Part 3: The Epistemology of Augmented Reality
2. Sensibility theory and the creation of value
the musical properties are truly there in the music, and individuals can be mis-taken about what is actually there.
McDowell (1998, 85) offers a roughly parallel view of the values and moral demands that a virtuous person sees due to their upbringing, which shapes the person’s sensibility or “second nature”. “In moral upbringing what one learns is not to behave in conformity with rules of conduct, but to see situations in a special light, as constituting reasons for acting”. He writes that “the relevant conceptions are not so much as possessed except by those whose wills are influ-enced appropriately” (McDowell 1998, 54), whose practical intellect has a “cer-tain determinate non-formal shape.” (McDowell 1998, 184 f.) In fact:
In acquiring one’s second nature – that is, in acquiring logos – one learned to take a dis-tinctive pleasure in acting in certain ways, and one acquired conceptual equipment suited to characterize a distinctive worthwhileness one learned to see in such actions, that is, a distinctive range of reasons one learned to see for acting in those ways. (McDowell 1998, 188)
Within any established second nature or ethical sensibility, there is the possibil-ity of individual error – someone could misread a situation. Hence the sensibilpossibil-ity entails standards by which individual actions and characters are to be judged;
something is not morally or aesthetically true just because I think it true. And yet McDowell (1998, 194) concedes that “[a]ny actual second nature is a cultural product.” Thus McDowell ultimately seems to think that a moral reality can be culturally produced.
Wiggins, who defends a very similar view and is often grouped together with McDowell, is more upfront about how the reality of value emerges through human history. He is comfortable tentatively adopting what he calls a “Humean”
story of how value enters the world, a story that begins with nothing more than the natural world and humans’ various affective responses to it. On the story Hume tells in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, we begin with quite divergent sets of emotional responses to the world, until we begin to rub off on each other. The fact that we can talk to each other about the responses we share, tends to reinforce those shared responses; and our ability to see our-selves from the perspectives of others is another mechanism that tends to create a shared reality. On the story that Hume tells in “Of the Standard of Taste”, this process can be accelerated on the individual level by critics, who seek to broaden and at the same time deepen their own capacity for response by sampling works from as many different cultures from distant places and ages as possible.Wiggins (1998, 196) adds a bit more to the Humean story, but the important point is only that we can imagine some completely naturalistic, metaphysically innocuous story of cultural development that eventually brings us to the point where “a sys-Augmented Reality and sys-Augmented Perception 179
tem of anthropocentric properties and human responses has surely taken on a life of its own. Civilization has begun.”⁵ There is at some point a reality of value that we live in just as we live in the physical world, that is no longer purely subjective in being a matter of merely personal whim.
We could describe the way that culture accumulates increasingly intricate and subtle realities as a process of augmenting reality.When we create the culture of Western music up to twelve-tone compositions, then there is that much reality, there is that much there to be heard in those pieces; we have Augmented Reality to that extent. When we create a new culture of culinary appreciation, then there is that much reality to be appreciated in the food, etc. And this picture of how value enters the world consorts well with a form of non-naturalist realism that is prevalent in contemporary metaethics, represented by authors such as Scan-lon, Nagel, Parfit, Dworkin, Putnam, Charles Taylor and others. In this brand of non-naturalist realism, the question of realism for any domain of thought and discourse – ethics, aesthetics, mathematics, etc. – hinges not on any meta-physical problems but simply and solely on whether we have the resources in our first-order thought in that domain to unequivocally support specific assertions. If we have the resources within our moral thought to show that murder is wrong and that there is nothing else to think, then we have shown that murder is really wrong. Or as Nagel (1997, 125) writes: “we can defend moral reason only by aban-doning metatheory for substantive ethics.”
None of this is meant to be individualistic or to imply that we can create re-ality by believing different things or that the individual can make something real by willing it. These augmentations of reality pull us out of ourselves more, and come to serve as a standard by which to judge and correct our individual wants and desires and feelings. Hume emphasizes that we have to overcome our own merely idiosyncratic responses at two different levels. Firstly, we rub off on each other and come to see ourselves from a shared and impartial viewpoint; and in raising our children within an existing moral and aesthetic culture we give them this impartial viewpoint on themselves. Secondly, for certain forms of aesthetic reality to exist there must be individual artists and critics who practice a more demanding self-discipline. I have been emphasizing here that we can see moral or aesthetic reality as collectively and historically created while at the same time being truly objective and not subject in any way to individual whim.
For Wiggins’ various descriptions of this developmental process see “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life” and “A Sensible Subjectivism?”, both in Wiggins (1998), as well as Wiggins’
“Moral Cognitivism, Moral Relativism and Motivating Moral Beliefs”, where he supposes that our moral sensibility perhaps “has its first origin in a primitive system of responses scarcely more differentiated than boo and hurrah.” (Wiggins 1991, 69f.)
McDowell and Wiggins might both nonetheless be uncomfortable with any hint that these realities are created in any way. Both are opposed to the metaphor of a ‘projection’ of value upon an initially value-neutral reality; and Wiggins in particular is concerned to preserve some space for the idea that values are dis-covered rather than invented. For the individual, this is how it works. But at a more macroscopic level, neither McDowell nor Wiggins give any foundational role to moral of aesthetic facts existing prior to human sensibility and justifying the cultures that emerge; they only wish to insist that the reality that has emerged serves as a check on individual human sensibilities. Hence would say that on their sensibility theory it appears that we humans have augmented reality with additional layers of reality through the course of human history.
3. “The world must become quite another”
I would like to briefly introduce another conception of ‘augmenting reality’ be-fore turning to the issues raised by ‘Augmented Reality’ technologies. I will begin by looking at Raimond Gaita’s discussions of the idea – which is of course not an idea he invented, but a long-standing theme of moral philosophy – that each and every human being is absolutely unique and irreplaceable and thus of absolute value, incommensurable with anything else: “that human beings are individuals in the way nothing else in nature is.” This sense of individuality is essential to our moral life and “is internal to our sense of what it is to wrong someone”, he writes (Gaita 1990, 125). I turn to Gaita’s development of this idea because, firstly, he makes it absolutely clear that no human being is in any empirical sense especially unique or irreplaceable. Insofar as I am the bearer of useful capacities or other properties, there are surely other people who could replace me. We see individual people as absolutely irreplaceable through the ex-periences of love and remorse, Gaita (1990, 126) writes, or rather through expe-riencing “the power of human beings to affect one another in ways they cannot fathom.” This does not mean that we can only acknowledge the absolute value of those we love; but seeing the absolute value of a stranger would be impossible
“unless we also saw him as the intelligible object of someone’s love.” (Gaita 1990, 132) We can see each person as a world in themselves only if we can see how each person could be loved, i.e. could be the whole world to someone else.
Gaita’s concern is with our typical failure to see others fully, or as he puts it, to fully acknowledge their humanity; he writes about “the ways human beings are sometimes invisible, or only partially visible, to one another.” (Gaita 2002, xx) Racism is a particularly clear example of this, at least as he interprets the phenomenon. He discusses a woman he knew who had lost one of her children, Augmented Reality and Augmented Perception 181
watching on TV “a documentary on the Vietnam War which showed the grief of Vietnamese women whose children were killed in the bombing raids. After a few minutes the woman remarks: ‘But it is different for them. They can simply have more.’” (Gaita 2002, 57) In Gaita’s view, racism does not need to involve any false empirical claims about the othered race, though it often does – that they are less intelligent, less trustworthy, etc. – but racism always involved a failure to attrib-ute the same ‘depth’ to the othered race. “‘They’ can do and feel almost every-thing we can except not as we do, not as deeply we do. We grieve, but they
‘grieve’, we are joyful, they are ‘joyful’, we love and they ‘love’, we feel remorse, they feel ‘remorse’ and so on.” (Gaita 2002, 63) The racist might not deny any of the facts of the fully human lives of the other race, but fail to response to them in the same way; this is, it seems to me, a failure of imagination and empathy and self-awareness. An example of McDowell’s works quite similarly; he imagines someone saying, “You don’t know what it means that someone is shy and sen-sitive”, noting however that “[f]ailure to see what a circumstance means, in the loaded sense, is of course compatible with competence, by all ordinary tests, with the language used to describe the circumstance.” (McDowell 1998, 86) If the minimalist scheme holds that the reality that p is simply that p, we see now that this scheme can easily mask a difference in the reality experienced by two different people who are differently involved in the proposition p. If p is the fact of someone else’s suffering, this might be very real to one person, and a rather meaningless fact to another. Insofar as we can rely on the notes to Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief”, it would seem that he felt this situation quite typical of religious belief; although an atheist might seem to be denying some proposition p asserted by a believer, it is unclear whether they mean the same, and “[t]he difference might not show up at all in any explana-tion of the meaning”. (Wittgenstein 1966a, 53)
I can know that someone is in fact a human, a person with an independent life, but this could be more or less real to me, depending upon how much work I am willing to do on the quality of my attention to others. The same could be said of the natural world, or of anything in the world at all; sometimes we are stuck in our own heads, and only our own narrow concerns are very real for us; and sometimes we wake up and are shocked at how real the world independent of our concerns is. In Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” he wrote that the paradig-matic experience of absolute ethical value for him was the experience where he was inclined to say: “how extraordinary that anything should exist!”, which he also described as the experience of seeing the world as a miracle. (Wittgenstein 1993, 41–3) It has been a frequent theme of poets like Whitman, and of Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, that our attention to everything is half-hearted and conditional, that we should be more alive to the reality of everything.
Wittgen-stein (1966b, 185) wrote in 6.43 of the Tractatus that the “ethical will” cannot change anything in the world, “it can only change the limits of the world […]
the world must thereby become quite another, it must so to speak wax or wane as a whole. The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhap-py.”
This is another context where one might naturally speak of ‘augmenting re-ality’. It arguably involves a somewhat subjective use of the terms world or real-ity; the person whose world enlarges will likely feel that they have discovered this larger world that was there the whole time, so to say that ‘their world’ or
‘their reality’ is larger really means that their sense of reality has been augment-ed, while of course reality itself remains unchanged. People naturally tend to-wards this subjective characterization, I think, precisely because they are de-scribing an experience where nothing has changed except everything. They have not discovered any new facts; all facts now appear to them in a changed light. Thus it is not anything in the world that has changed for them; and they will naturally want to say that only the world itself has changed. Though this in-volves a subjective use of the terms world or reality, nonetheless we can see this experience as an achievement of greater objectivity, since this enlarged sense of reality is only possible for people who put in the effort to overcome their own self-involvement and transcend their own narrow concerns. And it should be possible to combine this notion of augmenting reality with the notion of aug-menting reality I sketched in the preceding sections, according to which the de-velopment of culture is the creation of new anthropocentric realities. We might want to say that each person already is an absolute value, that this is revealed to anyone who can put in the work of imagination and empathy that is needed to overcome their own self-involvement; and we might at the same time want to say this reality of absolute value only exists as a creation of culture, and that to sustain this reality a sufficient portion of the people must always be exerting themselves sufficiently to acknowledge each other’s humanity. But to argue for this would take be far beyond the scope of this paper.