Real Experiences
“What if we’re all just brains in a vat?”
Before becoming the premise of the (increasingly disappointing) Matrix Trilogy, this was one of the more popular Epistemological essay questions for undergrad Philsophy students the world over. “If we got ourselves put in a situation where all of our experiences were simulated, would they be real?” and then “If you could arrange to put yourself into such a simulation, would you want to?”
There is a lot of hand-wringing in Epistemological circles about whether or not certain experiences or knowledge are ‘genuine’. This involves a lot of strange thought experiments with painted albino zebras and twins sitting in front of complex arrangements of mirrors. Being a dedicated gamer by the time all of this came to my attention, I had a lot of trouble understanding what the fuss was about. There are already millions of humans choosing to spend a large chunk of their leisure time having crudely simulated experiences. The first company to patent the Holodeck is going to clean up.
The media and our disapproving parents and friends also already know the answer to the first question: No the simulated experiences are not real, get outside and read a book. The latest warrior to toss her hat in the ring on the side of all that is good and genuine is Susan Greenfield.
She sets out a catalogue of repercussions: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalised text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern is how computer games could be emphasising what she calls “process” over “content” – method over meaning – in mental activity.
Greenfield is an actual scientist and so enlightened by her argument, I humbly apologize to all the world for the part that I played in the imagination holocaust that is game development. I promise to turn my back on the simple spoon-fed menu options of The Sims, Grand Theft Auto and Fallout and devote myself to the genuine free-ranging inquiry of Independence Day, Sex and the City and anything by Danielle Steele.
by-nc-nd
June 20th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Man why is everyone being mean to SATC lately?
But yeah. Though I didn’t find all that much hand-wringing among philosophers - most seemed genuinely willing to consider that a perfect simulation of an authentic experience just IS an authentic experience.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:08 am
This is probably a first-year quality answer, but “reality” is just a simulation in our brain, fed by input from the senses. Optical illusions are fun and make this fact very clear.
People seem to fall into the trap of old vs new: video games are “simulated experiences”, but books somehow aren’t. Text messaging is ruining the language, but the printing press was glorious for it. Is there a word for this kind of fallacy?
June 20th, 2008 at 11:28 am
I think this new contraption called the “printing press” is going to lead to the downfall of civilization. Kids will no longer bother to learn how to write: these machines will do it all for them! The problem isn’t just with amateurs: highly gifted calligraphists will be out of work, and the world will feel barren without their lovely art form.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:48 am
“Golden ageism” maybe? “Young whipper-snapperism”?
Honestly I kind of end up feeling guilty when preposterous “THE NEW MEDIA IS KILLING US” arguments get raised. It’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, the rate of introduction of new media is now fast enough that most of us can recall from our own childhood things that were going to tear civilization apart that for some reason didn’t.
I remember in university, one of my profs arguing that civilization and culture was in clear decline because no one had produced anything as intelligent as Plato in recent times. I remember, vainly, trying to explain that comparing Plato to [random modern text] was insane. Plato is a pinnacle of ancient achievement that has survived a test of millenia. [random modern text] hasn’t even been tried. Plato had many contemporaries and very few of them have made it this far. Likewise, we can rightly expect that the overwhelming majority of current human thought, speech and writing will be lost thousands of years from now.
June 20th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Einstein or Darwin doesn’t quality for being as intelligent as Plato? Is this prof insane? Was he limiting himself to “philosophy” writing?
June 20th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I think that he was limiting himself to being kind of a dick to 1st year students.
June 20th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Haha anyone I know? Was this in FYP?
June 21st, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Muir