Part 2: Ontological Problems in Augmented Reality
5. Reality as evaluated possibility
The latter fact leads us to the insight into the very concept of the concept, the theory-dependence of the very notion of empirical truths that goes beyond mere appearances. In the domain of appearances, we only have apparent qualitative distinctions that tell us how something looks, i.e. how we qualify a Gestalt from our (joint!) perspective without any augmentation by conceptual default in-ference and any evaluation of ‘normal expectation’. In real reality, appearances are augmented by objective causes.
It is clear that even animals can err. This is so because their perceptions are also already enactively connected to normal expectations that, by some chances, can fail to become fulfilled. In this aspect, our connections of qualita-tive distinctions at presence and dispositional expectations of normal behaviour of things (objects) is, in fact, similar to animals – and the empirical cognitive sci-ences are correct to investigate similarities and differsci-ences in some form of dif-ferential anthropology. However, the relevant differences concern the notion of non-present possibilities and real reality.
As a result, Hume’s autodafé of the allegedly ‘metaphysical’ analysis of real reality ‘behind’ empirical appearances unfortunately throws the child of human knowledge and science out with the bathwater. It is crucial to see how colour-blind this attitude is. The criticism does not apply only to the metaphysical ideol-ogy of empiricism. It applies also to the self-misunderstanding of present days cognitive science, if they neglect the fact that language as it is taught is the core medium for storing, spreading and developing generic knowledge, codified in so called theories, that are nothing else than material-conceptual systems, the result of our scientific ‘work in the concept’ (Arbeit am Begriff).
As a result, philosophy and logic are not the disciplines to develop the con-cepts, but the sciences and their theories are here in charge. Philosophy and logic are ‘only’ metareflections on the development of theoretical, generic knowledge, but this is quite important for the very understanding of what science, generic knowledge, and conceptually informed empirical (perceptual) cognition is. Phi-losophy is the methodological self-consciousness of knowledge, noēsis noēseōs, without which there inner science (Wissenschaft) at all, but only traditional teachings of self-declared school-teachers, which were already ridiculed by Plato as ‘sophists’, i.e. as self-declared scientists that do not know what real sci-ence and knowledge is and this means what it ideally should be.
title-sentence “reality is a possibility” says, accordingly, that we should distinguish between what is merely actually sensed or perceived (here and now) by singular individuals, such that it can be a reliable or a deceptive appearance of what there really is, on the one hand, and what can count as (objectively, hence at least trans-subjectively) real (“wirklich”) on the other. We never perceive what is real without modal, hence conceptual, mediation. That is, we never have ac-cess to objective reality by mere sensation (Empfindung) or sense-perception, not even to the realities of our own bodily existence. This does not mean, how-ever, that the actuality of, say, my headaches is questioned. Nor does it mean that we do not perceive with sufficient certainty that there is, for example, a chair in front of us. The only point is this: Talking about an objective thing like a chair already presupposes that we can expect that some possible things can be done with the object, e.g. that we can sit on it – which we cannot do if it is only a painted chair. Access to reality thus always requires a differentiation between merely ‘seeming’ appearances and how some specific reality shows it-self, as we are inclined to say. This very fact gives the considerations of Hegel’s Logic of Essence its importance and depth.
All this can be nicely shown at concrete cases, as, for example, when we look at a hilarious French mock-documentary on Stanley Kubrick and the race to the moon. In this film, Alexander Haig, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, some real CIA-grands and the widow of Kubrick discuss the notorious story that no man has even been to the moon. The scenes that show Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon were filmed by Kubrick in a studio on earth – in order to get some appropriate propaganda material against the Russians on TV. Obvious-ly, we have to evaluate at least the following three possibilities: What was shown in TV was the real thing (1). What was shown in TV was produced in a studio but the crew was really on the moon (2). The whole business was a hoax (3). In such an evaluation, we (should) accept something as ‘real’ (‘wirklich’) if, but only if, we have ‘sufficient reasons’ or ‘satisfying grounds’ for declaring that the possi-bility expressed in a judgment is no mere possipossi-bility but, as we say, reality.
In fact we say that something is really so and so, when we undertake such a reality claim and deny that it is a mere possibility. Hegel’s most notorious phrase articulates precisely this fact: “what is real is reasonable and what is reasonable is real”. The formula does not only mean, as Hegel himself sometimes says, that what is reasonable eventually comes (or, even more defensively: ‘should come’) into being. It rather says something about the logical status of reality-claims.
The basic insight is that reality claims are (almost) never immediate, that is, that we (almost) never ‘immediately see’ or ‘sense’ or ‘perceive’ what is real. This is so because what we count as real is (almost) never independent from senten-ces or propositions with trans-personal inferential impact and truth conditions Scientific Truth as Augmented Reality 97
that are constituted in such a way that they systematically surpass the domain in which we can evaluate truth merely subjectively by ‘mere perception’ or ‘mere intuition’. This logical fact and nothing else is the reason why any non-tautolog-ical empirnon-tautolog-ical truth is fallible. In other words, we always have to judge if a pos-sibility-judgment can be viewed as telling us what really exists.
This shows the further reason why Hegel also claims that he has ‘neutral-ised’ scepticism by incorporating the problems that it articulates. Hegel uses the phrase “sublation” or Aufhebung for such a logical analysis. He speaks of a self-refutation or self-consummation of scepticism in this context. He thus re-futes any dogmatism or ‘rationalism’ as well as any sweeping scepticism or sub-jectivism as in Humean ‘empiricism’.
This does not mean that no-one knows anything for sure. It rather means that the quest for subjective certainty is not relevant for robust real knowledge in the sense of playing the game of giving responsible information about the world as accurate as possible and of assessing such informative acts in a control games of asking for and giving reasons. Almost no such reason will be ‘absolute-ly’ sufficient in the sense that there can be no further doubt. On the other hand, there is a truth in Cartesian self-consciousness. It consists in the ‘absolute’ fact that any judgment is my or your judgment, the judgment of hopefully responsi-ble persons. The quest for subjective certainty holds philosophical epistemology still in its grip and results in a wrong alternative between dogmatic belief-philos-ophy and scepticism, which is, in the end, mere solipsism.
Now we can look back on Hegel’s progress: The Logic of Being had been a deconstructive logical analysis of the naïve, naturalistic, point of view. It has shown that there is no ‘immediate’ talk about things and objects without presup-posed norms and rules for what it means to make responsible claims or informa-tive statements about them. Such statements are prima facie only possibly true.
Insofar, we can understand the Logic of Being as a destruction of transcendent Pythagorean Platonism as we find it not only in theology and transcendent (‘ra-tionalistic’) psychology, but also in scientism, i.e. in materialism and naturalism.
The problem of Platonism is its ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung) of logical forms or of linguistic representations and explanations (of things and processes). Most prominent are reifications of causality and our talk about forces (1), but also of abstract objects like numbers (2), of abstract truths like mathematical truths (3), of mere possibilities as in any not merely formal theory of possible worlds (4), of theoretical entities like alleged rules wired in the brain as a com-puting machine in cognitive biology (5), and of institutional forms of actions and practices in economics (6).
Now we might understand at least in outline some of the most disturbing title-sentences of Hegel’s Logic of Essence, as, for example, the following:
“What is possible is also impossible”. “Real reality is a possibility”, and, per-haps, the most contested of Hegel’s logical oracles with which we have started:
“What is real is reasonable and what is reasonable is real”.
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Thomas Gil
Existence and Ontological Commitments
Abstract: Traditional (ontological) answers to the question concerning what there is have not lost their validity even if technological development has created higher-order informational devices, institutional facts due to collective intention-ality keep on proliferating, and poetic imagination does not stop creating fiction-al entities. Individufiction-al things, qufiction-alities, classes and facts are still the main com-ponents of the reality which is relevant for human beings.
Keywords: Ontological commitments, higher-order technologies, Superhistory, informational objects, things, qualities, networks, institutional facts, the Fourth Revolution, fictional objects.
Nobody would have thought, two decades ago, that computers would accom-plish certain tasks we used to conceive of as specifically human. Most of us as-sumed, without explicitly thinking too much about it, that there was a divide be-tween human and digital labour, people and computers, difficult to eliminate.
Self-driving cars were the stuff of science fiction, and not an imaginable daily reality. Today, cars without drivers exist that perform flawlessly. Improvement in robotics has created machines that can navigate and interact with existing ob-jects in factories, warehouses, battlefields, and offices. And all such technolog-ical devices seem to be able to function not only in scientific research labs of leading software companies but also in the messy real world of persons and things. A huge and sudden progress has been accomplished, a progress that is exponential and combinatorial, so that almost everything seems today to be a potential object for the global process of digitization that is taking place in front of our astonished eyes. Think of the many smart phone applications avail-able that help users to do whatever you can imagine a human being can do.
The terminology we choose to describe all these technological changes and developments is not that important. We may speak of a “second machine age”
(Brynjolfsson/McAfee 2014) and contrast our epoch with the Industrial Revolu-tion as that great sum of diverse developments in mechanical engineering, chemistry and metallurgy among many other disciplines that had such a huge impact on human culture and civilization. Computers and other digital engines are changing our world in such a way that we may choose to refer to such a transformation using the concept of a second machine revolution. Digital tech-nologies (computers, software, and communication networks) have indeed rev-olutionized our daily lives. They change substantially the way we diagnose
dis-DOI 10.1515/9783110497656-006
© 2017 Thomas Gil, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
eases, the way we talk and listen to what others have to say, the way we work and produce goods and services, the way we move around, and the way we enjoy life and the company of others when we don’t work. Computers and other digital devices help us accomplish all our goals. Almost everything we used to do while living can now be digitized, that is, converted into bits that can be stored on a computer and sent over a network. What is important is not the terminology we use to speak about this new epoch in human history or “superhistory” (Floridi 2014). What is relevant is to understand what is really happening, and to examine critically what all these transformations justify us to affirm about reality as a whole. “Revolution 4.0” or the “Fourth Revolution”, to use the concept preferred by Luciano Floridi, may be a revolution or simply the consequence of a continuous evolution.