Abstract Berlin: John R. Sageng

Perceptual Experience in Synthetic Realities

I offer a proposal for the content and intentional structure of perceptions of interactive graphical environments based on a position I call "synthetic realism". The premise for my discussion is that perceptual experience, action and rational belief-formation are subject to the constraints on content attributions called the "principle of charity" - specified as a "principle of coherence" and a principle of correspondence".  I claim that these constraints override traditional representational roles in interaction, forcing us to adopt a realist position.  Departing from Husserl's theory of image consciousness and Wollheim's "seeing-as" analysis, my proposal is that technology is used to hijack the biologically instilled capacities to track objects and apply basic phenomenal categories in a perceptual field. When the subject is performing actions with the objects that are encountered in perceptual space, this causes a reference shift from the intentional object conveyed by the representational role to the former images themselves (Sageng 2012). Accordingly, both perceptual content and intentional structure for these settings derive from applying perceptual schemata of substance hood, time and space on graphical shapes that have partially ceased to be representations and which are talking on real roles in action (Sageng 2019).