The Ontology of Virtual Reality

In 2012 the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality (VR) headset display, made headlines in the technology world when it raised US$2.5 million through crowdfunding. In 2014 it was acquired by Facebook for a whopping US$2 billion. Ever since then leaders in technology have been pouring money in VR research & development and there is no shortage of creative studios producing VR content. Although VR have not reached universal adoption, the data looks to be auspicious. In 2010, just 2 years prior to VR's supposed harbinger, I wrote a chapter in my Sufficiency in the Philosophy of Technology under Prof. John Sanbonmatsu titled 'The Ontology of Virtual Reality'. Rereading it, I think it is still relevant today. Here it is:

There are two aspects of virtual reality that pertains to human use: information and communication (Valentine and Holloway n.d.). Virtual reality is a space filled with information provided by its architects. Perhaps the easiest example to grasp is the internet. The internet consists of a network of computers storing information for users to retrieve, send and alter depending on their security clearance levels. The network of computers acts as the space to display the information and for users to roam around to view that information. It is similar to a shopping mall, museum, or really any artificial locale in real life. And like those places, users encounter other users. Human interactions are prevalent in such artificial realities. Chance encounters, meeting engagements, stalking and lurking are all prevalent in the internet similar to that in real life. This is the communicative aspect of the internet and virtual reality. The question is whether these realities that we use for information and communication are realities that we want or should be in. If not, why? Is it because there are other aspect of realities beyond information and communication that we need as human beings? These are just some of the questions that man should pursue. If not, a blind pursuit of VR technology will occur without any thought given to its unanticipated consequences, pernicious or otherwise.

What are the fundamental differences between information presented in the real world to that in the virtual world? Here is a thought experiment: Jake goes to an amusement park and has enough time to ride one ride. He could only choose between riding a simulator or an actual rollercoaster. A simulator is a ride where you sit in a room like a typical cinema except the chairs can shift around, the film played is in the first-person view and these shifts in the chairs correspond to shifts in the camera angles. The simulator in this thought experiment is setup to "simulate" a rollercoaster. Jake chooses the rollercoaster simulator over the actual rollercoaster. Could he therefore say that he experienced riding a rollercoaster? No, there are obvious aspects of riding a rollercoaster that the simulator failed to capture: the wind blowing against your face, the G-forces exerted on your body, etc. Now suppose it is 3000 years in the future where there is such thing as a simulator that captured every minuscule detail of a rollercoaster and projected it perfectly to all the sensations of his body. This means olfactory, gestation, auditory, visual and haptic. Could he say he experienced riding a rollercoaster? Again no. He knows this was all artificially rendered onto his body so his emotional reaction to this experience is not genuine as it has been tainted by prior-knowledge. Micheal Heim describes this phenomenon as the “[removal of] hidden recesses, the lure of the unknown, and [destroying] the erotic urge to uncover and reach further; you destroy the source of yearning… Even though the computer God's eye view remains closed to the human agents in cyberspace, they will know that such a view exists. Can we be touched or surprised--deeply astonished--by a synthetic reality, or will it always remain a magic trick, an illusory prestidigitation?” (Heim n.d.) Now again suppose the same scenario but this time he wasn’t told that the simulator was a simulator, instead he was told that the entrance to it was the entrance to a rollercoaster ride. Could he say he experienced riding a rollercoaster? This is actually a polemical question among philosophical circles.
Peter Boettke would describe this as “choosing to not live a human life but to experience a life scripted by someone else” (Gunkel n.d., 197). The simulator was artificially created by another human being. It provides Jake a reality programmed by an architect, a human with certain values, ethics, morals, upbringing and so on. These human factors would surely have influenced the design of the simulation. Perhaps the architect has a propensity to scare the “bejesus” out of others and so exaggerates the intensity of the rollercoaster ride. Then the rollercoaster ride is not an accurate representation of a real rollercoaster ride. Jake was simply experiencing someone else’s interpretation of one and thus he was not experiencing a genuine rollercoaster ride. That argument seems cogent enough. But was the feeling of fear and excitement that he experienced any less genuine than that engendered by an actual rollercoaster ride?

The fear and excitement he felt is fear and excitement, but he cannot say that he experienced it from a rollercoaster ride. David Weberman argues that the source of an experience is not important to humans than the experience themselves. For Weberman, the “quality of life inside the Matrix (a virtual reality) is simply better than that on the outside… The computer-generated world can certainly provide for these shallow gratifications, but it can also run simulations that stimulate “the higher faculties,” providing everything we believe makes a human life worth living” (Gunkel n.d., 206). Implicitly, he wants us to fully immerse (read this as “deceive”) ourselves in a virtual reality provided that the virtual reality is better for humans. The world may be contrived but the human emotions experienced are real and that is what matters.

However, someone must be an architect (and maintainer) of the virtual world living in the real world; the existence of the virtual world implies a reality beyond the virtual world. Is it not immoral to surrender your reality to the architect, a human being? And even if this architect is concerned with what is best for you, he is just human. The architect is the only person who knows the existence of both the virtual and the real world. By knowing that the virtual world is artificial, he cannot enjoy the pleasures it provides therefore it is impossible for him to immerse himself in the virtual world. The architect must have “higher faculties” to attend to; he may have or want a family and friends, he may have other aspirations, he may have creative outlets he wants to share. Who is this architect and how do we choose him? What right do we have to deprive this architect the perfect world that is the virtual world? Furthermore, it is not realistic to give the entire human race (excluding the architect) the option to enter a virtual world since there are people without the necessary technology to do so. For example, while people in developed countries are jacked into this virtual world, there are those in developing countries that can’t. It is immoral to deceive ourselves into thinking that the world is perfect by entering the virtual world when in actuality there are others who are not experiencing it. The emotional reactions to the scripted events generated in virtual reality may be real, but it would be immoral to not put these emotions outside of the context and perspective of actual reality. But the only way to achieve these emotional reactions is to not know the existence of actual reality. It is a paradox that can only be resolved by totally abandoning the concept of full immersion into virtual reality. We cannot deceive ourselves.

An alternative is that we could use virtual reality to augment the real world. Gill Valentine and Sarah Holloway showed empirical evidence that the off-line world and the on-line world does not and is often not mutually exclusive (Valentine and Holloway n.d., 302). In fact, they can constitute as one making our experience that more emotionally rewarding. The empirical evidence presented are interviews of children about their use of the internet. It was clear that they used the internet in its two key capacities: information and communication. Though many of the empirical evidence showed emotional reactions that are not as intense as earlier “rollercoaster” thought experiment, the emotional reactions engendered by human interactions in virtual environments are.

Virtual reality may not be able to provide the information (specifically scripted events) that give rise to emotional reactions we need as humans. But the human interactions that it allows may as well could. The human interactions are not scripted events; you say something and someone, not the virtual environment, reacts to it. The spontaneity of human interactions remains in the virtual world. This spontaneity provides the “focal things”, as Albert Borgmann, calls them that aren’t contrived like the scripted events. That is not to say that Borgmann agrees with its application in virtual reality. In fact, Borgmann is a pessimist when it comes to technology for human interactions. His concept of “focal things” is very much like Martin Heidegger’s argument for devices that “enframe” contexts beyond the instrumental one. Borgmann argues that modern technology focuses on what he calls the “device paradigm” in which the purpose of technology is to maximize efficiency. Focal things are the things we experience that leads up to a goal (or completion of a function). If technology reduces the process that leads up to the goal, it also reduces the experiences, the focal things. Borgmann urges that we must have these focal things because it brings people together and gives us something to live by. It is our very ontology. One of his examples is fast food versus prepared food. There are no focal things that can be obtained with the fleeting time it takes get fast food compared to the lengthy but less prosaic process of preparing a home-cooked meal. Thus Borgmann’s solution is to “bound the technical sphere to restore the centrality of meaning” (Feenberg n.d., 330); it is like an act of moderation of our use of technology. However, Andrew Feenberg criticizes Borgmann the same way as he did for Heidegger, that is, his indifference to technical design in his analysis. In fact, it is unclear in Borgmann’s work as to whether his censures are towards our attitude towards technology or towards its technical design.

His example of human interaction mediated by the computer clearly shows that he failed to consider the technical design of the computer. In his example, Borgmann says that the limitations of the computer mean that one does not need to reflect as much in one’s communication with others (Feenberg n.d., 331). As a result, few focal things can occur in human interactions. It is hard to argue that the resolution that computers provide in human communication is not as great as face-to-face engagement, but it is arguable his example shows that he is completely blinded by the idea of the device paradigm. The process or technical design that brought the computer to the state it is today (with internet connection and all) shows our ever changing attitude towards it that goes beyond the device paradigm. Human interactions in virtual environments is not meant to just be used for efficiently communicating with one another (this would be the device paradigm aspect), it is meant to be an enjoyable experience that is not ephemeral should users want it to be. Thus, a virtual environment populated with actual human beings could help provide the emotional experiences humans need. These technologies do not just transfer information between people and places; they actually involve "the creation of new forms of action and interaction in the social world, new kinds of social relationships and new ways of relating to others and oneself." (Thompson n.d., 4)

Now what form would humans take in the virtual world? This is arguably one of the challenges that virtual reality has and that is often used by opponents of virtual reality. The computer that generates the virtual environment “can never fully represent us” (Heim n.d.). Heim recognized this limitation of computer hardware. No computer has infinite resolution so avatars must be rendered by “omitting or simulating corporal immediacy” (Heim n.d.). The greater concern therefore is that our avatar is limited by criteria that the architect has put forth. What kind of power are we giving to the architect in this regard? Imagine he is a white supremacist. His bias could mean that he would not allow an option for users to select a race other than white for their avatars. Furthermore, we don’t necessarily know ourselves well enough to make a selection or because the selection was created by a human architect, there is an inherent ambiguity to it. Proponents of virtual reality may argue that this actually eliminates inequality and prejudice but, as Heim puts it, although “we are more equal on the net because we can either ignore or create the body that appears in cyberspace…, the quality of the human encounter narrows” (Heim n.d.)

But does that at all even matter? Do people seriously take avatars in cyberspace to be full representations of their real life counterpart? Empirical evidence provided by Valentine and Holloway showed that this is rarely the case. The people interviewed by Valentine and Holloway showed a consistently cynical demeanor towards their interaction with strangers online: “I mean you don't know who you could be talking to, you could be talking to a rapist or anything like that…”, says one of the interviewee (Valentine and Holloway n.d., 312). But that is not to say that nothing meaningful come out of these interactions. Valentine and Holloway found that by integrating the virtual interactions with real world interaction, one reaffirms a relationship and makes it stronger than if it were just purely on-line or off-line. In other words, populating a virtual world with actual people is not enough to give that world value. There must be some interconnection between the real and virtual to give that virtual interaction meaning. The virtual should augment not replace real world human interaction.

Of course, this is provided that the technology disposed to us allows us to actually interact with human beings. Ideally, a virtual world would be like that of the “matrix” in movies like ‘The Matrix’ or books like ‘Neuromancer’. Their infinite resolution (at least as perceived by the human senses) makes it ideal for our application. Pragmatically, this is not the case. The limited resolution of technological systems implies that a different cognitive style must be adopted to convey ideas to others. PowerPoint, a great example provided by Edward R. Tufte, with its limited screen real estate and its linear presentation forces users to change their way of making presentations to something different from what they would do without the "virtual reality" of PowerPoint. Because there is not enough space, abbreviation becomes the prime methodology of rarefying information (Tufte n.d., 5). The result is neither beneficial for the presenter nor the audience since the truth of the information becomes nebulous and the “information stacked in time makes it difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships” (Tufte n.d., 4). In addition to that, the reality of PowerPoint in its inherent design is that it imposes a hierarchy of information presented in bullet form. This creates an impression that points at the top of the hierarchy are more important than those below when in fact that may not necessarily be the case. Also, the bullet style hinders audiences from exploring relationships between bullet points, which is something that a written technical document would be able to do better (Tufte n.d., 11). The kind of "virtual reality" imposed by PowerPoint forces a type of cognitive style that by the transitive property imposes a certain kind of human interaction. This cognitive style is depended on the developers of the software in question: “The structure of the organization [that developed PowerPoint] reflects the PowerPoint style” (Tufte n.d., 8).

What Tufte seem to be alluding to throughout his work is the amalgamation of PowerPoint with more traditional information distribution methodology. Relaying his conclusion to the theme of virtual reality, the prospect of research in human interactions in virtual environments should focus on the hybridization of the real and the virtual. In that way humans can express themselves best within the constraints of virtual reality.

After appreciating the pessimist and optimist outlook on virtual reality, a happy medium that does not completely replace the real world with the virtual world can exist: the virtual world augments the real world. And the addition of the virtual world being populated with real people aids in this. The augmentation ultimately puts the virtual world in perspective of the real world allowing us to utilize the information and communication aspects of virtual reality while retaining our humanity.

Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Evaluation of Heidegger and Borgmann. Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Gunkel, David J. "The Virtual Dialectic: Rethinking The Matrix and its Significance." Muse, 2006: 193-215.

Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. USA: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Thompson, J.B. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. CA, USA: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Tufte, Edward R. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006.

Valentine, Gill, and Sarah L. Holloway Holloway. "Cyberkids? Exploring Children's Identities and Social Networks in On-Line and Off-Line Worlds." Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2002: 302-319.