Part 2: Ontological Problems in Augmented Reality
2. Presence in its absolute position
ality from the appearances in the mode of abduction, by a principle of best ex-planation, which was made explicit and famous by Charles Sanders Peirce. This mode of abductive inference is the very reason for the conceptually necessary
‘fallibility’ of objective statements about real reality.
This shows already in which sense real reality is already in itself augmented reality. In the following, we shall explore some of the features of the ‘augmenta-tion’ of actuality by reason that turns it into ‘real reality’. And we shall see in which sense Hegel’s insight is not at all a spooky and extravagant ‘theory’
about the real world – another word for real reality – as the object of thinking and not just of perceiving. For what we perceive are actual appearances, not their real, objective, causes.
Actuality is Hegel’s “Realität” – in the sense of Kant’s “realitas phaenome-non”. As such, it belongs to the domain of qualitative distinctions, which we make partly individually, partly together in present situations. We invest, of course, subjectively and jointly accessible appearances, for example on the ground of deictical observations and collectively learned qualitative distinctions, which can be as primitive as that between ‘it’s raining’, ‘it’s snowing’ and ‘the sun shines’ – taken as a holophrastic expressions for fine weather. In fact, no-body really thinks already of the sun as a star that produces heat when he says that the sun shines in contrast to stormy or foggy weather. And if a child says “mama”, “papa” or, later, “uncle”, she often does not yet make distinctions between her real father or uncle and what looks as a father or uncle. In the case of “mama”, the toddler perhaps does not do more than distinguish practically between situations in which mama is there and cases when she misses her.
Even though the toddler certainly already can distinguish between her real moth-er and mothmoth-er-substitutes, she does not yet use the word “mama” as ‘naming an object with properties’. We do this only later after we have learnt the differences between grammatical roles, for example the special function of the word
“mama” in a context like “mama is the best mother of the world”. Here,
“mama” has turned into a (local, relativized) ‘proper name’ – as we can see by the identification with the (local, relativized) definite description “the best mother” (from the point of view of the speaker).
Eiffel-Tower in Paris, for example, is an object in the real world, but not in my actual surrounding here and now.
By the way, there is only one world, the real world of real reality. Talking about possible worlds is talking about the content of possible stories or state descriptions that never add up to a whole world. We therefore prefer talking about possible things, events, states of affairs or objects in the world and not about ‘the actual’ world in contrast to some ‘possible worlds’ – which are in pos-sible-world-semantics anyway nothing but mathematical models.
In any case, qualitative distinctions rest on some ‘showing’, which includes non-visual ways of producing some joint distinctions on the ground of our five or six senses (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting and having a holistic bodily proprioception). The ‘6th’ sense is often unhappily neglected, as the exam-ple of producing joint feelings of horror, fear, surprise can show as well as all kinds of depressing or hilarious moods. The unquestionable point however is this: Qualitative distinctions cannot surpass the domain of some more or less spatially and temporally limited present processes which we distinguish practi-cally, in enactive perception. This happens in a way similar to how animals live in a limited presence. It is important, though, not to reduce presence to a mere moment (Nietzsche’s Augenblick). Presence always is extended relative to ongoing processes in the near future. But presence never extends to merely pos-sible events in the distant future (or past, or to fictional ‘worlds’).
The distinction between present actuality and mere possibilities is absolute-ly crucial for any correct understanding of the difference between the life form of animal and the life of human persons. For we have access to non-present possi-bilities only by some mediation or re-presentation. The most import means for such re-presentations is language. It is the easiest and ‘cheapest’ form of produc-ing arbitrary representations aloud or silently. Drawproduc-ing pictures and sketches or
‘representing’ them silently in mute ‘thinking’ or ‘imagining’ is already more ‘ex-pensive’. The differential and inferential conditions of fulfilment for pictures and images are much less ‘precise’ than the already ‘digitalized’ forms of language with its normalized or canonized conceptual criteria of differentiation and de-fault forms of dispositional inferences, conditioned by further differentiations.
In contrast to qualitative differentiations together with corresponding verbal signs and signals (which we already find in the animal kingdom in a rudimen-tary way, too) humans can refer to non-present possibilities by ‘thinking’, i.e.
by using language silently or publicly. Lewis Carroll would have said that one would need very sharp eyes to ‘see’ possibilities. And Hegel adds to this truism the insight that the only access to a mere possibility is indeed by thinking, i.e. by representing a possible state of affairs by some present linguistic act, for example by a description. In order to neglect inessential differentiations – like any struc-Scientific Truth as Augmented Reality 87
tural analysis should do – I incorporate the cases of representations that use im-ages or pictures into a broad notion of ‘language’. Then, silent ‘representations’
of images, diagrams, sketches, writings, sequences of films and so on also count as silent production of ‘language’. We represent, for example, a piece of music not only by silently ‘hearing it’ but also by some ‘tacit’ visual ‘representation’
of its musical notation. The notation helps a lot to ‘represent’ some complex piece of music – as the example of pianists show who certainly ‘represent’ in some tacit way or other the notes they play. Tacit thinking is therefore not more mysterious then reading a book silently. In fact, the cases are identical in form. As a result, we obviously must distinguish two different uses of the word “representation”, the representation of possible states of affairs by some language and the inner, silent, representation of some sequences of language in tacit ‘thinking’. There is no special language of thought as Jerry Fodor holds, tacitly suggesting a relation like that between a higher and lower comput-er language like Fortran and Assemblcomput-er, whcomput-ere the lattcomput-er is closcomput-er to the so called machine-language of the hardware.
We now slowly approach the core insight of Hegel’s ‘identification’ of real reality with reason by reading it as conceptually augmented reality. In the con-trast between ‘experience’ in the sense of ‘actuality’ and ‘real causes’, the latter are assumed as ‘real objects’ that ‘produce’ appearances via certain sensual stimuli causally. Hegel’s word for actuality is, at first, Dasein, which we could translate as presence. In presence, all our practical, perhaps already joint, dis-tinctions of qualities take place. If we look at the differences made from a logical point of view, the causes of the appearances, so called, are, in a sense, mere pos-sibilities.
In classical empiricism, one jumps right into a speculative, metaphysical, theory according to which the qualitative differentiations are prompted by phys-ical causations. The things are said to produce impressions (Locke, Hume), sense data (Russell, Ayer) or stimulus meanings (Quine). However, talking like this is just forgetting the logical analysis of perceptual judgments that are no automatic reactions triggered by sensations at all. Rather, the objective things as they are mystified in empiricism are in a sense ‘absent’ from the sheer presence of ap-pearances. This is so because they are already generic things, typified and ab-stract. Such a thing is a thing in itself, but in the sense of Hegel, not in the sense of Kant. Kant uses the expression in order to talk about things totally be-yond the reach of human knowledge. Such a use is incoherent, as Hegel shows in quite some details.
However, we need an immanent distinction between generic things as such and concrete things in-an-for-themselves, as Hegel labels the case of some refer-ence to real objects in real reality. The word “concrete” comes from Latin
“con-crescere” and says that the generic properties that are necessarily fulfilled if the thing falls under the species in question and the individual object we refer to are
‘grown together’. Only such concrete objects are real things in real reality. They are always already specified and typified objects, laden with dispositions and therefore dependent on ‘their’ concept. This concept, in turn, depends on a whole system of concepts, i.e. on a whole theory, as we today would say. Talking about the lion as such or in itself is speaking about the genus or species of lions in precisely this sense. Saying that this animal over there is a lioness means claiming that she is a female animal of the corresponding species with the cor-responding faculties and dispositions. We would or could already evaluate the claim as wrong if the animal were dead, not only if it is only a fake lion.
We usually do not realize these logical facts about our talk about things as causes of appearances in the way we should. It should be clear that we have to take them into account in order to understand what we do when we say, e.g., that we see a green shirt in the department store and say, nevertheless, that
‘in reality’ the shirt is blue or bluish. ‘Immediately’ we might see a ‘bent stick’
in the water; but we might assume – and even fishing birds do similar things en-actively – that the stick is nevertheless straight. What we see – and even distin-guish together in the yellow light of the store – is, obviously, not the blue shirt, but a green shirt; and the bent stick appears to us as ‘objectively’ as a fata mor-gana in the desert. Only by thinking, i.e. by reference to a possible future, can we say that the stick as such is not bent and that, what we see as an oasis, is only an optical illusion.
Of course, while acknowledging that real reality is a modal concept, a kind of possibility, we do not have already explained the difference between mere pos-sible cases and real cases. In fact, this is the crucial point. While nobody denies, if she is sane, that we cannot have access to possibilities if not by thinking, imag-ining, story-telling, or picturing, the very contrast between possibilities and real-ity misleads people, first, not to accept the insight that realreal-ity is a kind of pos-sibility and, second, to confuse reality with actuality. The latter confusion lies at the ground of the whole tradition of empiricism and its illusions of immediacy.
Empiricism is, all in all, a speculative ‘theory’ of knowledge that recon-structs ‘knowing’ as a slightly developed kind of animal cognition. This is the deep reason why Berkeley, Hume and the empiricists cannot make sense of sci-ence at all – as Kant has realized and Hegel, the great foe of immediacy (Wilfrid Sellars) has convincingly shown. No wonder that Russell, the logical atomist and arch-logical empiricist, did not agree – and declared in his History of Western Philosophy that he believed that everything is wrong what Hegel has said. It is up to us to decide the implications of this statement for what Russell himself be-lieves as true.
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In any case, Hegel’s reframing of the debate has quite important consequen-ces. The first point is that we have access to real reality – just as to mere possi-bilities – only mediated by thinking, not just by perception. The second point is that evaluating a possibility as a real possibility in contrast to a mere possibility says that we should count with the possibility in our actions and plans. This is the crucial difference to merely counterfactual states of affairs told in fairy tales or divine myths. We do not and should not count with them in the world. They tell us what is not the case; but we may use them to represent ex negativo most general features of our world. If we talk, for example, about an almighty or all-knowing god, we just represent in a negative way some most general facts. Ac-cording to Hegel, our talks about a utopian, non-existent, god show in a negative way the perspectival limitations of human faculties to act or to know things.
These faculties are finite, but real. For example, we cannot travel into the past or into the future. Nobody can. However, we can make this fact and its limita-tions explicit by augmenting real reality by some utopian and speculative image of a god beyond all appearances. In fact, this is the very function of spec-ulative sentences. Only negative theology is true theology; and only negative phi-losophy is true phiphi-losophy.
The problem of a more radical approach to avoid any ‘speculative’ talk as Hume famously has proposed consists in the fact that it makes reflections on whole domains of discourse in the world impossible. As a result, empiricism is the attitude to behave rationally without self- consciousness. Even if there is no god who could be in a position to wind ‘the film’ of the world back and forth – and this in no time, the image helps to see what it means to look at the world as a limited whole sub specie aeterni, as Wittgenstein does in his Trac-tatus. Once again, the situation is related to the games and films of virtual reality.
But how to reconstruct the more narrow distinction between a merely real possibility and real reality? The distinction is crucial because it is the distinction between well-justified belief in a real possibility and world-related empirical knowledge about real things and not only generic normal conditions. However, in empirical knowledge about what we really perceive, singular empirical obser-vations and perceptions are already grown together with generic judgments and expectations. Hegel’s deepest insight is here that the truth conditions not only of generic truths about a whole species of things in general but also about concrete objects go far beyond descriptions of ‘merely subjective’ appearances and in-volve judgements of the form of dialectical reason. We shall see what this means in our further consideration.
Any real possibility is represented by its generic description. It is evaluated as real by the judgment that it is reasonable to count with it. When, for example, a reliable weather-forecast tells us that in the evening there is a high probability
of rain or even of a thunder-storm, hikers in the mountains are well advised to count with the corresponding possibilities, despite the fact that in the morning there might have been fine weather and no immediate sign for the possible tem-pest. Here, the above explanation seems to be obviously correct: A claim that says that a possibility is real says that we reasonably should count with it.
One should, for example, not count with the merely formal, verbal, possibility that one will not die, not to mention other weird possibilities as ‘traveling’ to King’s Arthur’s court. There are many other fairy tales which we should not con-sider as representing real possibilities, for example in science fictions in which the content of a brain is ‘copied’ into an ‘avatar’ or other nice but counter factual analogies between humans and robots.