A Defense of Simulated Experience

New Noble Lies

Mark Silcox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429663499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book defends an account of the positive psychological, ethical, and political value of simulated human experience. Philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Heidegger, Nozick, and Baudrillard have warned us of the dangers of living on too heavy a diet of illusion and make-believe. But contemporary cultural life provides broader, more attractive opportunities to do so than have existed at any other point in history. The gentle forms of self-deceit that such experiences require of us, and that so many have regarded as ethically unwholesome or psychologically self-destructive, can in fact serve as vital means to political reconciliation, cultural enrichment, and even (a kind of) utopia.

The first half of the book provides a highly schematic definition of simulated experience and compares it with some claims about the nature of simulation made by other philosophers about what it is for one thing to be a simulation of another. The author then provides a critical survey of the views of some major authors about the value of certain specific types of simulated experience, mainly in order to point out the many puzzling inconsistencies and ambiguities that their thoughts upon the topic often exhibit. In the second half of the book, the author defends an account of the positive social value of simulated experience and compares his own position to the ideas of a number of utopian political thinkers, as well as to Plato's famous doctrine of the "noble lie." He then makes some tentative practical suggestions about how a proper appreciation of the value of simulated experience might influence public policy decisions about such matters as the justification of taxation, paternalistic "choice management, " and governmental transparency.

A Defense of Simulated Experience will appeal to a broad range of philosophers working in normative ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of technology, political philosophy, and the philosophy of culture who are interested in questions about simulated experience. The book also makes a contribution to the emerging field of Game Studies.

Part 1

1 What Is a Simulated Experience?

i. Basic Features of the Concept

Under what circumstances does an experience of type X count as a simulation of some other experience of type Y? Given the diverse and variegated ways that the concept of simulation tends to be invoked in the present day, especially since the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, it is probably impossible to answer this question to the satisfaction of just anyone who might find it worth considering. But my aim in the present chapter is to come at least passably close to attaining this explanatory goal. The criteria that I argue must be fulfilled for something to qualify as a simulated experience are highly abstract and somewhat schematic, but I argue that they nonetheless succeed in isolating the key common features of a wide range of psychological phenomena that deserve to be regarded as belonging to the same broader kind. I also compare my own account with the way that the concept of simulation has been made use of in slightly different contexts by other contemporary authors, in the hope of distinguishing substantive philosophical disagreements from illusory ones.

The classification of human experiences into different fundamental categories has always been a favorite pastime of philosophers. Many who have been influenced by the careful and attentive study of the structure of lived experience undertaken by early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Hume or by the more esoteric speculations of recent writers in the phenomenological school such as Brentano, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty have thought that this enterprise might, in fact, play a foundational role in the discipline.

Most contemporary philosophers who undertake this sort of project tend to fall into either one or the other two discrete factions. Some try to follow the procedure first articulated by Descartes in the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy and favor treating the ways that experiences actually present themselves to conscious subjects who undergo them as the most important source of data. Edmund Husserl, for example, in his Cartesian Meditations, talks about how all true philosophy begins with a “transcendental reflection” on one’s own experiential manifold and must therefore involve a suspension of belief, not only in the external objects of thought, sensation, and perception but also in the most basic tenets of deductive logic and scientific methodology. The philosopher must strive to be that “[e]go who grasps himself after he has deprived the experienced world of acceptance” (22). Several more recent thinkers in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition have suggested that the very immediacy of human conscious experience implies that there is something peculiarly philosophically intractable, or even ineffable about it, and that trying to describe its different modes and manifestations therefore represents an especially “hard problem” for the scientific study of the mind.¹ So-called internalist accounts of human experience, founded on these sorts of assumptions, seek to taxonomize our mental states on the basis of their intrinsic, introspectable properties.

Starkly opposed to this approach to understanding our mental lives is the thesis that whether a person is having an experience of some object z depends fundamentally on what z really is, regardless of the extent to which that information is available to the experiencing subject herself. The most important early modern progenitor of this view was Thomas Reid, who, in his 1875 Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, remarks that

[w]hen, therefore, in common language, we speak of having an idea of anything, we mean no more by that expression, but thinking of it. The vulgar allow that this expression implies a mind that thinks, an act of that mind which we call thinking, and an object about which we think. But, besides these three, the philosopher conceives that there is a fourth—to wit, the idea, which is the immediate object.

(20)

Reid argued with great vigor and persuasiveness that ideas, thus conceived, are little more than a philosophical fiction and an explanatorily redundant one at that. Contemporary philosophers, such as Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge, who label themselves as “externalists” about the nature of human experience have also defended this “vulgar” view of human experience (to use Reid’s expression). Their usual tactic for defending this view involves the construction of vivid, but highly speculative thought experiments meant to show that (for example), however watery the stuff running through your fingers in the bathtub might feel to you, you can’t be having a genuine experience of water unless what you’re touching really is H₂O.²

It seems to me that any philosophically adequate characterization of what is distinctive about simulated human experiences will have to occupy a rather singular stretch of middle ground between internalist and externalist approaches to the nature of mental phenomena.

The verb to simulate shares a common Latin root (simile, n., a comparison or likeness) with the adjective similar. Whether or not the relation of similarity itself obtains between two or more things is almost certainly best regarded as a paradigmatically subjective phenomenon. The possibility of two things being considered or thought of as similar is sufficient all by itself, in other words, for the two entities in question to actually be similar. If one is able to so much as entertain the thought that one’s aged grandmother is like a tyrannosaurus, a chiliagon, or a dish of poutine, then this thought taken entirely by itself is something that one simply can’t be wrong about. Of course, one might be in error about the specific respect in which they are similar if one believes (for example) that both Granny and the poutine are sentient, two-dimensional, or covered with cheese curds. But the mere occurrence of the thought that they are similar in some respect or other is enough to guarantee that Granny and the cheese do share at least some kind of similarity, even if it’s only the relatively trivial characteristic of the being objects of one’s own present contemplation.

This account of how the concept of similarity works becomes at least a little more tendentious once we consider the possibility of treating human experiences themselves as the objects of these kinds of specifically comparative thoughts. For it might be thought by an internalist to follow from the claims just made that if an agent is able, via introspection or some other suitably transparent mental faculty, to regard of one of her own present experiences e as bearing similarities to another experience e*, then even if the latter belongs to a class of mental phenomena that the relevant agent has merely heard about or imagined, the fact nonetheless suffices all by itself for e to be classifiable as a simulation of e*. But certain sorts of examples of the sort one might find in the literature on externalism seem to show that subjects are only in some cases in a position to successfully recognize the similarities between an experience that they are presently undergoing and the types of experiences that we might normally be tempted to describe them as simulating. A person confined to a wheelchair who plays any fairly realistic three-dimensional (3D) computer game will probably be able to tell when she is experiencing visual perceptions that are similar to those of somebody who can walk normally. But when the represented visual field wobbles a little from side to side, she will be much less likely to have an idea of whether this sensation feels anything at all like what a normally ambulatory person undergoes when she loses her balance. Likewise, an American stage actress who learns how to speak in a Cockney accent will almost certainly be able to tell when she has succeeded in making her voice sound authentic. But she will be unlikely to be able to tell what it feels like to speak in this way as the result of having been brought up in the southeast of England. This suggests that our intuition about what it takes for one experience to simulate another are at least partly externalist in nature.

I do not think there is any deep logical tension between these two features of our everyday concept of simulation that undermines its usefulness for characterizing relations between the phenomena of our mental lives. All it shows is that any adequate set of criteria for determining whether a person counts as having undergone a simulated experience must be irreducibly conjunctive. For one experience to qualify as simulative of another, it must be the case both that the subject is in a position to acknowledge it as a simulation and that it bears similarities to other experiences that obtain independently of the subject’s present state. Or, to put things a bit more rigorously,

• [Σ]
• A person P is undergoing an experience a of type E that is a simulation of an experience b of type E′
• IFF
• i. P’s experiential state a is of type E, and
• ii. experiences of type E′ are psychologically accessible to P,
• and
• iii. P’s experiential state a shares n (>0) actual similarities with some experience b of type E′

The mere formulation of this biconditional does not provide much additional illumination all by itself, but it will prove useful as a point of reference when we come to look at other philosophical accounts of the concept of simulation. It will also help bring a little focus to subsequent discussions of particular cases. Before moving on to either of these tasks, however, it will be important to say a few things to disambiguate the two key quasi-technical terms employed in [Σ]: psychological accessibility and actual similarity.

ii. The Psychological Accessibility of Experiences

What does it mean to say of a type of experience that it is “psychologically accessible” to a person? Philosophers have often had the occasion to very defend broad generalizations about the closely related issue of what is conceivable to human beings. David Hume, for example, famously proposed that anything conceivable is also possible (Hume 32). Ralph Waldo Emerson and some of the other authors of the American transcendentalist school seem to have believed that anything possible is conceivable (Emerson 107–8).

Both these hypotheses represent fairly radical departures from what strikes me as the more commonsensical intuition that the limits of human conception are best described in terms of utterly contingent, creaturely limitations on our own psychology. Surely, one might think, the boundaries around what we are able to dream up for ourselves are more likely to be set by the quirks of our neurosystems than by broader modal or metaphysical constraints on how the universe as a whole might have been. But this does not mean that the way in which these authors have characterized conceivability is simply wrongheaded or philosophically unmotivated. For there is obviously at least a sense in which, as soon as one asks, “Can I conceive of x?” the answer must always be “yes.”³ And this latter point is at least a little more than just a verbal trick. For while I myself am deeply skeptical that any normal human being could truly summon to consciousness a sense of what it would be like to be able to breathe in an atmosphere of pure methane, to live for 50,000 years, or to belong to the suborder Microchiroptera, if someone I ever did sincerely claim to be able to summon up such a conception, I would have no idea whatsoever about how such a contention could be refuted.

The notion of accessibility that I shall be relying on for the remainder of this study is therefore best understood as being closer in purport to that of imagination rather than conception, as the latter ability has just been described.⁴ Many are in the habit of regarding the human imagination as a capacity whose breadth is similarly unconstrained. And certainly, any psychologically normal adult can imagine herself undergoing plenty of experiences that she happens to be either physically or mentally unable to undergo. The wheelchair-bound video gamer described earlier who can imagine herself walking would be one obvious example; the tremendous conviction with which both children and adults become engaged in fantastical games of make-believe, from as Cops and Robbers to Dungeons & Dragons, is surely another. Folk psychology provides us with a rich vocabulary for describing the abilities that are exercised whenever individuals accomplish this—we say that they are employing empathy, that they are engaging in pretense, or that they are indulging in fantasy. But the extent to which each of these ostensible capacities can be used to extend one’s range of experience just as obviously varies widely from individual to individual. This is a fact that serves, paradoxically, both to make it obvious that there are at least some intrinsic, ethological limitations to the human capacity to conceive of new experiences and to make these limitations impossible to characterize with any degree of precision.

I think that our commonsense understanding of how the imagination works allows for the possibility that one might try and fail to imagine some types of experiences that one is nonetheless able to conceptualize (although this does not seem to be a feature that is retained by every philosophical theory of the imagination).⁵ That having been said, however, it also seems unlikely to me that criteria for the successful imagining of any given experience can be provided in conventionally externalist terms. To succeed at imagining oneself floating in outer space, for example, one needs to achieve a certain level of concentration and physical self-awareness, but one needn’t get the physics exactly right. This point is especially important in the present context, since if it were not the case then it would become very difficult to distinguish imagination from simulation proper, and clause (ii) of [Σ] might plausibly be regarded as rendering the whole definition viciously circular.

A more interesting feature of the imagination, conceived of as a powerful but finite human capacity, is what one might characterize as its fundamentally Lamarckian nature. The very process an agent undergoes while she is having some experience of type E might play a significant role in causing an experience of type E′ that it might objectively resemble to become more imaginable to her than it was before. This feature of our mental lives will be of considerable importance later on in the present work when we turn to a discussion of the relationship between simulated experience and certain types of political utopianism. It is therefore worth examining in a little more detail here, via an especially vivid and instructive literary example.

Stephen Millhauser’s magnificent short story “The Wizard of West Orange” is a profound and philosophically instructive fictional treatment of the phenomenon of simulated experience. Millhauser’s “Wizard” is a late nineteenth-century inventor and industrialist in the style of Thomas Edison who invents a machine called the haptograph. The haptograph is designed to replicate the tactile sensations produced by a variety of external objects via an electrode-studded full-body suit that is worn by the subject. The Wizard decides to test out his new invention on a couple of employees at his laboratory.

The story is told from the perspective of one such human guinea pig who tries to keep a diary about the experiment. At the start of the procedure, the protagonist struggles to come up with even fairly prosaic descriptions of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index