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Philosophy & Science

On our ‘About’ page, we describe Matrise as a blog that focuses on the topics of VR and Consciousness, and the related Science & Philosophy. In this entry, we will discuss why we find both Science & Philosophy essential and how the disciplines compliment each other. The entry is apologetic of Philosophy as a discourse, and especially critiques the philosophy of Scientism and other extremes of logical positivism — of which the former can be understood as an ignorance of the role of philosophy in general. The discussion is highly relevant as this is a worldview increasingly adopted by young people and promoted by popular science figures. The danger is a spread of anti-intellectualism, which ironically is going on under the flag of science, and further even tries to adopt its authority.

It should be noted that although the entry critiques some ignorant science communicators, it is not the aim of this entry to argue philosophy in any way triumphant over science.  The aim is rather to replace “versus” with “and”, and illustrate their mutual dependency. Like my philosopher friend and colleague Deborah G. Johnson once said of her technology criticism: “I prefer to think of my role as similar to that of an art critic” — an art critic loves art, and similarly, in this entry, my critique is out of love for the scientific discourse. It is, by far, not directed at the conceptual core of science, but rather towards the bad tendency that may be had towards it.

In my occupation as a Ph.D. fellow, I ought to, and do, value both science & philosophy, and the main argument of this entry will be the inseparability of the two disciplines and the beauty of their interplay.

Philosophy is Dead, Long Live Philosophy

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Illustrating excerpt from “The Philosophy Force Five vs the Scientismists” by Existential Comics. The left guy seems to be Richard Dawkins. Original can be found here.

It may benefit us to personify the attitude towards science and philosophy that we are criticizing with an example. In 2010, the late brilliant Professor Stephen Hawking declared that ‘Philosophy is Dead’, and that the torch guiding the quest for knowledge had been passed to scientists rather than the philosophers. The strong irony present is obviously how Hawking argues the death of philosophy in terms of philosophical arguments, thus illustrating the futility of his statement simultaneously. In his book, “The Grand Design”, Hawking writes that metaphysical questions such as the meaning of life and the nature of reality traditionally were questions for philosophers — but that now, alas, philosophy is dead. Luckily, however, Hawking himself comes to the rescue: further in the book he writes that the “purpose of this book is to give the answers that are suggested by recent discoveries and theoretical advances” — thus pronouncing ever more clearly that his book is one of philosophy rather than science — but which reasons on asserted scientific facts. Revolutionary, indeed. Why did not Philosophy think of just looking at the answers that were suggested by the facts? The whole field of Philosophy is dead, but Hawking has taken it up as a side project and written a philosophical book, so we need not worry.

A critical point that illustrates Hawking’s misunderstanding here, is how he announces that his book discusses “the answers that are suggested by science”. His attitude is therefore that the physics always imply its metaphysics; that descriptive facts of the world also tell of their own meaning, that the solution is always innate in the problem. The situation is that Hawking, of course, has a certain philosophy, he is simply not critical towards his acceptance of it. His assertion is easy to critique, however,  by arguing that science does not suggest anything — Hawking, however, suggest several things, and these may be great things and great ideas! It is easy to agree with his philosophy as broad as it is: through observation, we agree on facts, and with logic, we reason on the meaning of these facts. Hawking is philosophizing on scientific discoveries and theories, and that would be a great thing had he only been aware that was his approach. There is not (necessarily) anything wrong with his philosophical stance, except in exactly how it claims to not be a philosophical stance. The saying “Philosophy is Dead” instantly revives Philosophy as the utterance itself is a philosophical statement. The sentence achieves the same futility as a person grabbing a megaphone to announce that megaphones don’t really work.

idiot - Philosophy & Science
Illustrating excerpt from “The Philosophy Force Five vs the Scientismists” by Existential Comics. Original can be found here.

The Science Gang

Unfortunately, Hawking as a popular science communicator is not alone in his ignorance. For instance, both Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye (the Science guy), has also publicly addressed their concerns over Philosophy. Neil deGrasse Tyson has called Philosophy ‘useless‘, advising bright students to stay away from it, and stated that Philosophy is not “a productive contributor to our understanding of the natural world”. He has also said that he is concerned that “philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature”, and described the venture of philosophy as being “distracted by questions”, and therefore not able to contribute anything to our understanding.

Our best example of the problem that lies at the core of these poor critiques, however,  is given by Bill Nye in a YouTube video where he is faced with a question from a Philosophy major on what his take on Philosophy is. Nye addresses the topic of Philosophy by introducing several great philosophical problems such as the nature of consciousness and reality, only to dismiss them based on the argument, or, rather saying, that he is quite sure that reality is real. Deep dive. The best illustrative quote would perhaps be his rejection, and total misunderstanding, of Descartes’ famous argument ‘Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am.’ Nye comments on this: «Well, what if you don’t think, do you not exist anymore? You probably still exist even if you don’t think about existence”. I hope I don’t have to explain why this is ridiculous.

At the end of the video, Nye goes further into depravity when he presents a thought experiment to validate his lack of philosophical skepticism.  Nye simply asks the questioner to drop a hammer on his foot. This kind of argumentation is classic and has long before been termed ‘argument ad lapidem‘: a logical fallacy that consists of dismissing a statement as absurd without giving proof of its absurdity. What is even more unfortunate, however, is that this was a brilliant opportunity for Nye to illustrate how science actually benefit philosophy, as there is much evidence from scientific experiments that show we may not always be able to trust our senses, and even our own reasoning (read for instance about the fascinating split-brain experiments, or even here on Matrise on how we can fool our senses to achieve Virtual Embodiment or our entry on The World of Illusions). For those who can emotionally afford to experience a few cringy minutes, Bill Nye’s YouTube video can be watched here.

A Philosophical Argument

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Illustration borrowed from Existential Comics’ “Philosophers And Physicists” available here.

The problem with a defiant attitude towards Philosophy is that it promotes an ignorance of thorough, critical thinking. Our sciences are infused with philosophy and we need philosophy to reason on our discoveries and their meaning, and further to discuss what we want to research. The best way to understand this is that our scientific methods are an accomplishment of philosophy with the epistemology, methodology, and rationality underlying it: the validity of the scientific discourse is argued for in philosophical terms. Science is not given, it is a construct: our scientific methods have been developed, and are still being discussed and developed to this day. Science & Philosophy does not compete with each other; philosophers compete with philosophers; the logical positivists compete with the idealists, and the rationalists compete with the empiricists. Science is conceptually within Philosophy, and one of its greatest accomplishments. They do not exist separately.

The Uninvestigated Myth

What Philosophy can teach us, and which perhaps especially the field of Existentialism stresses, is to critically reinvestigate our beliefs. It stresses the possibility of each individual to realize their own potential, and also implicitly, the possibility of failing to do so. Heidegger, for instance, a philosopher which we have discussed in several entries earlier is concerned with authentic existence. Allowing an uninvestigated myth such as Scientism to guide one’s life could be a good illustration of Heidegger’s “Das man”; which could be said to be his impersonated term for the norms and culture we blindly accept. It is hard to translate “Das man”, but Heidegger defines it as a possible state of Dasein’s Being. A common way to explain or translate “Das Man” is to the “They” or the “One”, as in “One should always get up early”. Heidegger explains that “‘Das man’ prescribes one’s state-of-mind, and determines what and how one ‘sees'”. This can be read as that culture, or uninvestigated norms that provide a narrative to our existence determines how we fundamentally interpret reality. In the words of crazy Terence McKenna: «Culture is not your friend!»  Rather than to accept the cultural and societal narratives, we should critically investigate them, and not let anyone dictate a narrative for us that we should just subscribe to. What narratives in our society do we subscribe to, in relation to who we are and what we want?  What did we adopt from our parents and our society in relation to how we understand the basic principles of the world?

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Illustration borrowed from Existential Comics’ “Philosophy News Network: Philosophy Solved” available here.

 Conclusion

It is a very naïve view, indeed, to believe that the solutions to the problems of mankind may be solved if all the young, bright minds go into the natural sciences. We need not only to find out how nature works, but also how we ought to work with it and further with each other. Science alone does not tell us what we should do in our lives. No scientific fact can alone provide us meaning, or say what we should value and pursue. Dismissing philosophy is a dismissal of thorough criticism, it is being attached and dependent on one’s settled, foundational narrative of how the world works.

Concluding this entry is an accompanying text to one of the comics in this entry on Scientism by Corey Mohler. As this entry has not necessarily been very explicit on what Scientism is, it may be informative to read his very clear presentation on this.

“‘Scientism’ is the position that Science can solve all problems, or that all problems are empirical. Philosophically, it is mostly associated with the strongest statements made by the logical positivism movement, which mostly died out in the mid 20th century. Culturally, however, it is stronger than ever, and is closely tied to movements like the so-called “New Atheists”. These newer, more naive forms of Scientism, also have a strong tendency to call philosophy “a big waste of time”, “pointless arguing”, “nothing but semantics”, etc. Rhetorically, they tend to say that non-empirical ideas have no way to guarantee they are true, so are pointless to talk about. This is a rather ridiculous point to make, since their entire movement is based around spreading a certain set of non-empirical, philosophical norms, which they apparently don’t feel it necessary to open up to criticism. What they mostly seem to mean is, assuming everyone agrees with us on the important philosophic questions, such as atheism, utilitarianism, capitalism, eliminative materialism, etc., then we don’t need anything but science. Well, this is maybe true in a strange way, insofar that if everyone agreed on every philosophical position, i.e. if philosophy was solved, then we probably wouldn’t need philosophy. Philosophy, however, has not been solved. Furthermore, if it is going to be solved, it certainly won’t be solved by a bunch of people who don’t even read or engage in philosophy. The real goal is often just to draw a border around what we should or shouldn’t question, because they don’t want any of the fundamental aspects of society to change. And, well, people who don’t want society to change often also find themselves not wanting people to even think about changing society.” — Corey Mohler behind ExistentialComics.com

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Sensory Deprivation — Floating in Virtual Reality

In this piece, we discuss how we can use a floatation tank to increase our immersion and presence  in Virtual Reality. If we look to our glossary, we see Presence within Virtual Reality (VR) defined as the degree to which the subject feels present in the virtual world. What is interesting to note, is that this naturally has to be viewed relatively to the degree that the subject feels present in the physical world — as we usually receive information from both our physical and our virtual environments.

There can thus be two separated approaches to designing for presence in virtual reality environments: one is to provide sensory stimulus of the virtual environment, and the other is to block sensory stimulus from the physical environment. Both approaches work towards the same goal of immersion — the encapsulation of the user in the VE. Slater and Wilbur (1997) recognise this in their definition of Immersion, which is closely related to the notion of Presence. They define immersion in terms of four qualities the system can afford, the first one of which is called inclusiveness. Inclusiveness they define as the extent to which physical reality is shut out.

Obviously, the principle of adding and removing sensory experience go hand in hand; by equipping a Head-Mounted Display you are blocking the physical impressions and replacing them with virtual impressions, all the while shielding for incoming light from the surroundings. Blocking light, however, is not the only way to deprive the senses of information from the physical environment. In this entry, we will discuss how we can maximize the inclusiveness of the immersion by achieving sensory deprivation in a floatation tank, whilst immersed in Virtual Reality!

Floatation Chambers

Floatation tanks, or sensory deprivation chambers— are pools of water with copious amounts of epsom salt (≈600kg). The floatation tanks are sealed for any incoming light and sound, and the air- and water temperature is equal to that of your body. When you lie down, you will feel how the salt makes you float even though the pool is very shallow. As you lie there, you notice how the ripples you created when lying down start to slowly subside as you sink down into weightlessness. After a while, because of the air- and water temperatures are the same as that of your body, you can no longer pinpoint where the water ends and the air around you begins. In fact, it gets hard to distinguish anything from anything else, including your body from the air and water. There is really nothing that is easy to grasp as isolated, save perhaps your breath. And as the minutes go, with total physical relaxation and lack of much sensory impression at all, things start to change.

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“Alone With Your Thoughts”, Illustration by Cole Ott

The most significant, explicit change one may notice in the tank  is that after a while your bodily self-consciousness is not what it used to be. Your mental model of where your body is in relation to the world around you starts to become blurred. Normally reinforced by tactile stimuli of air and water (of varying temperatures), and visual and auditive stimuli from the environment, your body model is now lacking information on which to create it. Your sense of spaciousness has also changed, that is the feeling of your position as defined relatively to say, the walls, mountains and sky has disappeared. You now really experience nothing around you, but neither any edges to this lack of information in your surroundings. You may get the feeling of floating in empty space — but where are you in all of this? What, in this stream of conscious experience is matter and what is mind?

Inner vs Outer

6D71D188 AD2B 48A0 8DBF F288A5BBE096 - Sensory Deprivation — Floating in Virtual Reality

In our entry — ‘Inner as Outer: Projecting Mental States as External Reality‘ — we discussed the potential of using VR for meditation purposes in experimental ways. In the introduction to the entry, we discussed our feeling of Self as a duality of Inner and Outer, of which our everyday experiences usually comprise. We discussed how technology may have the power to transform our consciousness away from this traditional subject-object hierarchy and into a non-dual one, where the Inner is seen as the Outer, and the Outer as Inner. In this entry we are building further on these ideas. Similarly to visualising inner states in VR through biometrics, using VR in floatation tanks might provide illusory experiences where the conscious experience is significantly altered.

One other entry relevant to our experiments with VR in floatation tanks should be mentioned before we go on: the entry on Virtual Embodiment. In the entry, we discuss the great potential of VR to hack our consciousness; why it is possible, and what it can be used for. The research is highly relevant for floatation in VR, as both floatation tanks and VR alter our self-model, as both alter the sensory impressions necessary to maintain it.

Research on Virtual Embodiment in Floatation Tanks

Matrise partnered up with Bergen Flyt, a local company offering floatation therapy in the heart of Bergen city. We used a Samsung Gear VR with a Samsung S8 phone. We did not use a HTC Vive (Pro) as it would be more risky exposing the cable to water. Also, no room tracking or even much head orientation was needed, and in terms of resolution the HMD is quite high in ppi. We chose to first try out some abstract visualisations through the application “Fractal Lounge”, that shows varying psychedelic visuals and floating through space.

My Experience

“After I had showered, I put on the GEAR VR headset, started the application, and slowly entered the floatation pool. I held my hands towards the wall, as I did not see anything else than the visuals in the headset. When I was inside, I closed the glass door, and slowly lowered myself into the water — back first. It took a few seconds before I dared to lower my head all the way down, but very soon I was totally relaxed. As expected, the electronics in the display was kept well above water, due to the intense amount of salt in the water …”

maxresdefault - Sensory Deprivation — Floating in Virtual Reality
The kind of visualisations provided from Fractal Lounge, the application that was tried in the floatation tank.

“The visualisation pulsated, floated, drifted along — and often totally changed in colours and shapes. It took probably about ten minutes before my feeling of body totally vanished, to the degree that it was a larger gap between wanting to move the body and actually being able to move it than usual. I felt like perceiving a great drama and scene, and I got engaged in the forms and ways of the visualisations, sometimes quite invested in it, as it felt close and reality-defining for me. After about twenty minutes in, I felt as if I was drifting along in space at high speed, because of the steady movement of stars away from me. At the same time, there was no sound, which made the quick travel feel peaceful and smooth. As with normal floating, about every ten minutes there is a sort of reality-check moment where you remember you are in the tank and contemplate how weird it is. This also happened in VR, and was … equally as weird”

Reflections and Future Work

My first experiment with floatation in VR lasted for about 45 minutes. Sometimes, unfortunately, the VR headset glided slightly off my face, and I had to reposition it with my wet, salty fingers. After this happened about three times, I had to leave the tank in order to save the equipment.

sensory depro 577x1024 - Sensory Deprivation — Floating in Virtual Reality
Thank God that we have floatation pools instead of this creepy stuff.

My first experience of floating in virtual reality was very promising. The largest surprise was the feeling of movement through space at high speed. The largest frustration was the lack of any sort of interaction with ones surroundings at all, except the possibility to open and close one’s eyes. A great experiment would be to use eye tracking technology as a way of navigation in the vast, abstract psychedelic spaces. If one travelled towards where one saw, one could even be interactive while lying still in the floatation tank. This could also possibly have curious effects on which parts (perhaps the eyes), we identify with our selves. Perhaps the placement of our self could be altered by changing the agency for transportation.

Matrise will continue the cooperation with Bergen Flyt, and both try and develop different applications. Our plan is to measure the feeling of presence and self-identification and consciousness while in the tank.

Literature list

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Virtual Embodiment

The most praised ability of Virtual Reality is its capability to immerse the user in a Virtual Environment — to the degree that the subject feels present in it. The magic is to be fooled by the system so that one feels present where one actually does not physically reside. This effect can, however, turn even more magical. A deeper step into the effects of technological immersion is found in the concept of Virtual Embodiment. If a subject is embodied virtually,  not only is the virtual environment accepted as such; the subject also identifies with a virtual body or avatar inside the virtual environment. This differs from realizing which character you control in a game — within Virtual Embodiment it is the same processes that make you identify with your real body that makes you identify with a virtual one. This is a key point, as it is why research into virtual embodiment is important.

Screenshot 2018 07 20 at 13.05.27 - Virtual Embodiment
Peeling layers of the onion: VR can be a tool to discover who we are, through investigation of what and how we identify with our bodies. Illustration: “Mask of Day by Day” by Paulo Zerbato.

Hacking and Experimenting with Consciousness

What is fascinating about both of these possibilities of illusion, then — is how, and that, they are possible at all. Knowledge on how to achieve such immersion is obviously relevant for all VR developers, but the knowledge that can be obtained by researching these phenomena goes far beyond knowing how to apply it in VR technology. By creating experiments in VR, we can generate, and investigate, phenomenas of the mind under various experimental conditions. Exploring Virtual Embodiment, for instance, can enable us with a better understanding of our self-consciousness and the relationship between body and mind. Because of this wider span, research on Virtual Embodiment attracts neuroscience researchers, psychologists, information scientists and philosopher’s alike.

The Rubber Hand Illusion

The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is an excellent example of the kind of ‘brain hacks’ that can be achieved by sensory manipulation. The illusion, as illustrated below, is a perfectly simple experiment that does not even require the use of VR technology to perform.  The RHI was introduced by Ehrson, Spence & Passingham (2004) and has been an ingenious way to illustrate how we identify with our bodies. More importantly for this entry, the results of the experiment has inspired further research on Virtual Embodiment.

160330 The Rubber Hand Illusion grande - Virtual Embodiment
Illustration from Thomas Metzinger’s book “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of The Mind and The Myth of the Self”

In the RHI, the hand of the subject is replaced by a rubber hand, while the normal hand is blocked from sight by a separating wall. When the subject is sitting as such, a researcher will stroke each hand, both the rubber and the physical hand, simultaneously. Now, the question is what happens when experiencing the sensory impression of stroking, all the while seeing a corresponding stroke on the rubber hand?

Put very simply, the brain does a ‘reasonable guess’ that this hand is indeed the correct physical hand attached to your body.  You feel that the rubber hand is yours, with nerve-endings and all — and you couple your physical feelings to the vision of the hand. This means that in your subjective experience, the rubber hand is the hand that has the sensation. Ehrson et. al write that their results suggested that “multisensory integration in the premotor cortex provides a mechanism for bodily self-attribution”. When our brains receive sensory information from two differing sensory inputs (sight+feel), these are coupled: the brain is coupling the stroking-sensation with imagery of a nearby-hand being stroked, and this is enough for the brain to attribute its self with the hand, to acknowledge it as its own.

This simple experiment share a lot of principles with the concept of Virtual Embodiment, and has inspired research in the field that we will present in this entry.

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Some experience out of body experiences (OBEs) on the onset of sleep or waking up. Often they may feel that they are floating over their bodies. VR may help to study such states of consciousness by systematically inducing them.

Virtual Body Illusion

In a later experiment by Lenggenhager et.al (2007), not only the hands of the subjects — but their whole bodies were replaced with virtual representations. Moreover, in the experiment they present, the bodies are seen from behind. In effect, they were simulating out-of-body experiences, with very interesting results.

The experiment was conducted as such: the subjects wore a Head-Mounted Display which projected imagery from a camera located behind the subjects. As such, the subjects could see a representation of their bodies “live”, but from behind. Of course, this is deviating slightly from how we normally experience life. Although the subjects saw their body responding and performing actions in real time as under normal conditions — there is a logical dissonance due to the mismatch between the location of the subjects’ eyes in the virtual environment, and what these eyes see. Effectively, the user is seeing inside a pair of “portal” binoculars (HMD), which display the light from, if not another dimension, then at least a few feet away. And this will be a part of the point.

What is interesting about this experiment is not necessarily simply that the users feel present where they do not reside physically, but how the distance is only a few feet off. The users feel present right outside of their bodies. The situation is similar, the body and the environment is there, but everything is a bit off. What is interesting to investigate then, is how the body adapts to this. Will it accept that it now controls its body from a third person perspective, similarly to how Stratton’s subjects got used to seeing the world upside down?

What they studied was basically whether this change of perspective had an impact on where the users felt embodied. To investigate this, the researchers stroked the subjects as they did in the Rubber Hand Illusion, except at their backs — so that it was perceivable by them. The question is then where this physical feeling will be attributed to — how will the phenomena of the subjective experience present themselves to the subjects?

obe - Virtual Embodiment
Out of Body experiences can be achieved virtually by using sensory impressions from other locations, for instance five meters behind you as in the experiment by Ehrson (2007). You can then effectively look at yourself from the outside.

First of all, to be clear on this — the sensory data of being stroked will initially be provided by the nerves in the physical shoulder of the user. The problem of the brain, however, is that the shoulder is out of sight — blocked by the Head-Mounted Display. There is, however, the visual impression of a shoulder on a person standing in front — being scratched in exactly the same way. Although the nerve-endings definitely feel the stroking, the problem is that where this feeling will be placed in our subjective experience is not the responsibility of the shoulder, but rather the brain. And, as the placement of the physical feeling in the bodily self-consciousness is largely dependent on vision for coordinates, what will happen? How will the brain fix this sensory discord?

In this beautifully written article by The New Yorker, its author Rothman describes one of the co-authors of the research paper, Thomas Metzinger’s, own experience undergoing the experimental conditions:

“Metzinger could feel the stroking, but the body to which it was happening seemed to be situated in front of him. He felt a strange sensation, as though he were drifting in space, or being stretched between the two bodies. He wanted to jump entirely into the body before him, but couldn’t. He seemed marooned outside of himself. It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but it was proof that, using computer technology, the self-model could easily be manipulated. A new area of research had been created: virtual embodiment.”

new yorker - Virtual Embodiment
“Are We Already Living in Virtual Reality?” — The New Yorker has a brilliant, long, read on Virtual Embodiment that features interviews with VR and Consciousness researchers Prof. Mel Slater and Prof. Thomas Metzinger.

Phantom Pain

Another curious potential effect of Virtual Embodiment, is the possibility of phantom sensory impressions as well. Handling virtual objects while being embodied, for instance, may convince your body to expect pain or touch — and so this is, somehow, actively generated. Because of this, VR may be a way to study how phantom pain is created, and further how it can be alleviated. For instance, several studies show how VR can embody a subject missing a leg in a body with two legs, similarly to traditional mirror therapy treatment, which is effective in reducing phantom pain. Again — what may be most interesting here is the possibility of systematically creating the phenomena and studying it afterwards. For instance, as Metzinger is quoted on in The New Yorker’s article, it may be supposed that phantom pain is created by a body model not corresponding to the physical reality. This will be the case for phantom pain in VR: it is not based on the physical reality, you are only relating to a virtual reality instead. Similarly, those those with real phantom pain may also be relating to a certain kind of “virtual reality”, but rather one in the format of their skewed narratives — maintained by their minds instead of a computer.

That the narrative, worldview and consciousness that our brain’s experience and generate is often not the best match with reality is not something new. As for Matrise, these concepts reminds us of the conclusion from our three-series entry towards a metaphysical standpoint on VR, in which we discussed VR as rather examplifying of our abstracting tendencies of mind. These entries can be read at Matrise, and were called: 1) On Mediums of Abstraction and Transparency, 2) Heidegger’s Virtual Reality, and 3) The Mind as Medium.

Virtual Embodiment for Social Good

Now that we have discussed the concept of Virtual Embodiment, it may be natural to discuss what this knowledge can be used for. As discussed already, generating experiments in VR that hacks our self models, may provide useful knowledge on the structure of our self-consciousness. Apart from this general knowledge, some may also have practical utilisation in applied VR for specific scenarios.

Racial Bias

A very exciting paper that describes work utilizing virtual embodiment, is one by Banakou, Hanumanthu and Slater. In the project, they embodied White people in Black bodies, and found that this significantly reduced their implicit racial bias! The article can be found and read in its entirety here (abstract available for all).

Domestic Violence

Another interesting project by Seinfeld et. al, is one in which male offenders of domestic violence became embodied in the role of a female victim in a virtual scenario. At first in the experiment, the male subject is familiarized with his new, female, virtual body and the new virtual environment. When the body ownership illusion, or virtual embodiment, has been achieved, a virtual male enters the room and becomes verbally abusive. All this time, the subject can see his own female body reflected in a mirror, with all his actions corresponding to his. After a while, the virtual male starts to physically throw around things and start to appear violent. Eventually it escalates and he gets closer into what feels like the subjects personal space, and appear threatening.

They write:

“Our results revealed that offenders have a significantly lower ability to recognize fear in female faces compared to controls, with a bias towards classifying fearful faces as happy. After being embodied in a female victim, offenders improved their ability to recognize fearful female faces and reduced their bias towards recognizing fearful faces as happy”

The article can be read in its entirety at ResearchGate.

Staying Updated in the field of Virtual Embodiment

Research on Virtual Embodiment is happening continuously. To stay updated on this area of VR research, I enjoy following Mel Slater, Mavi Sanches-Vives and Thomas Metzinger on Twitter. Last but not least, I would stay updated on Virtual Bodyworks at Twitter, of which both Sanchez-Vives and Slater are co-founders of.

N.B: This entry lies at the centre of Matrise’s interests, and we are planning on writing several entries on this topic further in philosophical directions. Have any ideas or want to contribute? Please contact us.

Literature list

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Mysticism and Virtual Reality

Introduction to Mysticism

Within Mysticism, the merging of Self and World — Inner and Outer — is seen as the utmost aim. Mysticism can be found within most of the world religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam — and its aim is often formulated as union with God. Depending on the religion, however, the degree to which Mysticism is the common way of practicing the religion varies. Although many religions have such contemplative practices, they are not always adopted by the religion’s followers at large.

When discussing «Union with God», it should be noted that the term «God» varies in its meaning between these religions. The contemplative practices often have significantly varying metaphysics, for instance Monotheistic (Christianity), Polytheistic (Hinduism), and relatively Atheistic or Agnostic (Buddhism). Be this as it may, their descriptions of the experience of this merging of Self and God is often strikingly similar. These states of enlightenment are often described as ecstatic, in which the conscious experience can not be placed within our normal frames of language or understanding.

What also unites the different traditions, is that such states of consciousness is usually  worked towards through contemplative practice such as yoga, meditation or other disciplines of focus or conscious attention. Other techniques for achieving these ecstasies have have been ascetic ones, such as fasting, waking, isolation — or other ways of stirring the Self to war.

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The experience of seeing the Inner as Outer, and the Outer as Inner, is often described as the feeling that living itself is an experience of seeing and perceiving Oneself and/or God. Within this worldview, there is no Self relating to anything external.

Mysticism and Virtual Reality

The concept of merging Inner and Outer, or Self and God, can each be viewed either in very material or spiritual terms. Although materiality and spirituality do not have to differ metaphysically, separating these gives us some communicative benefits — and Mysticism may be explained and spoken of from both these perspectives. Discussing the Inner as Outer purely «scientifically», if you will, makes sense in that all our perceptions of the Outer world is indeed created Inner, and as such — Reality will always be a synergy of Inner and Outer. We know that we do not see, or have ever seen, anything which we ourselves do not actively generate. As neuroscientist and consciousness researcher Anil Seth put it, “our brains are actively hallunicating our conscious reality”.

States where a subject experiences the Inner and Outer as ‘one’, is often referred to as «non-dual».  Often while speaking of Inner and Outer, we tend to implicitly reinforce the Self and the World as a duality (when pitching a solution we often have to pitch the problem first). By using the word «non-dual» instead of ‘one’, we may pinpoint the nuance that it is not a duality in separation, but neither completely “same-same”. Although it is non-dual, neither is it all same or flat — least of all static!

Although we classify and divide our reality, fundamentally what we perceive is a stream of experience, which in every sense is simply “reality” before divided, and, again, actively created by us. This is not to say that there are no external reality or world — but it definitely is to say that all which is external is perceived first and foremost, solely, internally. Experientially — externality has never been perceived, except as a subcomponent of internality.

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A vase, or two faces? Each defines the other, and neither exist without the other.

Experiencing and Sensing the Non-Dual

This causal explanation, however, leaves out the experiential aspects of the non-duality. Although it may make sense on paper, it matters little to us as we absolutely perceive the world as dual — as subjects relating to a World. Within Philosophy, this traditional way of adhering to and speaking of the world,  is referred to as the subject-object dichotomy. Although, between different cultures and continents, the degree to which we adhere to this way of thinking vary in its intensity, it is nevertheless definitely an essential part of the human experience which we share.

How the material explanation can be said to be different from the spiritual in this sense, is that the spiritual concern is to experience the Inner as Outer, not to understand it cognitively. As such, and towards that, meditation practices such as Mindfulness and Yoga have existed, to increase wellbeing by increasing the degree to which one feels in union with God, or for those who do not fancy the term; to the degree which one has peace with oneself and the world.

Contemplative practices such as yoga and meditation, has the last fifty years become more popular in western societies. Although they have been subject to a certain degree of metaphysical raffination the last years, these methods are nevertheless largely old and traditional. The most common of these contemplative practices we see today is adopted from the Vippassana practice, commonly known as Mindfulness. These methods are now commonly used in psychological treatment of anxiety and depression, and research has the latest years started to uncover the benefits of learning to be able to sit quietly with your mind and, well, deal with shit, or seeing it for what it is.

In the next section, we will discuss an approach utilizing Virtual Reality to aid in Mindfulness meditation — which can help to perceive the Inner as Outer.

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A common belief is that the aim of contemplative practices is to empty the mind. In a sense, it can be said to be correct, in that meditation practices often seek to eradicate, dilute or cancel the self-referential narratives.

The effects of Mindfulness meditation

The essence of Mindfulness or similar contemplative practices, lie in their manipulation of identity. We stated “the problem” of Mysticism as the gap between Self and Other — and for this separation to be there, we must necessarily have a relatively thoroughly defined sense of self. For most of us, this tend to be limited to the cognitive processes that constitute our mental narrative (the personalized voice in our heads, our formulated will, and how it appears to direct our actions and plans our lives). It is actually to a far lesser extent our bodies, although this also attributes to our self-consciousness.

Mindfulness is about being present attentively in each moment to one’s state of mind. When doing such focus excercises directed at the mind, and observing these mental processes closely, the idea or view of them as solid things starts to unravel. When rather seeing them as thoughts from a distance, they appear untangled to us, and we perceive our own existence as distinct from those thoughts.

Virtual Reality Biofeedback as Meditation aid

One of the great benefits of VR is its ability to project and represent data in the format of the reality encompassing us. Within the context of this entry, we could say therefore that VR can simulate what we perceive as the Outer. The question may then be asked: how can we project our Inner in to this medium of Outer?

Although I believe we will see more work on VR biofeedback within this domain in the future, in this entry we will focus only on one research paper in particular to examplify our case. At last years CHI conference, the world leading conference on Human Computer Interaction, Joan Sol Roo and his colleagues presented their work on Inner Garden: a mixed reality sandbox for mindfulness. The artifact is a physical sandbox, which the user can shape to a given terrain. The sandbox is given generally visually augmented by a projector with colors and shapes — and physical changes to the sandbox will also alter the output of the projector, which deliver terrain information such as sea levels and green growth.

The sandbox is just not physical, however; by placing a physical avatar in the physical sandbox, you can enter into the land you created in Immersive VR. A 3D-model of the land you created physically can be seen virtually, from the viewpoint of your placed avatar.

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The Sandbox, which heights of the sand have been turned into an island by the projector.

Attached, to measure your inner states, is both breathing- and heart rate sensors — which are coupled to provide visual and auditive feedback. In this way, you can synchronize your breath to control the environment and rythm and breaking of the waves. The Inner Garden represents your inner state, and. by practicising breathing techniques, the flora of your world will get greener and more animals will appear.

In this way, Inner Garden works as a great example of representing Inner phenomena as External Reality. Very conceptually interesting, and hopefully one day we will also see empirical studies on similar artifacts.

You can read more about Inner Garden, which received an honorable mention at CHI’17, here.

What do you think? Do you have any ideas for VR applications using biofeedback? How may Mysticism as a way of relating to the world inform Virtual Reality design?  Please comment below.

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Camera Obscura and the World of Illusions

A few years ago I visited the beautiful scottish city of Edinburgh. Apart from the old pubs, the whisky and its mighty castles, the city also have attractions for those interested in the art of illusion.  In a castle on one of the heights of the city, we can find an example of an ingenious yet simple optical technology, called the Camera Obscura. We have previously published an entry on the History of VR, where we discussed the invention of the Stereoscope as the first technology underpinning the VR of today. With a broader definition of VR, we could say that the Camera Obscura is an even earlier VR technology than the Stereoscope; in the mid 1600s,  by using the Camera Obscura, one could live stream a photographic segment of reality at much higher refresh rates than what we can do with information technology today.

 

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Four people using a Camera Obscura, all the while remaining unseen behind closed doors.

The drawing above illustrates the workings of the Camera Obscura: In a dark room, the light from the world outside is directed by a mirror through a lens, which focuses the light on to a leveled surface. Often made of white stone, the surface functions as a canvas for the photographic reflection. As this is light straight from its source, the responsiveness is immediate and as the lens is continuously open, the pictures are moving. It is a very interesting experience to stay in the Camera Obscura of Edinburgh, and wholly undetected watch and perceive the actions of the masses of people walking the streets outside.

We should note, however, that even the mirrors and lenses are not necessary to create this effect. The camera obscura is in essence an extremely simple concept, and the simplest version of it is called a pinhole camera, which is as simple as a dark room with a hole for which the light to enter through. The light that enters through it represents what reflects it —which of course is the environment outside. As such, all light contains information, and pinhole cameras utilize this by letting the light enter through a small hole in a wall into a dark room, so the visual information can stand alone and be perceived relative to the dark background. In more complicated camera obscuras, lenses are used to strengthen and focus the light, and mirrors to redirect it.

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Illustration of a Pinhole Camera, displaying an image upside down on a wall in a dark room.

As some may know, when light hits our eyes, the retina actually perceives the world upside down. Our brains, however, flips this back again — resulting in the world as you see it today. Traditional pinhole cameras or simple camera obscuras also suffer this effect, and so often the image is seen as upside down, as in the illustration above. In the Edinburgh Camera Obscura, they use lenses to maintain the normal orientation. Effectively, the image is inverted twice — once by the aperture, and further back using the lenses. For those who want to try to achieve this at home, we recommend this experiment, which highlights the workings of the lenses.

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The Camera Obscura used for the art of drawing.

Another interesting use of the camera obscuras, and a source of their popularity, was for the art of drawing. By projecting directly to the canvas one is drawing on, the lines of the environment can be outlined more easily. What is becoming increasingly clear here, is the role of the camera obscura in the creation of the modern photographic camera. The technology is quite simply the same, only instead of a continuous stream of light to a canvas — we have a limited, controlled exposure to a surface that adapts to the light. It is related to this exposure where photography features make sense, such as aperture (how much light we let in); ISO (the sensitivity of the image sensor), and shutter speed (the amount of time that light should be let in). We are still playing with light and lenses.

The World of Illusions

If you visit Edinburgh to look at their old Camera Obscura from the 1850s, you will find in the same castle what they call «The World of Illusions»; five floors containing over 150 different optical illusions. Caleidoscope rooms; 3D stereoscopic mirrors; mazes of mirrors and much more. We will discuss and explain a few of these in more detail, the first being “The Ames Room”.

The Ames Room

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The Ames Room, showing three men of similar size.
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An overview of the Ames Room, dissolving the illusion. The illusion illustrates our lacking capability to perceive actual depth (3D).

For the illsion of the Ames Room to work, you have to see it from a certain perspective, which in the above illustration is referred to as the viewing peephole. The Ames Room in Edinburgh, unlike in our illustration, also use floor tiles as in a chessboard to further improve the illusion, which from the viewing hole appears to be of similar size. The illusion is a funny one, and an obvious photo-opportunity.

The Vortex Tunnel

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Phtograph from the World of Illusion in Edinburgh.

Another illusion, which is more bodily, is their Vortex Tunnel. You are in a room, where a bridge connects the two ends. The task is to walk over the bridge (a fully stable, stationary bridge). Now, this shouldn’t necessarily be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that the cylindric vortex walls are spinning around you. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you simply can not walk a straight line: it is as if the gravity draws you toward the rails of the bridge. If you close your eyes, however, everything is fine.

Do you know of any other fun illusions or old optical technologies? Please comment below!

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The History of Virtual Reality

In this piece, we will discuss the History of Virtual Reality. In recent years, Virtual Reality (VR) technology has finally reached the masses. 2016 was called “The Year of VR” as several actors released their Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) on the consumer market. While HTC, Oculus and Playstation delivered high quality HMDs that require external computers to run, the year also opened up for high quality mobile VR. Both Google with their Daydream View and Samsung/Oculus with their GEAR VR have provided an easier step for consumers to enter the world of VR. These mobile VR solutions  offer better internal measurement units than the simpler Cardboard devices, and also feature simple controllers for interaction. We now see the market spreading out both  in quality and accessibility: in 2018 we have both seen the coming of the HTC Vive Pro, a more expensive high-end HMD with increased resolution, and the Oculus Go, which is a reasonably-priced ($200) stand-alone 3DOF (3 Degrees of Freedom) HMD for the starters.

It is natural to wonder how all of this started. Why did we for instance not see much VR before 2016? When it now seems to be relatively easy for commercial actors to push out HMDs down to $200, why did it not happen sooner? Of course, we have had Oculus’ development kits since 2013 — but even this is very recent.  When Google released their Cardboard (a simple HMD made out of cardboard  and some lenses), it seemed incredilous that VR could be attainable for the smartphone for only 50 cents. This, however, only points us toward how fascinatingly simple the underlying pinciples of VR technology actually are.

In this entry, we will trace the VR tech we see today back to its roots. We will go back about two hundred years, and work ourselves jumpingly forward to the very recent innovative technologies.

Stereoscope

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A drawing of the Lothian Stereoscope, released in 1895; one of many different models.

In 1838, Sir Charles Wheatstone developed what would be the first Stereoscope. Even before the camera was invented, people were seeing (drawn) images with 3D effect through stereoscopes.  Stereoscopy, that is, perceptory illusion of depth, is achieved by displaying a slightly different segment of an image to each eye. Wheatstone achieved this by separating the two images by a piece of wood, and providing a lens directing the light, between each eye and the corresponding image. While looking through the stereoscope, our brains perceive the two images as one image, with the added 3D effect due to the varying segments of the images. This effect is simply caused by an utilization of how our eyes and brain work, by combining the sensory data from each eye into one. We may, for instance, most likely be able to recall  sometimes «seeing double», when our brains have yet not our varying visual impressions.

Since Wheatstone, different stereoscopes have been produced all the way up to the Google Cardboard or other HMDs; which instead of drawn images, or later photographs,  utilizes a screen to deliver the imagery to the eyes. Actually, in the early 1900s, Stereoscopes functioned as home entertainment devices, and «stereo cards» such as the image seen below could be purchased from photography companies.

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Stereo card of St. Peters Church in the Vatican. Such cards, picturing tourist attractions all over the world, could be purchased and viewed at home in a Stereoscope.

Stereoscopes and modern day Virtual Reality HMDs share the essential feature of stereoscopic depth illusion (3D). Apart from that, however,  a lot has obviously happened since 1838, which we now regard as essential for the feeling of presence and realism, and which makes the technology capable of simulating realities. The most important of these have been moving images, 3D environments, interaction, and 360 degrees of orientation. With the stereoscope, images very static in every sense.

Sensorama

In the mid 1950s, however, some people saw the opportunity to spice up their stereoscopes a bit. A bold attempt at enrichening this, was the Sensorama. In addition to providing a stereoscope with motion pictures in 3D and color,  all quite revelutionary, the device had fans for simulating wind, odor transmitters for smell of the environment, stereo sound, and even a moving chair!

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The Sensorama, or «Experience Theather». Illustration from Morton Heilig’s 1962 US Patent.

Pygmalion’s Spectacles

The idea of the Sensorama, or VR in general, can as many other innovative future-defining ideas, be found in science fiction literature. Before its conception, in the 1930s, the science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum introduced the idea of «Pygmalion’s Spectacles». By wearing these, the user could experience a fictional, or virtual world, with holographs, smell, taste and touch, and make the virtual come alive. Pygmalion, which «Pygmalions Spectacles» were named after, were a Greek sculptor who fell in love with his sculpture, and so begged Venus that it would come alive. The Myth sheds an interesting light on VR as an ultimate dream of humanity, to create realities for ourselves to inhibit, or to create images in the format of reality.

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Pygmalion, which «Pygmalions Spectacles» were named after, were a Greek sculptor who fell in love with his sculpture. He begged Venus that it would come alive. Painting by Jean-Baptiste Regnault.

Information Technology

To take a leap towards another paradigm shift in VR tech, we must enter the land of 1s and 0s.  The Stereoscope slowly moved from drawn images, to photographs, and further to moving images with the Sensorama. None of these, however, supported spherical environments that could be perceived in all their 360˚. To achieve this,  certain sensors and further computation based on their sensory input has been necessary.  The most important and interesting of these sensors, has been the Gyroscope.

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The Focault Gyroscope, created by physicist Jean Bernard León Focault.

The Gyroscope was given its name by Phycisist Jean Bernard León Focault in 1852 who used the device as a means to prove the rotation of the Earth.  The gyroscope is a device consisting of a spinning top with a pair of gimbals. Its origin can not be traced to a single invention or inventor, as tops have originated in many ancient civilizations — however, unlike the «complete» Gyroscope, these were not necessarily used as instruments.  Although Focault’s gyro were not the first that were used as a measuring instrument, its affordances work well to examplify the usefulness of gyroscopes in VR HMDs; the important feature it affords is the measure of rotation, which key lies in the Gyroscope’s tops’ possibility for free rotation.

Gyroscopes are fun artifacts to play with as they seem to defy gravity. While spinning, they can remain stable in most positions. If placed on a platform, that unlike the gyro remain stable, the position in terms of rotation can be measured relatively to the platform, and as such we can also measure the rotation of a HMD. It should be noted, however, that the gyroscopes of today are not pretty mechanical objects of brass anymore, which, although they do no longer satisfy our aesthetic appetite, at least have the benefit of fitting into our smartphones and HMDs. Today, gyroscopes have heights, widths and lengths of only millimeters, which opens the possibility for placing them inside smartphones and HMDs.

The Sword of Damocles

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The Sword of Damocles, an old greek cultural symbol of Mortality — ever close to those in power. We see the sword hanging from a single horse hair over the head of Damocles.

Fifty years ago, in 1968, Ivan Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull created the first computer-driven stereoscopic (3D) Head-Mounted Graphical Display with 360˚ head-tracking. The HMD was not exactly lightweight, and was named after the «Sword of Damocles» because of the heavy stand hovering over its users head. As can be seen in the illustration below, the head-tracking was mechanical, and did not in fact use a Gyroscope. Later, however, this became a more fruitful approach, so as to avoid the massive device rotating over the users head.

The field of view and graphical fidelity of the Sword of Damocles were obviously quite low, yet the Sword of Damocles is the first widely known HMD, and has since its dawn inspired and launched further decades of VR research.

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The first Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Display, named after the Sword of Damocles, because of its great weight hanging over the user’s head.

Towards the modern HMD

Since the invention by Sutherland and Sproull,  creation and use of HMDs was seen more and more within research. As computational power became faster and cheaper, the HMDs decreased in size, and increased in field of view, graphical fidelity and refresh rates. Yet — even back in the 1990s for instance, the technology was still expensive, and poor in terms of graphical realism. It often caused cybersickness due to low refresh rates, and high motion to photon latency. Of this reason, as with any really powerful computer from that time, VR was reserved for research universities that could invest into the technologies, or businesses with resources to experiment with the technology. There were some attempts at commercializing VR for gaming purposes, such as the SEGA Genesis and Nintendo Virtual Boy — however, both of these remained largely as prototypes and were later discontinued. To this day, none of these companies has since experimented with the technology, although Nintendo in 2010  released the Nintendo 3DS which utilizes a stereoscopic display that does not require any glasses.

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Image of a 3D model of the HTC Vive Pro.

Conclusion

In this entry, we discussed the History of Virtual Reality. Since the Sword of Damocles, VR technology has undergone small incremental changes leading to where we are today, mainly as a result of general computer and graphics research, and the natural progression of Moore’s Law; today our processors are smaller and more powerful, and our screens of higher resolution.

In addition to this, however, there are certain very recent technologies that have impacted the VR as we know it today as well. In Matrise’s glossary, we briefly present and define some of these technologies. Some that can be read about is Foveated Rendering and  Low Pixel Persistence Modes.

Did we miss anything that belongs in the History of Virtual Reality? Any thoughts are welcome in the comments section.

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Virtual Reality and Exposure Therapy

The most essential feature of VR is its ability to simulate what is not real. This is its core concept, and what causes its radical exclusivity and novelty. The benefits of ‘avoiding reality’ in this sense, is most often that virtuality is more cost-effective than reality. For instance, corporations worldwide train their employees in VR as it saves money to avoid renting a physical location and hiring physical trainers. ‘Money’ in this case, is of course just a measure of effectivity: it takes less resources to achieve certain objectives virtually than physically. The cost is not the only benefit, however; the virtual may also be safer. We see this especially within surgery, where a failed operation on a virtual patient is much preferred than on a real one.

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“Scream”, by the expressionist painter Edvard Munch. Want to experience Munch in VR?  Read our entry on Art in Virtual Reality.

Exposure Therapy
Another scenario where virtuality may be preffered  is psychological treatment of anxiety disorders. Anxiety is a terrible disorder in the way it is eating away the lives of the sufferers, and is hard to treat to by non-addictive pharmaceutical medicine. Psychological treatment, however, is in general very successful towards certain anxiety disorders.  Agoraphobia, arachnophobia, glossophobia, etc., can be treated by what we call “exposure therapy”.

Under exposure therapy, the patient usually get together with a psychologist, and is asked to express their fears of the situation of exposure. Here they answer what they think will happen, and how they think they will react. Their fears are pinpointed, and their catastrophic thinking is outlined. In these cases, it is not uncommon that patients believe they will literally stop breathing, or die, etc.: the narrative which operates is something they buy heavily in to, and the key of exposure therapy is to challenge their acceptance of this narrative. To a certain extent, this is a central problem of anxiety disorders: patients very seldom challenge these fears, of obvious reasons, and so their map of how the world works is not challenged and updated by reality. This is, through exposure therapy, systematized.

When the patient has been exposed to their fear scenario — the psychologist confront the patient with their initial fears that were written down prior to the exposure. The patient is then encouraged to reflect on the gap between their fears and what actually happened, something which we refer to as inhibitory learning. This kind of treatment falls under what is depicted as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT); by actively challenging the patients’ mental model of the world by reflection on facts.

Long story short — exposure therapy works. The largest problem with exposure therapy is, as usual, the cost. Having highly educated psychologists dedicated to the task is expensive enough in itself — but arranging the exposure to a fear scenario is an often greater challenge, practically and economically. It is not really convenient to summon spiders into the psychologist’s office, for instance. Arranging complicated fear scenarios and executing them is not convenient, and at high cost, which is a hinder for an otherwise effective treatment.

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Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy can be used to treat, for instance, arachnophobia (fear of spiders). If you are not afraid of spiders, you might need to increase their size. I can recommend trying Farpoint for PSVR, which features giant space spiders similar to those in this illustration by Alphonse de Neuville.

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
This is where the concept of VR enters our story, as we start talking of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VREP). By using virtual environments instead of actual physical locations, effective exposure therapy can be offered to more people at lower cost. At the University of Bergen, through the research project INTROMAT, we develop and do research on VR Exposure Therapy for adolescents with fear of public speaking. The INTROMAT project aims to introduce personalized treatment of mental health problems using adaptive technology.

The question that often raises itself when we discuss the concept of VRET, is whether we can fear what we know is not real. Although we know what it is like to be nervous before talks, it is perhaps hard to imagine being afraid of speaking in front of virtual subjects in which ‘nobody’s home’. On this point, however, the research is very clear. As Lindner et. al (2017) writes, “decades of research and more than 20 randomized controlled trials show that [VRET] is effective in reducing fear and anxiety”. The reason why VRET is interesting now, today, is then not necessarily because VR is finally good enough to deliver realistic virtual scenarios. VRET has been shown to be effective with VR technologies far inferior to those setups we have commercially available today.  The reason for its relevance as a research subject now, is because the technologies are finally cheap enough to successfully be used in large scale treatment. It is therefore time to revisit the previous research, and look at how this treatment can be improved further.

Participatory Design of VR Scenarios for Exposure Therapy
We are presenting our paper on VR Exposure Therapy at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction — in May 2019 (Flobak et. al.) The paper is available at ResearchGate, and has in my unbiased opinion two very interesting contributions: 1) it documents prototyping of VR with 360 cameras, which enables less technically skilled persons to produce VR (for exposure therapy, and for other areas), and 2) through the fact that it enables a larger group to produce VR, it simultaneously enables adolescents to communicate their social scenarios through the medium of VR. As we have previously discussed in The Capture of Reality, it easier to avoid the uncanny valley effect and simultaneously maintain high standards of realism when using image capture equipment, than it is to create it with 3D animation. Thus, this approach to creating VR Exposure Therapy has both the benefit of being extremely cost-effective, whilst still being developed based on good sources for the social scenario it should depict.

You can read the paper at ResearchGate. Below is the conclusion of the paper:

Conclusion
“This paper has presented a participatory approach to prototyping virtual reality scenarios for exposure therapy for fear of public speaking. In the study, we demonstrate how adolescents can be involved in the design of VR scenarios enabled by 360° videos. We also show how the participants draw on their lived experiences when creating the scenarios. The paper also illustrates how 360° video is a viable tool for making the design of immersive experiences more accessible, as the method involves far less technically demanding skills than you need for constructing CGI-based environments, and is less time- consuming. Further, the expert evaluation highlighted the authenticity and realism of the scenarios, and the scenarios were seen as having a potential for use in a therapeutic context. In addition, we have discussed how this approach can be used to make tailored VR experiences for exposure therapy”

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The Mind as Medium

N.B: This post is the third and final post in a series on VR metaphysics; the entries comment upon a metaphysical stand towards VR technology. The entries are based upon an essay that was written for a doctoral course on the philosophy and ethics of the social sciences. The two previous post that precedes this one, are linked here:  1) “On Mediums of Abstraction and Transparency“, and  2) “Heidegger’s Virtual Reality“. 

3 / 3

Now that we have arrived at the final post of the series, it is time to revisit our initial problem of Virtual Reality and Authenticity. Initially, we introduced our problem as the abstracting tendencies of Information Technology, and the unique position of VR technology in this case, as it abstracts all the while displaying a high degree of transparency and coherency with the real world – while simultaneously hiding the real world as much as possible. We wanted to ask whether this was indeed a real problem, and if the technology could in effect distance ourselves from the reality of the world, and thus distance ourself from truth, or an authentic living.

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An old illustration of a Stereoscope, the illusive technology responsible for 3D effects in our modern VR Head-Mounted Displays. The first stereoscope was created in 1838 by Sir Charles Wheatstone.

Discussion

After reviewing Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, we noticed several questions that we could use in our existential approach to our technology critique. Following the lines of Heidegger, we could say that we could have a free relationship towards VR when we know what it is. We can for instance ask whether we can see any “Enframing” tendencies of VR technologies.

In Being and Time, Heidegger’s concern for authenticity is a concern for individuality: a concern for Dasein’s possible impossibility of leading its own life: the death of authenticity. In the they-self, no individual is thoroughly relating to its Being, and so the truths and the “goings-on” that is defined “culturally” in the they-self, are in a sense accepted blindly and left unexplored: they are abstractions as they are not defined relatively to each Dasein; they are not experiential, not resolutely made up. Effectively, we are not in control when we have given ourselves up to let the they-self decide the possibilities of what we can project upon.

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“The Fairies Flew Away”, by Charles Henry Bennett.

Similarly, In Heidegger’s Questioning Concerning Technology, we introduced the term of Enframing. Enframing is dangerous because we create things that enframe us, we instantiate our enframing orientation in technology. If we do not relate to technology as exactly this which it is in its essence, Enframing, we do not relate to it as it is, and so it may hinder us to perceive the world as it is. Both by relating to the agenda set by the they-self, or the framework set by ourselves indirectly through our enframing technology, we do not relate to the world and our active projection upon it: we do not resolutely enact our nature of actualizing the possibilities that can lead us to our authentic self.

So how is this relevant for the technology of VR? Should we interpret it as that we are not in control over our possibilities, if they are presented to us through VR, rather than in real life? Can , in this respect, VR be seen as an instantiation of the they-self, as it similarly provides abstractions, terms and conventions? If we remember to follow Heidegger deeper than the image of the problem, we may see that it is not VR that we should be afraid of. VR, like other modern technology, carries the mark of its author: and similarly we can see the creation of VR as the ultimate dream of Man. We spoke earlier of the characters of challenging-forth as inspired by the view of modern physics as an exact science: we wanted to view the world as chopped up in parts and materials that we could understand, enframe, and use as means to ends. If the dream accompanying this Newtonian metaphysic ever was lost with the rise of quantum physics, VR can certainly become the free space where man’s illusive control over the world could be rekindled: finally we have a world, not of atoms, but of bits, that we can know totally through an actual access to its source code.

We can have a free relationship towards VR, when we understand what the essence of VR is. To what is the essence of VR, we will not answer “enframing”, but rather abstraction, and more specifically, abstraction in the mode of transparency. The tendencies of abstraction, was, as with Heidegger’s technology, perhaps not inherently something technological, but something human: only technology made it obvious and explicit enough for us to see clearly. VR may perhaps be an interesting way for us to look at the real problem figuratively; the technology stands in between (medium) you and your senses, in the same way that our mental terms and classifications obscure the otherwise non-reducable reality.

To create VR is a human activity, and in VR we find much of ourselves: similarly to technology in general, we see that VR is a means to an end, and that it is an instantiation of this purpose. Sometimes, this purpose is “re-presenting” an abstraction of reality, and so it is not the genuine authentic reality itself that we see. We can therefore say that it is a human activity to create representations as means to an end, and even further, we can say that it is human to abstract, it is human to deal in images, it is human to connote terms and concepts, similarly to “putting things to boxes” in the enframing attitude of mind. With VR, these boxes are presented to us as reality, or at least in the format of reality, and the result is a realm of abstraction, a realm of representation, that blocks naturally-occurring presentation. Similarly to how Heidegger’s technology illustrated our enframing tendencies, VR may show us our desire to create our own bubbles of reality to inhibit, our own terming and associations and concepts of the self. In this respect, the essence of VR may not even be anything new. In this sense, we have created “mental virtual realities” for a long time, and the technological, the “material” expression of this does not provide anything new.

Conclusion

If we can understand the essence of VR as abstraction in the mode of transparency, and, similarly to Heidegger’s technological essence, believe that this essence is inherited from our own tendencies of mind, we will view it as such that it is human to create transparent abstractions. Through our terms, conventions, and definitions, we abstract, and through relating to these abstractions, we perceive them as real. Our thoughts and defined concepts, and the conventions we adhere to, work as our transparent user interface’s which we use to navigate the world. Our initial fear was that IT, examplified in its extreme case of VR, would act as a wall between us and the world; inhibiting a true, authentic relationship towards it. This is, however, not fundamentally something that we find in especially in a certain technology – instead, we find that when we look at this technology we are instead looking at ourselves. The mediums and interfaces that classifies and simplifies is inspired by our minds that classify and simplify. Technology is not the separation between us and the world, at least not any less than the enframing and abstracting orientation of our minds to the world are: the one mirror the other. We have thus reached a new question to replace the first, one step further on the hermeunetical spiral, and that is whether our own abstracting tendencies of mind keep us from authenticity.

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Heidegger’s Virtual Reality

N.B: This post is the second out of three, in a series that comments upon a metaphysical stand towards VR technology. More specifically, it deals with the philosophy of Heidegger in relation to Virtual Reality. The entries are based upon an essay that was written for a doctoral course on the philosophy and ethics of the social sciences. The first post,  preceding this one, is “On Mediums of Abstraction and Transparency“, while the third and subsequent to this post, is “The Mind as Medium“.

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In the previous post, we argued why existentialism was fit to explore our problem of VR authenticity. Although the post quoted several existential philosophers, we will further only go in depth into the work by Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976). Heidegger was deeply concerned with authenticity, and also discussed the role of technology in our relation to the world. Although he never lived to see the true emergence of IT, Heidegger’s 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning Technology”, discusses the essence of technology in general, and our relationship towards it.

heidegger - Heidegger's Virtual Reality
Martin Heidegger, Portrait, Oil on Canvas.

Questioning concerning Technology

In his essay, Heidegger does not just analyse technology itself – as part of this, he writes about how the technology implicitly alters the metaphysics of our world; how technology may change ourselves and our relation to the world. In the essay, which title is “The Question Concerning Technology”, Heidegger discuss the essence of technology as it appears in our relationship towards it. The reason for his questioning concerning technology, is that he believes we can have a free relationship towards technology when we know what it is, that is, its essence. Throughout his essay, Heidegger draws a distinction between traditional technology, which is ‘bringing-forth’, and modern technology on the other hand, in which the technology is ‘challenging-forth’ in a more brutal and hacky way. It is this latter technology that Heidegger is critical towards and wishes to discuss, more “traditional” technology, such as for instance a bridge, is not an example of a technology that is challenging-forth. Heidegger for instance writes of windmills, that, though they draw energy from the wind, do not extract the energy for storage as we do with coal: the wind can still “do it’s thing”, being as-it-is, unlike coal, which for us no longer exist as-it-is; its only given meaning is being a means to our end. Through rigorous analysis, that is where Heidegger ends up: through such challenging-forth technology, our relationship towards nature is changed, as nature is interpreted only as a means towards our end, the world is no longer interpreted as it is, as it manifests.

To fully understand how Heidegger comes to this point, however, we must back up a bit. We will start “in media res” with a quote by Heidegger that is relatively concluding as to the main point of the essay, and then further navigate backwards to introduce the terms necessary to understand what he means.

Heidegger writes:

The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.


We see then, that Heidegger’s main concern is that man may be separated from truth, a more “primal truth”, or a more “original revealing” of such. He does not say bluntly that technology threatens man with this possibility, but rather speaks of “the rule of enframing”, which will be an important term for us to understand Heidegger’s proper meaning. Throughout his essay, Heidegger builds his philosophical argument with his self-composed terms from the ground up before getting to the point, and so to understand “the rule of enframing”, we must therefore go back to thoroughly define Heidegger’s concepts of bringing-forth and challenging-forth. Both bringing-forth and challenging-forth are modes of revealing, although they differ in how and what they reveal. Heidegger’s “bringing-forth”comes from the Greek “poiesis”, which means to bring something out from concealment to unconcealment. Heidegger speaks of this revealing rather poetically, and asks the readers to imagine what is being brought forth as already “being on its way” to existence, from unconcealment to concealment; and so we can say that poeisis brings that which was not present into presence. This “revealing” or “unveiling” that happens with poeisis, Heidegger describes by the Greek word “aletheia”, literally meaning “revealing”, but which also is the Greek word for “truth”. In this way, according to Heidegger, technology can reveal truth through poeisis, although, as Heidegger points out, this is exactly what modern technology fails to do in its challenging-forth.

rotary boilers - Heidegger's Virtual Reality
Rotary Boilers, by Broux, P, from Les merveilles de l’industrie, vol. 2.

Bringing-forth vs. Challenging-forth

According to Heidegger, we find the difference between bringing-forth and challenging-forth in that challenging-forth treats “modern physics as an exact science”. This can be interpreted as such: modern science was on its arrival a dream come true for the human impulses to classify and understand the world: now we could understand the workings of the world according to our own scheme, and therefore also “own” them in the sense that they were perceived to be within our control. On the discovery of the atom, for instance, we finally had a graven image of the source code of reality, and we were closing in on a framework of the whole world (this was, of course, before quantum physics shattered our image of reality as something that could easily be pinned down). It is this “attitude”, according to Heidegger, which separates bringing-forth from challenging-forth: the implicit metaphysic we accepted along with the principles of Newtonian physics, that the world could be viewed as a clockwork of cause and effect, where the world is made up of manipulable materials that could serve as means to our ends.

Heidegger notes, however, that challenging-forth also reveals, but that it does not reveal truth in the same way that bringing-forth does. The point is to be found in that “the essence of [modern] technology, is not something technological”. By this, Heidegger means that technology bear a resemblance to its Maker; there is something in the essence of technology that it has inherited by us. Early in the essay, Heidegger notes that technology can be thought of both as a “means to an end”, and a “human activity”. We can therefore also say that it is a human activity to think in the context of means to ends, and it is this which technology represents to us, as in a mirror: our attitude towards the world, where everything is viewed and classified in terms of potential means to an end. Through the vision based on modern physics as an exact science, human beings view the natural world as materials for their endavours. It is a human tendency to look at the world and ask: “what is it good for?”; in the words of Albert Camus, “the world evades us when it becomes itself again”; we do not really relate to the world, but to our interpretation of it, which is an interpretation of utility or means to ends. Technology is in this respect mirroring ourselves as an expression and example of how we interpret things in light of our narrative, where things in the world fit in the degree to which they can be means to our ends. This is what Heidegger considers when he writes that the essence of technology is not anything technological, rather, its essence lies in how we approach and orient ourselves towards technology, and through technology, to the world.

With this, we are approaching the point of Heidegger’s criticism of technology: if we only interpret the world as potential means to an end of ours, we don’t really see the world as it is, or as it reveals itself. Heidegger uses the example of technology to pinpoint that it is the human aspect of technology that is dangerous about it: because we as humans are used to interpreting the world to concepts, terms and classifications, these now stand in the way as a medium or interface between us and the world. This is Heidegger’s definition of the essence of modern technology, and it is this that we shall mean by the term Enframing that we set out to define. Enframing comes from the German “Gestell”, and has associations to that of order, system or framework. It should be noted, however, that Heidegger uses it as an active verb, and so instead we talk of “ordering”, or “gathering together”, or an “enframing” of the world. Enframing is in this case a mode of human existence, it is how we navigate and present the world to ourselves, relative to ourselves.

make cannons - Heidegger's Virtual Reality
Illustrator: León Benett. From Jules Verne’s “Les cinq cents millions de La Bégum”

We set out to answer what the challenging-forth reveals, as both bringing-forth and challenging-forth are modes of revealing. It is by its enframing that challenging-forth reveals, and the enframing categorizes human and machine alike, and what it reveals, it reveals as standing-reserve. The concept of standing-reserve is the utmost point of criticism for Heidegger, and is what will be discussed in the next section.

The Danger

Heidegger’s critique then, is that the attitude of enframing is dangerous. Technology as examined here, have worked to reveal this dangerous tendency in humans. The humans themselves are not safe from their orientation of enframing: the enframing of the world also include the enframing of human beings, and humans are also in this system reduced to “human resources”; the degree to which they are beneficiary resources in this system of their own creation. Enframing is the consequence of what happens when this attitude of ours is enforced and instantiated through technology; “standing-reserve” is a role that the world and its inhabitants has been given in its enframing.

This category or classification of “standing reserve” is illustratively speaking exactly of this: technology, with its essence, does not, and can not, view anything in the world “as it is”, it is only judging in terms of utility and means to ends; it is seen not as good, but good for. This is being in the standing-reserve: an airplane has no meaning or value out of itself – it is purpose incarnate, and its value is therefore only in relation to human beings and a certain activity, and so it’s role is otherwise as standing reserve. For Heidegger, however, it does not end there, as humanity is also caught up in this system of technology: the system of the world is increasingly becoming a system in which technology is heavily incorporated. Within sociology, this kind of society with non-human agents as equal affectors, has seen new theories reflecting these relationships, for instance in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory. The theory describes one system, where technology and humans are both treated as actors in the society. Similarly, according to Heidegger, humans are equally likely to be put into standing reserve to fit this system as any other: he describes the forester as put in standing- reserve by the paper industry: his role and worth is defined there only in so much as he produces for them; when he does not, his being is one of standing-reserve, not as-he-is.

The Solution

At this part of the point, we should revisit Heidegger’s initial point of inquiry: that we inquire into technology in order to establish a free relationship to it. Heidegger is not just concerned with the existence of the technology, he is also definitely concerned with our orientation towards it, our standpoint towards it, and so our relationship with it. We initially set out to establish a free relationship towards technology, and now we see that it in fact is our relationship with the world, and the technology’s relationship to the world as well as to humans and other agents that is the issue at hand. This is a critical point, because it also means that this is not a problem that can be solved even in the extreme case choosing to discontinue technology as a whole; the essence we want to avoid comes from us. On this, Heidegger writes:


We shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.


We are limited then, in that we can not change technology in its essence. Heidegger does not want to create “better” technology: he wants to see technology for what it is, to prepare a relationship to it – and it is here that we find Heidegger’s curious path of “technological determinism”; a view that can be defined as the lack of control by humans over technology, that the development of technology is somewhat deterministic, instead of perhaps more commonly viewed as an expression of our needs through tools that we create (i.e. social constructivism). Therefore Heidegger does not want to change technology, but change our relationship towards it. The approach is almost stoic in its basic philosophy: it is only concerned with one’s own relationship to the situation, the situation itself is at any rate given. And again, the orientation which we normally have to both normal technology and to the natural world, is one of enframing. It is not just in technology, it is a human mode of being and connecting to the natural world in itself: enframing is the human tendency of categorizing the world, into objects, events, or other terms or conventions. We “frame” things in the sense that we “box” them, and this Heidegger considers to be a human activity in general, not a technological one in particular.

Heidegger does not offer a plan for humanity to solve this, but rather encourages us to stray from the enframing attitude of mind, to the more poetic: in poeisis, we can see the world as it reveals itself, not just as raw materials to be used by us. By adopting the vision of the artist, we can take part in the world instead of analysing and categorising it from the outside, indirectly alienating us from the world. Although not very specific in the approach, Heidegger is still clear on the role of action towards the problem, as he writes that “humanity is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth”.

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Want to read more? This essay is continued and finalized in “The Mind as Medium“. In the final entry we revisit VR and Heidegger’s relevance for VR technologies. The entry that you just read was a continuation of the entry On Mediums of Abstraction and Transparency.

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On Mediums of Abstraction and Transparency

N.B: This blog post is the first of three posts in a series that comments upon a metaphysical stand towards VR technology. Specifically it deals with Abstraction in Virtual Reality. The entries are based upon an essay that was written for a doctoral course on the philosophy and ethics of the social sciences and was presented in a panel at Global Fusion 2018 at the University of Virginia. The posts following these as the second and third, are “Heidegger’s Virtual Reality” and “The Mind as Medium“.

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Technology, in all its facets, has increasingly changed our way of life. It changes how we approach life and tasks in that we distribute agency and commands to artifacts and computers. Coffee is made with a button, transport is performed by sitting. Our toil with the world is outsourced to technology, and so we are indebted to our dishwashers and robot-vacuums. What this essay will discuss, however, is whether it matters that technology in many ways is the mediator of our reality. The question is, broadly, if we lose something when we ourselves avoid getting our hands dirty by touching the unpractical reality ourselves. Can it be that technology is responsible for distancing ourselves from a more authentic way of living? Or more concretely – would that matter, and if so, why?

brunton machine 1 - On Mediums of Abstraction and Transparency
Technology (the Brunton Boring Machine)

We now communicate with each other, and the world, through interfaces. For technology to be relevant for us, it naturally has to embrace and cooperate with the world. Therefore, when using technology, we are not separated from the content of the world: the technology is simply representing the world to us through different mediums. To “present” originally comes from the Latin word “praesent”, meaning “being at hand”, and to re-present, then, is to present something as “being-at-hand”, where it perhaps did not naturally originate. To represent something, we need a medium; we need matter by which to re-create an ideal form or pattern, and so the data which express this pattern is presented through a medium of either e.g. text or images. We here see the concrete meaning of “medium”, which literally means “in the middle”; an appropriate term for the “re”-presenting technology, which is standing between ourselves and the world.

Technology is within the world, and as such a part of it, and so it can not represent the whole world without compressing it and leaving out details. Therefore, when representing the world, with each medium, there follows an abstraction. In the way the information is simplified and represented through abstractions, different mediums vary in their degree of transparency, or in other words, their conformity with the real world. Throughout this essay, we will keep this separation of abstraction and transparency, and we will define transparency as the degree to which the abstraction corresponds with reality; the more it corresponds, the more transparent the abstraction is. A photograph is far more transparent than a drawing, for instance, but both are abstract representations of the reality they represent. Examples of abstractions can be, as mentioned when the complex coffee brewing process is reduced to, and represented by, a button with an icon; a minimalistic silhouette of a steaming cup of Joe. Similarly, in our communications, our emotions are also reductionally abstracted to emoticons, and we see our personal identity and self as abstracted and reduced to social media profiles, for easy export over the Web.


Physical vs. Virtual

Hiroshi Ishii criticizes the abstracting tendencies within Information Technology (IT) in his paper “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms” from 1997. Critically discussing the abstraction of information into the standard Graphical User Interfaces, Ishii proposes a new vision for the research field of Human-Computer Interaction. By introducing the concept of “Tangible Interaction”, Ishii was to take back the physical, and in that, acknowledging our human history of some million years dealing of dealing with physical objects and artifacts. This, then, would provide us with a more “authentic” or “traditional” way of interacting with IT. According to his vision, bits and atoms would then live side by side in glorious harmony. In this, we also see that Ishii’s motivation is touching on the question which our essay will discuss: there is a sort of gap between space and cyberspace. Where Ishii postulates his problem as that there is a gap between the virtual and the real, we shall rather investigate whether it can be that cyberspace is the gap between ourselves and the actual.

We will use the example by Ishii to illustrate our point a bit further. Ishii wanted to bridge the virtual and the physical so that we could interact with computers in the same way that we interact with physical artifacts by employing tangible interaction. Rather ironically, however, the most realistic way of realizing Ishii’s vision of coupling bits with atoms, may be through the medium of VR. When immersed in a virtual environment through a head-mounted display, the whole world is made of bits: they work as the atoms comprising the world. In VR, our reality is mediated by a medium that can theoretically contain an abstract representation of the world in digital form, whilst the abstraction is presented to us in the same way that traditional reality is, avoiding the immediate feeling of the medium as separating. In this case, what we traditionally view as physical, then, is represented by bits, and the atoms are brought into the virtual, instead of the virtual being brought into the physical.

Ishii’s vision confronts the unnatural abstraction of information in that we view IT through various interfaces. VR escapes this degree of abstraction, and what separates VR as a mediator of our world from other digital representations such as social media, is exactly in its own relation between abstraction and transparency; it is at its point on the abstraction-transparency continuum that VR is unique. Placed on the utter end of the abstraction-transparency continuum, VR has the capability to be extremely transparent in its abstract simulation of the world. Often we turn to and equip the technology of VR because of its transparency: we do not feel that we interact with an abstraction of the world, but with a genuine representation of it. This does not mean that we are out of the abstraction altogether, however; a virtual world most certainly is a reduction in its representation – the interesting thing about VR thus is that it is an abstraction that presents itself as transparent, and at the same time is the first truly immersive, encompassing technology which hides you from the real world. We leave the world in absence and are in return given an illusion of presence in an abstraction that claims its rightful transparency. To use the word “illusion” in this case, is not an overstatement: by facilitating for stereoscopic (three-dimensional) vision into the virtual reality, the brain is tricked to perceive the environment as an environment of depth, which combined with a 360° degree presentation of the environment, often leads to a feeling of presence to it. Its illusory tendencies are caused by the fact that we see the virtual as we normally see the physical.

Abstraction in Virtual Reality: A Problem?

We have now articulated the problem issued by the unique technological medium of Virtual Reality. Abstracting in disguise, the medium is unique in its the relation of its approach to abstraction and transparency. In and out of itself, however, this does not mean anything. It is not as if we lose our access to oxygen in VR: the detachment is not physical, it is only our minds that are immersed and feel present. The question this essay will discuss is not whether it is the case that technology distances us from the world, as this technology per definition does; but whether this matters. Does it matter if sexual urges are satisfied through “VR Porn” in a 360° stereoscopic (3D) video, filmed from a first-person view? Does it matter that the elderly with dementia are given VR experiences because this is cheaper than arranging a visit outdoors? Put short: does it matter that our worldly needs are simulated rather than actualized? Does the concrete reality have a value in itself, or are its mirroring mediums capable of transferring the essentials? Does authenticity; whether what we adhere to is true, real, or genuine, matter?

To tackle this question, this essay will not feature empirical studies on the wellbeing of humans with virtual sex partners, nor will we perform studies on the use of VR in nursing homes. We will discuss the concept of authenticity philosophically, and implicitly close in upon commenting on a metaphysic of technology in general, and VR in particular. To this purpose, we will discuss VR in terms of the philosophical tradition of inquiry called “Existentialism”, a field of philosophy that is especially concerned with the notion of authenticity or authentic living. In the coming section, we will define existentialism and present how it can help us to shed light on the human concern of authenticity in relation to technology. When we have defined the term, we will move on to present the two works of philosophy that we will use to comment on our problem, namely Heidegger’s essay: “The Question Concerning Technology”, and his book “Being and Time”.

Existentialism

In Existentialism, the human is viewed as the starting point of philosophical reasoning in general. Therefore, it also takes the human experience and concern for an authentic living seriously. For instance, in discussing the concept of Being, Heidegger is quick to identify the process of inquiry into Being, as first and foremost a human activity, as humans are the only beings for whom Being is an issue. Of this reason, the human problem of suffering also comes quickly as an object of inspection, including the receding (or preceding) sense of absurdity. We are now approaching the concept of existential angst, which is terribly related to the sense of responsibility over one’s own life. In respect to this, Søren Kierkegaard, often called the Father of Existentialism, spoke of anxiety (Angst), as “the dizziness of freedom”: and the concern for authenticity is also the concern over choices. The concern for authenticity, and in some cases as individuality, naturally only matter in the degree to which humans are free to affect their position towards it. It is in this case that Jean-Paul Sartre speaks of “radical freedom”, like Kierkegaard he also emphasizes the responsibility of each individual for the choices that he or she makes. Existentialism may be useful to examine our relationship to technology, because of its genuine and felt concern for authenticity. In the sense that the field of inquiry is humanly oriented, existential philosophy at times comes close to the practical, as what it discusses at its core, is each person’s concern at its core. In this sense, to be an existentialist can necessarily not be just an outward doing: the problem it discusses has to be understood personally and experientially because it is only where it exists. Because of existentialism’s genuine concern for authenticity, it may be able to shed light on how we should relate to technologies such as VR, and how this may impact our relationship between self and world, and this potential relationship’s corresponding state of authenticity or inauthenticity.

Want to read more? This essay is continued in “Heidegger’s Virtual Reality“.

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