[Rough draft, please do not quote]
Local Coherentism of Perceived Reality in Video Games and Virtual Worlds
A Husserlian Approach
Tom Poljanšek
Prelude
The paper argues that perception in video games and virtual worlds is a special case of ordinary perception and cannot be adequately analyzed with standard theories of perception of images, symbols, and representations. Using considerations from Husserl, it is shown that objects or events in digital environments can be perceived phenomenologically as more or less real, depending on the intensity and focus of immersive experience. Generally speaking, the extent to which we phenomenologically perceive a given object as real depends on its coherence or ‘Einstimmigkeit’ [‘accordance’] (Husserl) with its co-perceived situational environment over the temporal course of perception. This implies that the question of the perceived realness of a thing or event must be distinguished from the question of whether we also believe that the thing perceived actually exists as part of our ordinary space-time continuum.
Apperception, Anticipation and Accordance in Perception
Husserl's notion of 'Einstimmigkeit', which is perhaps best translated in English as ‘accordance’ or ‘concordance’, refers to the diachronic unfolding of perception. Thus, instead of describing perception primarily from individual moments of perception, phenomenology focusses on perception as an event unfolding in time. According to Husserl, every perception is already a case of perception-as on a pre-linguistic level. We never simply perceive material objects in perception, but rather immediately and without any conscious consideration conceive of these objects in each case as objects of a certain kind. The phenomenological technical term for this perceiving-as is ‘apperception’. Simply it can be said: Every perception is always a case of apperception. Now, according to Husserl, apperception is based on protoconceptual, dispositional perceptual faculties which belong to the dispositional ‘background’ (Searle) of a subject. Husserl calls these dispositional faculties which structure the phenomenological content of perception ‘types’. Thus, types underlie perception operatively and structurally, so that objects and situations in perception are each given to us as objects and situations of a certain kind. In this context, it is important to understand that the types that structurally underlie our perception are not to be identified with the explicit concepts that a subject possesses in order to form propositional beliefs. Thus, a subject may well have types of kinds of objects and situations for which it has no corresponding concepts, so that it is able to distinguish these types of objects phenomenally in perception, but without being able to articulate this distinction conceptually or forming corresponding propositional beliefs.
Now, a distinctive feature of Husserl's conception of apperception in perception is that the something-as-something structure of perception is precisely not to be understood as if a perceived object were, in some kind of second step of classification, apprehended by a concept as a 'token' that falls under a general concept. Rather, according to Husserl, the perception-as of something primarily shows itself in the specific ‘horizons of anticipations’ that can ‘prove’ [‘sich bewähren’] or fulfill themselves in the further course of perception, and that allow the perceived object to appear in its specific ‘mode of givenness’. To perceive something as a living being, for example, means to perceive a current perceptual impression andto perceive at the same time a horizon of possibilities fused with it to the unity of an object. In the perception of a living being, this horizon consists, among other things, in the anticipation that it is ‘agentive’, i.e. able to move independently. Now, if a perceived object behaves in such a way that the horizons of anticipations constitutive of the object are fulfilled or proven in the further course of perception, Husserl describes the diachronical unfolding of perception as ‘einstimmig’, ‘accordant’. An object accordantly perceived in the temporal course of perception then appears continuously as itself. Thus, if a new object appears in the field of perception, a ‘line of accordance’ is ‘instituted’ (Husserl), which refers to possible further courses of perception in which the perceived object would be continuously further given as itself. In a certain sense, it can already be said at this point that the more accordant in this sense the. course of perception of an object, ‘the more real’ it also appears to us in perception.
Local and Global Accordance in Perception
Now, in perception we do not only perceive a number of individual objects, rather the objects are always given to us embedded in wider environments and contexts, in which their respective lines of accordance can sometimes also cross and interfere with each other. In this respect, Husserl further distinguishes between the ‘inner horizon’ and the ‘outer horizon’ of perceived objects. Here, the inner horizon denotes the line of accordance within which the object would be further given to us as ‘itself there’ in the unfolding course of perception. At this point, Husserl now proposes a further distinction that is of particular importance with respect to perception in digital and virtual worlds. The distinction concerns two different ‘belief modes’ in which objects can be perceptually. given to us. On the one hand, Husserl claims that an object is given to us in the ‘mode of living presence’ [‘Modus der Leibhaftigkeit’] insofar as the line of accordance instituted by its apperception proves itself in the further course of experience. Thus, when the anticipations constitutive of the perception of an object are fulfilled in the further course of perception, that object appears to us as ‘itself there’ in the ‘mode of living presence’. However, this is not all that Husserl has to say with respect to the phenomenal reality of what is perceived. Thus, according to him, an object given to us in accordance within the unfolding course of perception can phenomenally still be given to us as ‘unreal’. This is the case, for instance, when the object that we perceive is not in turn given as being in accordance with the environment within which it appears. Husserl himself uses the example of a ghost, which we might well perceive in accordance and thus in the ‘mode of living presence’, provided that it continuously behaves in a ghostly manner throughout the course of perception. But as far as, for example, the ghost does not appear in any relation of accordance with its environment, as far as, for example, it cannot interact with it in any way or does not react to any events from this environment, it is still phenomenally given to us in perception as unreal.
Thus, in order for a thing to appear to us phenomenally as ‘really existing’ beyond the ‘mode of living presence’, it has to be given in what Husserl calls the ‘belief mode of certainty’ [‘Glaubensmodus der Gewissheit’]. For a thing which is already given to us in the ‘mode of living presence’ a second apperception, as Husserl says, would have to locate the thing appearing as being in accordance with the ‘wider context’ in which it appears in order for it to appear in the ‘belief mode of certainty’. Thus, the line of accordance in which an object appears to us must in turn be accordant with the perceived environment in which an object is given to us. To distinguish these two dimensions of perceived reality, I propose to distinguish between ‘local’ and ‘global accordance’. If an object us in the ‘mode of living presence’, insofar as the anticipations constitutive of its perception are fulfilled, I speak of ‘local Accordance’. If, in addition, such an object is given to us as being in accordance with its perceived and co-perceived environment, I speak of ‘global accordance’. For a thing to be perceptually given to us as real, it must thus be in global accordance to its environment.
Local, Situational, and Global Accordance in VR Experience
These considerations can now be productively applied to our perception in video games, especially in virtual worlds. At this point, the proposed approach deviates in some respects from Husserl's own considerations, insofar as Husserl assumes that global accordance always refers to the world as a homogeneous spacetime continuum which is posited in what Husserl calls the ‘general thesis of the natural attitude’, so that from his perspective even the experience of virtual realities can never appear entirely real, insofar as virtual realities, however complex and accordant they may be in themselves, can never be in global accordance with the spacetime continuum of our everyday world. My proposal, in contrast, is to read the distinction between local and global accordance more gradually than Husserl himself does. Thus, I argue, for situated cognizers like us, only in the very rarest of cases is something like the apperception of the world's spacetime continuum as a whole significant for the phenomenology of our perception. Rather, in our perception, we have ever only co-present, co-perceived, limited situational environments in relation to which we perceive things and situations as more or less real. One could thus argue that, when it comes to the perceived reality of a situation, the kind of accordance in question is not so much ‘global’, but rather only ‘situational’. To the extent that an object, situation or event we perceive ‘fits’ into the appresented contextual environments and situations appresented in perception, it appears to us as real (even though we might still judge that the virtual environment is not ‘really real’). With reference to Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), in which protagonists who are able to travel into nested dreams are constantly threatened with losing touch with fundamental, ‘ordinay’ reality as well as with the higher-level dreams in which their respective current dream is embedded, one could in this respect also speak of the inception-thesis concerning the perception of reality of artificial worlds. It can, however be stated that in most VR experiences we are at least peripherally still in perceptual and attentional contact with the fact that the virtual reality as a whole is not in global accordance with the ‘real’ environment in which we find ourselves with our head-mounted display. However, the more we focus our attention on the perceptually given things as well as their situationally co-perceived, accordant environments, the more ‘real’ we perceive virtual and digital worlds.