have to acknowledge that there are things that affect us that lie outside of our minds, but we also have to acknowledge that our view of “reality” is partly dependent upon how we view the world, and that our presence in the world alters it unpredictably.  How different this is from the Newtonian view, that the universe just “is” in some certain way, and if I come to know that way, I will know “reality”. 

 

Is it legitimate to generalize Heisenberg’s principle, outside the realm of subatomic physics?  I shall use two examples to suggest that it is.  First, in the realm of literature, there is Stanley Fish’s idea of “self consuming artifacts”, and in fact a whole literary movement known as “reader response criticism”.  The gist of these ideas is that a text, be it a book or whatever, doesn’t have any particular meaning on its own.  What a book “means”, or “is about”, is a function of that text, plus a function of what kind of response it produces in its readers.  This is to say that texts don’t have a “reality” of their own; instead, they figure in a network of interactions between readers that define their meaning and significance.

 

The second example, one of the cornerstones of modern chaos theory, is the “Coastline of Britain” problem.  The example works like this:  I ask, how long is the coastline of Britain?  One thing we might do is measure it with a satellite, and our measurement would be accurate to, say, so many miles.  To get a more accurate measurement, we might go around the island with some surveying instruments, accurate to within a few feet.  Now suppose we want a more accurate measurement still - we might use a ruler or yardstick, accurate to a few millimeters.  And we could use more and more sophisticated instruments, accurate to Angstrom units, to the rotational spin of quarks, and on and on.

 

What we would discover during this process is that, as we go to smaller and smaller increments of accuracy, the coastline itself gets bigger and bigger.  We would discover that, in measuring with the ruler, the length we come up with will be much greater than the margin of error in our satellite measurement - it will be many miles longer.  Intuitively, we can understand why this is so: as the measurement increments get smaller, we measure finer and finer details, which add to the length.  The problem is that as we use smaller and smaller increments, we don’t approach a limit that is the “real” length, we approach infinity!

 

Well, the coastline of Britain is not of infinite length, so something must have gone wrong.  What went wrong is that we assumed, as the Newtonian view leads us to do, that the island of Britain is some kind of object with a definite set of primary qualities, and the more accurately we measure those qualities, the more accurately we will know the nature of what we are measuring.  But this is not the case; every time we measure the object, it’s most basic, “primary” qualities, change on us!  That certainly isn’t the kind of reality Locke thought he was dealing with.

 

In the language of modern physics, we would call the coastline of Britain a “fractal”, meaning that it is not exactly a two dimensional object, with some definite linear dimension we can measure, nor is it exactly a three dimensional object, that we can weigh (how does one weigh a coastline?).  It occupies some fractional dimension between the two.  But what is the “real” length of the coastline of Britain?  The answer is, that there is no “real” length, that isn’t a function of the way we interact with it.  If we were interested in how long it would take to fly around the island, one answer would be appropriate.  If we were going to hike the distance, though, it would be much longer, as we would be involved with it at a different degree of magnitude.  There is no “length”, independent of how we measure it, and the best way to measure it is a way that is appropriate to the way we will be interacting with it.

 

These examples, the Heisenberg principle, reader response criticism, and the fractal nature of objects, support the notion of “participatory reality”, because they show that reality is not something that stands on its own, but is defined by the way in which we interact with the world.  There just is no “way the world is”, that doesn’t include us as a part of it, and doesn’t include the changes our activities make in it.

 

So, what is the status of the “virtual” within the framework of a participatory reality?  Let us try one last example.  Suppose I create a computer program that lets us view a building, walk through it, see its contents, and so forth.  We would say, “that is virtual reality”, because there is no such building, other than in the mind of the programmer who created it.  Suppose I give this program to a contractor, and goes out and builds the building, exactly as the program specifies.  Now, I show you the program, and you would say, “That’s a model, because it depicts something that’s really there.”

 

The trouble is, that in going from “virtual reality” to “model” - from depicting something that isn’t there to depicting something that is - nothing about the program itself has changed.  Something about the outside world has changed - now there’ a building - but the program iitself is the same.  In our eyes, however, there has been a change in the “reality” status of the program, because now it models something that’s there.

 

The kind of change that has occurred is in what philosophers call a “mere Cambridge property.”  A “mere Cambridge property” is something that is true of an object by virtue of its relationship to something else.  I am, for example, so many feet away from Cambridge, England.  Now, if I move to the other side of the stage, that property is no longer true of me, because I am now some different number of feet away from Cambridge - there is a new mere Cambridge property that I now have.

 

Intuitively, we don’t tend to take mere Cambridge properties very seriously most of the time, partly because there are so many of them - think about my relationship to every other object, to every point in space and time, and how many mere Cambridge properties I have - but more importantly, they seem to have little to do with the nature of things themselves - nothing about  me changes, so we would think, just because my distance from  Cambridge has changed.  What changed between our computer program being “virtual” and being a “model” is nothing about the program - what changed is its relationship to a pile of building materials.

 

But I think the notion of “participatory reality” forces us to re-examine that issue.  After all, the only thing that lets us assign any value at all to the length of the coastline of Britain is - our relationship to that coastline, whether we’re hiking or flying.  There just is no determinate length for the coastline of Britain, outside of our relationship to it.  If that example can be generalized, then it means that there is no “reality” outside of our participation with it, and it means that the difference between what is “virtual” and what is “concrete” is given by relationships, and not by the things themselves.

 

I’m not sure, though, that the coastline of Britain example can really be safely generalized to include all of reality.  For one thing, it has some pretty abhorrent consequences in the realm of ethics: one could say, for example, that because I am not a member of a certain ethnic group, the persecution and/or genocide of that group just isn’t part of my “reality”; it isn’t “really” going on.  One could legitimize a view like that, on the basis of taking these “mere Cambridge properties” seriously.

 

On the other hand, as William James pointed out, our own “realities” are very much a function of what it is we choose to include within them.  We have a remarkable ability to ignore facticities, even to the point of serious injury.  To some extent, we create our own “facticities”, and this is where the idea of virtual reality comes into play.

 

In an era when philosophy has yet to fully come to grips with Heisenberg’s principle and chaos theory, virtual reality remains a virtually untouched idea.  The difference between virtual reality and, say, fantasy art, is that we now have the ability, through pressure suits and so forth, to create a set of “virtual facticities” as well as images. 

What is new about “virtual reality” is the ability to manufacture a more complete environment - to suspend, at least temporarily, the mental distinction between the virtual and the concrete.  That’s where the notion of the participatory reality comes in - for the moment, we can suspend the judgment between virtual and concrete, and the virtual can become the “real”.  Or can be made into the “real” - perhaps it means we are allowing others to suspend that judgment for us.  Is the nightly news “real” in the concrete sense, or in the virtual sense; does it depict a world that’s “really” there, or a manufactured reality?  What about other kinds of virtual reality - “society”, “nation”, and other concepts we take for granted as being real, but which are in fact virtual reality constructs?

 

How are we to distinguish “concrete” reality - a term I slipped in there without really explaining - from the “virtual”?  The virtual, of course, is what is not really there, while the concrete is what really is there.  But,, in making that distinction, aren’t we falling back on Locke and his objectivism?  And haven’t we shown how that doesn’t work? 

 

Remember the movie, “War Games”?  That’s an excellent example of a virtual reality gone haywire.  A teenager looking for computers with games on them starts dialing every phone number in the world, and eventually gets a system that has a menu with “global thermonuclear war” on it.  He wants to play that game, so chooses that item.  Unfortunately, the computer is the main control system at NORAD, and the simulation almost causes the computer to launch a real “retaliatory” strike.  Using that as an example, we might ask where the distinction between the virtual and the real lies, or if there is really, in many cases, any such distinction at all.

 

So at bottom, I think that philosophy has not yet really come to grips with virtual reality, and how it fits into any kind of general picture of reality.  It is clear that the classical conceptions of reality fail in giving us a clear picture of what “reality” is, yet it is not clear that more recent views of “reality” do much better, when trying to distinguish between what is “virtually real” and what is “really real”.  We may have to face the prospect that there is no clear distinction to be made there.  As one song said, “Don’t write in starlight, the words might come out real.”  We just may have to face the possibility that when we create virtual realities, we are in fact creating reality itself.