What an ‘Augmented Reality’ (AR) Bus-Stop Can Tell Us About Reality
… And How That Can Help Heal A Divided World!
Last year this ad about an augmented-reality (‘AR’) bus-stop popped up on my LinkedIn feed. (Take a look. It’s really pretty cool — with apologies for the soft-drink advertisement inextricably woven in!)
It’s a good leading-edge example of how the way we think about reality itself could be affected by a coming wave of ‘reality’ technologies — virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). (MR is a near-neighbor of AR: see this article if you’re as confused about the AR/MR distinction as I’ve been!).
Reality-Technologies and ‘Reality Itself’
Generally, the social-media commentary about reality-technologies is directed to work and/or play.
‘At work, VR can help architects and engineers stroll inside their creations!’
‘At play, AR can have us tracking Pokemon characters in our streets and parks!’
But there’s a much more profound message from what I call the ‘R-technologies’, if we choose to listen. It’s that what we see is not ‘Reality Itself’.
Trending AR VR Articles:
1. Mario Kart in a real vehicle with VR!
2. How XR Can Unleash Cognition
Take this still from the AR bus-stop ad:
The bus-shelter creates the image of a man being grabbed by an alien tentacle, as everyday folk walk on by! The image inserted into conscious experience of people inside the bus-shelter is completely lifelike. If we can create completely-lifelike images inside alleged-reality (i.e. waking sight-sound-touch-smell), this suggests that that reality itself isn’t actually ‘real’.
Put more directly:
Consensual reality is itself a sort of virtual-reality re-presentation of real-Reality.
But what is ‘real-Reality’, then?
Maybe you took a philosophy class, and learned about the ‘epistemic veil’. (More or less: matter — if it even exists! — lies on the other side of an impenetrable barrier-to-knowledge. All we ever see-touch-hear are the products of a matter-brain. And that brain itself lies on the other side of the impenetrable barrier! The grey squishy thing we see when the skull is removed isn’t ‘the matter-brain’ — it’s an experience-of a matter-brain!)
Maybe you saw the Matrix movies, and intuited that there was something true and real there. Which is: we’re all walking around inside our own, mind-projected, virtual-reality experiences!
Maybe you’ve studied physics and neuroscience, and you’re familiar with the narratives of how the brain contributes information to conscious experience. And how the matter-realm in which photons fly and neurons spike is prior to conscious experience itself, and distinct from it. (Leading neuroscientist Anil Seth makes essentially this point in his great TEDx talk, ‘How your brain hallucinates your conscious reality’. If conscious reality is a hallucination — I prefer the term ‘projection’! — there must be another reality that the projection is projected from!)
Of course, ‘real-Reality’ is just a buzzword-phrase that I invented for this article. But it labels an actual thing! It challenges the everyday view that what I see around me is the totality of reality. ‘That arrangement of colours and lines is the table’. (No, it’s not. It’s a re-presentation in experience of a Real-table). Real-Reality is the unseen way that things exist, outside, beyond, or prior to everyday experience. (Do you still think that set-of-edges-and-colours is the table? Cross your eyes — two tables! You can’t do that with an actual physical table!)
This not woo-woo, New Age, mysticism. Its philosophical label is ‘indirect realism’, and it’s the mainstream scientific view in those disciplines that actually take the trouble to think for a moment about consciousness (i.e. neuroscience and psychology). It doesn’t mean ‘there is no reality’, and it doesn’t make science wrong, or impossible. (As long as the virtual re-presentation of real-Reality within conscious experience is a faithful-enough, reliable-enough image or picture, we can use it to learn about some aspects of Reality itself.)
Disagreements About real-Reality Are the Deep Source of Societal Divisions
Understanding the distinction between conscious experience and real-Reality is not just an esoteric, philosophical luxury. Western societies are increasingly polarized, trust in institutions is falling, and civility has fallen off a cliff. Surprisingly, disagreements about reality — and about how we know what’s real — are the long-term, chronic, root of global divisions.
Take climate change, for example, as one demonstration of collective-level disagreement. Science says one thing. Religions say another (at least some of them do). And postmodernism (as a philosophical view that emphasises subjective construction of truth) says … well, whatever it wants to really … because it’s all subjective!
Of course, you may not agree that disagreements about real-Reality are the deep source of societal divisions. But that’ll only be because you and I disagree about Reality and its resources!
As-is science says that matter-made systems are our only resources. Religions say that there are additional spiritual entities, agencies and functions that we can draw on. Postmodernism says a lot of things, but one of them is definitely that science is not the sole authority it thinks it is! These decision-resource disagreements — and the policy conflicts they perpetuate — fuel the fire of social conflicts.
When Science Gets Reality Straight, It Can Start Help Setting Society Straight
In the middle of a current three-way battle between science (facts!), religion (God!), and postmodernism (‘fake news!’), as-is science claims to stand for an objective, unbiased, clear view of reality. It’s this that stands behind science’s further claim, to be the pre-eminent arbiter of social, economic, and personal choices and policies.
But As-is Science is Not Itself Straight on Reality!
Although behavioural sciences accept indirect realism (‘experience is a representation of real-Reality’), physics — the foundation of as-is science — is extraordinarily confused on this point. And behavioural sciences and physics are in plain mutual contradiction. If experience differs from Reality, and brains are in Reality — how does experience affect Reality? (For example, speaking out loud about the experienced-colour of a table is experience-affecting-Reality, because vocal cords are part of Reality!) Experience can’t affect reality, according to standard physics. Yet we have whole sciences about experience (psychology, for example!), despite the alleged-fact that there’s only a one-way street, from Reality to experience. (If experience doesn’t affect Reality, we could never have experiments about experience. So we couldn’t have a science of it! Feeling confused?! It’s not you. Really. It’s as-is science that’s extraordinarily tangled up, about these things.)
These points may seem abstract and nuanced. But they really matter.
We trust science to build airplanes, in part because it has a good consistent theory of matter. We should only trust it to help us build societies, and orient lives, if it has a good consistent theory of the experiences that lives and societies are built from.
We trust science, in part, because it’s a logical enterprise which pays attention to detail. That trust needs to be severely curtailed when self-proclaimed ‘belief-free consistency and precision’ reveals instead basic contradiction and fuzzy confusion.
None of this is to say we should give up on science, or accept the destructive claims of it vitriolic critics. (‘The end of expertise!’). This is not the postmodern critique, writ large (or in detail — or at all!).
However, as-is science must start to take these criticisms seriously. There’s a serious risk of it losing its authority, otherwise. (Very few in science seem to realise that its own account of Reality is the basic problem, here. It’s always easier to blame the ignorance and stupidity of opponents. And so societal conflict goes around and around, with problems never solved!)
Once as-is science starts take these points on board, it can learn from them, and re-invent itself. For want of a better term, it can create a ‘supra-materialist science’, which takes to heart for the first time the experience/Reality relationship. (This kind of science would be supra-materialist because it would have liberated itself from the mistake that the table-experience is also the material-table. ‘Post-confusionist’ would be another good name! Supra-materialist does not mean dualist, or wishy-washy, or woo. For the theoretical physicists in the audience: calculations of the magnetic moment of the electron are unaltered!)
And why does that kind of supra-materialist reinvention matter?
A reinvented, supra-materialist, science will be straight on reality — and consequently it will be a cultural, societal, grown-up. It can have adult conversations with religion and postmodernism about their valid contributions. And it can call them out on their remaining confusions — from a place of respect and confidence, rather than aggression and insecurity.
In summary: when a supra-materialist science gets itself straight about Reality, it can start to truly and unambiguously start to help setting society straight.
And that’s how AR bus-stops can help to heal a divided world!
Nicholas Rosseinsky is a scientist, activist, and trouble-maker. At www.project-10-18.net he’s currently exploring paths towards a supra-materialist world, via a communal examination of consciousness science, and its significance for the future of humankind.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
