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A peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for Ethics and ISSN 1541-0099 22(1) –November 2011 |
Fictional Entities and Augmented Reality: A
Metaphysical Impossibility Result
Jeff Buechner
Department of Philosophy
Rutgers University-Newark
buechner@rci.rutgers.edu
The Saul Kripke Center
CUNY, The Graduate Center
JBuechner@gc.cuny.edu
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 22 Issue 1 – November 2011 - pgs 53-72
Abstract
The transhumanism project will gain
momentum with advances in technology, in basic science and in philosophy, as
well as in bioethics. However, there are minefields that jeopardize this
progress – one such minefield is a fundamental
problem in pure philosophy: fictional entities and how we refer to the
nonexistent. In the absence of solutions to the problems that arise in this
area of philosophy, progress in the technology necessary for augmented reality will
be considerably impeded. I will argue there are forms of augmented reality that
are metaphysically impossible and that believing that such forms are possible (both
metaphysically and physically) creates a form of skepticism.
Introduction: augmented
reality in the near future
Imagine the following scenario, which you might think
may well happen in the not too distant future. Fred is under orders from his
doctor not to indulge in foods that will elevate his already dangerously high
cholesterol level. Unfortunately, Fred has little will power to resist the
delicious foods he is forbidden to eat and that may well kill him if he does
eat them. Luckily for Fred, it is now possible to wirelessly connect his
cerebral cortex directly to the Internet. He connects to a website that caters
to weak-willed, high cholesterol people. Instantly a tiny elfin figure –
Peter Pan – appears in Fred’s visual field. Peter Pan engages
in repartee with Fred, after which he then saunters over to the overstuffed
pastrami sandwich Fred is desperately trying to ignore. He pulls down his
drawers and defecates on the sandwich. Fred recoils in disgust, murmurs to
himself that Peter Pan is standing on his sandwich, but that Peter Pan does not
exist, and tosses the sandwich into his waste disposal unit. Peter Pan disappears
and Fred settles down to eat his AMA-approved lunch of lettuce and cucumber.
This scenario poses a number of difficult
philosophical puzzles about what actually happens in it – is Fred having a
conversation with a fictional entity? Is a fictional entity walking on top of
Fred’s sandwich? Can Fred truly say both that Peter Pan is standing on his
sandwich and that Peter Pan does not exist? (If we accept Saul Kripke’s views
on fictional entities, Fred cannot truly say that.) In augmenting Fred’s visual
field with beings that are fictional, but which are visible to him, what
exactly is being done? Augmented reality is a vision for the near future that
will require, if it is to happen, a detailed understanding of brain processes
and brain-machine interfaces. It might take the form of direct wireless
connection of the human brain to the Internet or virtual reality devices, such
as virtual reality glasses. There are multiple important functions subserved by
such technology. For one, the uses of virtual beings that appear in one’s
visual field are almost endless. A virtual companion could serve as a guide
when traveling in a
One might think that the only problems for
implementing augmented reality are issues concerning neurophysiology and brain-machine
interfaces. That these are problems for augmented reality is certainly true,
but it is not the complete story. There are additional problems that may call
into question the very idea of an augmented reality. These come from an area of
pure philosophy, namely reference to fictional entities and the logic of
nonexistence. I will argue that if certain views about fictional entities and
the logic of nonexistence are accepted – those
of Saul Kripke – then certain kinds of
augmented reality are metaphysically impossible. If so, it follows that we
might be wrong about what we think we are observing when virtual fictional beings
appear in our visual field or when there is any kind of communication between
fictional virtual beings and real beings. So we will need to distinguish between
different kinds of reality augmentations, some of which are philosophically
incoherent and some of which are not.
Kinds and degrees of reality augmentation
The term “augmented reality” marks off a large parcel
of possible virtual augmentations. Although it is not the point of this paper
to provide an analysis of the concept of an augmented reality, nor to describe
all the different kinds and respective degrees of augmented reality, it is
worthwhile to briefly sketch some of the kinds. The claim of this paper is that
one kind of augmented reality is philosophically incoherent. That is, there are
a priori reasons to believe that it cannot happen. It is not that the concept
makes sense, but is either physically or technologically unachievable. Rather,
the very concept is incoherent. It is metaphysically impossible. Thus, there is
nothing that could be physically or technologically implemented. The importance
of the claim is that it shows how we could be radically deceived about what we
think we have engineered. That is, certain reality augmentations involving
fictional virtual beings look like they are technologically achievable, but
that is the mistake. It is not those reality augmentations, but reality
augmentations of a different kind that appear to be reality augmentations
involving fictional beings that are technologically achievable. To repeat: I am
not arguing that a particular kind of augmented reality is either physically
impossible or technologically impossible (though physically possible). My claim
is not about limitations of the physical world, but rather about the concept of
reality augmentation and the metaphysical limitations imposed by a
philosophical theory of fictional entities.
Hearing aids are a simple and well-known kind of
reality augmentation. Incoming sound waves are amplified for people whose
hearing mechanism has been compromised in some way. Similarly, eyeglasses are a
form of reality augmentation. In both cases, incoming signals are
technologically altered so that an underlying physical impairment in the
sensory mechanisms sustaining a cognitive ability (such as sight) is overcome.
Adding machines, calculators, slide rules and computers (for making numerical
computations) are ways of augmenting our arithmetical skills, but are not reality
augmentations, since it is not some feature of the physical world (our reality)
which is being augmented. Of course, one might argue that if one takes
augmentation of reality to be either adding something to, changing something in,
or subtracting something from reality, then enhancing one’s ability to add
numbers by use of a calculator might be seen as a form of reality augmentation,
since one is adding to “reality” sums which one would not have produced without
the use of the calculator. I will not worry whether or not this way of bringing
calculators (and much else) under the umbrella notion of augmented reality is
conceptually appropriate, since nothing in what follows hangs on a resolution
of this issue.
The term “augmentation” suggests an enhancement,
though the dictionary counsels neutrality on that: to augment is to become
greater in size, extent or quantity. Certainly, some reality augmentations will
be seen as enhancements (headphones), while others will be seen as treatment of
some underlying pathology (hearing aids). Since this distinction is rather
difficult to draw and may be hostage to our definition of normal health,1
it is best not to appeal to it in elaborating the concept of augmented reality.
We do well, though, to focus on the notion of “reality.” If reality is defined
to be the totality of all that is real, then it is not clear how reality can be
extended. If reality includes all and only what is real, then any extension of
it must consist of things that are not real, and thus not part of reality. In
which case, there is, by definition, no such thing as augmented reality. One
way out of this definitional impasse is to define reality to be a complex
psychological state that involves human perception and human experience. The
methodological point, then, is that what is an augmentation of reality
critically depends upon the conception of reality to which we appeal.
One way to think of reality is as the sensory and
cognitive world that we inhabit. On this view, reality is not some transcendental
realm forever hidden from us that lies below our sensory and cognitive apparati,
but is just what we experience in virtue of the activities of our sensory and
cognitive apparati. Reality is, on this view, what we experience, and a
description of the phenomenology of our experiences would be a description of
the fabric of reality (though not a description of the physical structure and
physical laws of reality). Adding to or modifying what we experience, then, is
augmenting our experiences and thus augmenting reality. Since our experiences
can be either veridical, on the one
hand, or hallucinations or illusions, on the other, one might insist that
reality is just the set of our veridical experiences, since hallucinations and
illusions are experiences of what is not real. But this move threatens to
restore the definitional impasse it was the point of defining reality in terms
of experiences to remove. Instead, I will stipulate that augmented reality
consists of any change in the totality of our sensory and cognitive experiences
(at any given moment) that is produced by some form of technology. The three
basic kinds of technologically mediated changes are additions, modifications
and deletions. Another stipulation is the following: how the world appears to
be as it is experienced by a human being is called one’s total experiential
field. This is a term borrowed from Gestalt psychology (Gurwitsch 1964, Chapter
1).
One kind of augmented reality, on this view of reality,
is a virtual modification in which various features of reality are virtually
enhanced. For instance, putting on rose-colored glasses produces an augmented
reality in which the natural colors of objects are modified – and perhaps enhanced. Listening to music piped
into one’s ears by a headset, while walking, is a form of augmented reality in
which features are added to reality. One adds to the natural sounds of the
local environment the sounds of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata. In such cases, natural
sounds in the local environment might be masked, modified or deleted. Olfactory
and tactile augmentations of reality are also technologically available. If we
stipulate that a rose-colored world is non-normal, then we can distinguish
between normal and non-normal augmentations of reality. We can also distinguish
between what exists in reality and what does not. Reality augmented with an
image in one’s visual field of a non-existent flower with natural colors is a
normal addition to it of something that is non-existent. Of course, the image
of a non-existent object exists in one’s visual field and is, in that sense, a
real part of one’s visual field.
Given a sensory component of the human brain, there
are reality augmentations of it. What, however, of virtual linguistic
inscriptions, such as words, that augment one’s visual field? (The importance
of this kind of reality augmentation, and its associated problems, will be
developed below.) These inscriptions are not images of what exists in the real
world (unless they are, either intentionally or coincidentally, images of
inscriptions that exist in the real world and which occupy the same place in
one’s visual field that the image of the real world inscription would occupy – though it may seem bizarre to replace an image of
an object with another image that is indiscernible from it). This kind of
augmented reality is not now available, but in the near future it will be
technologically possible to mark objects in one’s visual field with linguistic
inscriptions. Similarly, visual objects could be virtually marked with olfactory,
aural, tactile, or gustatory signals. Such multi-modality sensory markings
would be inscriptions, though, only if they provided information of some sort
(that it is the function of an inscription to provide). Providing useful information
to the user is certainly a primary function of future augmented reality
technologies. Although it is important to distinguish between the manifold ways
of representing information in a user’s total experiential field, devising such
a catalog will not be our concern here. Suppose virtual non-existent beings are
added to one’s visual field. If they talk, move, touch, and so on, those
features will be features of the total experiential field that constitutes
one’s reality. More importantly, if they provide information to a user by
speaking, the user will be able to employ that information in performing
various cognitive activities – or so our
intuitions tell us.
Augmented reality and the
problem of experiential field integration
In a future in which it is technologically possible to
connect the human brain directly to the Internet, one form of augmented reality
would be one in which items of various sensory and cognitive modalities from
the Internet are integrated into one’s total experiential field. Unlike the
cinema (though it certainly could include cinema-like augmentations), where the
images projected onto the movie screen occupy a rectangular surface in the
center of one’s field of vision, images and linguistic symbols would be
scattered throughout one’s field of vision. Some of the images will be of
virtual objects. One problem with an augmented reality of virtual objects is
how they can interact in a natural way with the natural objects (including
beings), natural features, and natural properties that are represented in one’s
total experiential field. For instance, suppose that a virtual being that looks
like a real person is in Smith’s total experiential field. This virtual
companion could be helpful when Smith visits a
There are integration problems in other sensory
modalities. If the virtual object is a virtual being who talks, the sounds it
makes must not destroy or mask the natural sounds from one’s local environment.
Here, too, sounds provide valuable information necessary for survival. Losing
sounds is also a recipe for disaster. We will assume that the problem of
integrating perceptual signals into one’s total experiential field has been
solved. The world is a complex and continually changing place where what is
true at one time may no longer be true a half-second later. Integration of
virtual fictional or non-fictional beings into one’s visual field would
require, minimally, a solution to the frame problem in artificial intelligence.
There are some philosophers who have argued that there will never be a
computational solution to the frame problem. Whether that is or is not the
case, the claim of this paper is not affected. These claims are not hostage to
the technological means by which augmented reality is achieved.
There are certainly problems of information overload
that need to be addressed (besides the problems of sound integration) in
augmented reality technologies. It would be a worthless technological project
if Smith acquired so much information from the combination of his local
environment and reality augmentations that he could not store all of it in
short-term memory. (Decisions would then have to be made about which
information should be stored and which not, but that is a problem that does not
affect the claim that is argued in this paper.)
There is, though, a different integration problem for
sounds. Suppose that the virtual being speaks to Smith. There are situations in
which it would be important that it appears to Smith, phenomenologically, that
the virtual being is speaking to him and not simply speaking to a general
audience (in the way in which a carnival barker speaks to anyone and everyone).
It might be thought that this problem is a technological one. However, that is
not so, if certain circumstances obtain. If the virtual being augmenting one’s
total experiential field is a fictional being, it would not be possible for it
to speak to Smith. It might appear to Smith that this is precisely what it is
doing, but Smith would have a false belief if he believed that to be the case.
In order to see just what the problem is, we need to consider two different
kinds of virtual beings inhabiting one’s total experiential field. The first kind
is a fictional being, while the second kind is non-fictional: it is a conduit
for information that is transmitted from another human being or is information
that is transmitted in virtue of a program being executed (and where there may
or may not be program designer intentions in place). Let’s consider the second
kind of virtual being first. Just as we acquire information from other people
from (but not restricted to) their words (say, in a conversation), we acquire
information from virtual non-fictional beings in the same way. There is a
causal connection of us to the virtual non-fictional being and of the virtual
non-fictional being to some source of information. Given that the causal
connections are in place, if the virtual non-fictional being tells Smith that
Jones wants to meet with him at the Hilton, then the referent of the word
“Jones” is the woman named “Jones,” and the referent of the word “Hilton” is a certain
hotel that is part of the Hilton chain of hotels. (The same is true if the
information is transmitted in virtue of a program being executed, though the
causal chains might be more complex in this case.)
If the virtual non-fictional being augmenting Smith’s
visual field is causally connected to a real human being (say,
Augmented reality with virtual
fictional beings
The first kind of virtual being – a virtual fictional being –
creates special problems for communication different in kind from any of
the problems created by virtual non-fictional beings. To fix ideas, suppose
that it is possible to download a fiction (perhaps a film) into one’s total
experiential field in such a way that all of the problems discussed above have
been resolved. There is another problem, and it has to do with the problem of
reference to fictional entities and the logic of nonexistence. To put it
crisply, there is an impenetrable barrier between real beings and fictional
beings. The barrier is not physical. It is metaphysical, in the following way:
it is a metaphysical impossibility for beings in reality to communicate with
beings in a fiction and for beings in a fiction to communicate with beings in
reality. That much might strike anyone as being trivially true. What we need to
see is how it falls out of one philosophical program of how reference to
fictional entities works. My argument in this paper is relativized: I will help
myself freely to the claims made in only one philosophical theory of reference
to fictional entities – Saul Kripke’s theory (advanced
in, among other places, Kripke 2011). It is not my aim in this paper to critically
examine Kripke’s views, to investigate the metaphysics of fictional entities,
or to consider the problem of virtual fictional beings in augmented reality
through the lens of different philosophical theories of reference to fictional
entities.
The primary claim I argue for in this paper is that
reality augmentation with fictional virtual beings is metaphysically
impossible. It is impossible in two distinct ways. First, it is metaphysically
impossible to communicate from real beings to fictional beings and, conversely,
from fictional beings to real beings. Second, it is metaphysically impossible
to integrate into a total experiential field both real objects and fictional
objects (where the objects of either kind include, of course, beings). To see
why both of these metaphysical impossibilities hold we need to examine Kripke’s
views on reference to fictional entities.
The problem of reference to fictional entities and to
non-existent objects was thought to deliver a fatal blow to Millian theories of
reference and to vindicate Russellian theories of reference. Kripke had
destroyed Russell’s theory of descriptions as an account of reference in 1970
(in his lectures, Naming and Necessity,
at Princeton (Kripke 1982)). He devised an ingenious account of reference to
fictional entities in (Kripke forthcoming 2012, some of which is anticipated in
Kripke 1982). The central idea in his account is that in works of fiction it is
only pretended that the conditions described actually obtain. That is, “a work
of fiction is a pretense that what is happening is really going on” (Kripke 2011, 52-74). Names
used within a fiction do not have referents. Rather, it is merely a pretense
that they have referents. Thus, an author of a fiction can pretend that any
theory of reference is in place and is satisfied within their fiction. An
author can pretend that Russell’s theory of descriptions is an entirely
satisfactory account of the reference relation and pretend that reference is
secured in her fiction by the appropriate descriptions. That this is a radical
proposal goes without saying, since it implies that all of the propositions in
a piece of fiction are not genuine propositions. Rather, they are pretend
propositions. Propositions within fiction are not genuine because, if they
were, we would be able to speak of counterfactual situations in which they are
true. Suppose that there is a proposition about a particular fictional person
in a work of fiction. It makes no sense to ask whether that proposition would
be true under various counterfactual conditions, since the fictional entities
in the fiction have no essential features that could be used to determine
whether they are, indeed, objects in the counterfactual situation. What
criterion would we be able to use to pick out a fictional character in a given
counterfactual situation?
Already in Naming
and Necessity, Kripke discusses unicorns and explains why it is that these
mythical creatures could not be discovered to exist (Kripke 1982, 24, 157-158).
There are component epistemological and metaphysical theses that are somewhat
connected. The epistemological thesis is that we would not be able to discover
unicorns existed, because the mythical unicorn has no microstructure (such as
DNA) which could be used to identify an actual creature as an instance of a
unicorn. The metaphysical thesis is that there are no possible circumstances
under which unicorns would have existed. The epistemological thesis depends on
the metaphysical thesis: without an essence, there are no actual beings
satisfying the description of a unicorn. Thus, without an essence, there is no metaphysics
of the unicorn, and so there is no criterion by which we could epistemically identify
a being as a unicorn. Further, there is no criterion by which we could say of a
being in a counterfactual situation that it is a unicorn.
Consider the fictional being Hamlet. Shakespeare is
merely pretending that the name “Hamlet” refers to a certain man and is pretending
that he possesses features, such as certain psychological traits. There are many
sentences in the play Hamlet that are
about the person named “Hamlet.” But none of these expresses a genuine
proposition, since it is metaphysically impossible to say under just what
counterfactual circumstances such propositions would be true. In which case, it
follows that we cannot say under what circumstances Hamlet would have existed.
If so, it is not the case that fictional entities are possible, but non-actual,
objects (since to be a possible object we must be able to say under what
circumstances it would have existed). What if we want to say something about
what happens in the play Hamlet? Do
we simply say that the ghost of his father appears at the beginning of the
play? Or is it that we can’t say any such thing, because we cannot express a
genuine proposition about the appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father? If we
say that Hamlet saw the ghost of his father, we must contextualize that
assertion to the fiction (or employ an operator “in the fiction”). That is, we
say that in the fiction it is true that Hamlet saw the ghost of his father. In
the fiction, Hamlet is an actual and not a fictional person. What if we want to
talk about the claims literary scholars have made about Hamlet? Kripke’s view
is that when we talk about fictional entities from outside the context of the
fiction in which they appear, fictional entities are abstract entities which
are not mere ghostly entities. They are full-bodied abstract objects, in the
same way that numbers (if such there be) are full-bodied abstract objects (Kripke
forthcoming 2012, 18 Lecture 3). We can say, from outside the play, that the
great scholar of Shakespeare, Gwynne Evans, considered Hamlet to be one of Shakespeare’s finest works. Moreover, it is
true that this is so. Abstract objects can play roles in propositions that
contribute to the truth-conditions of that proposition.
Kripke makes an analogy between fictional and real
objects, on the one hand, and real and toy ducks on the other:
One thing which I think has caused
confusion is the use of the word “real” here, where I contrast a fictional
person to a “real” person. If the fictional person isn’t “real,” then after all
there must be a weaker kind of existence involved. I don’t wish to make that
kind of use of the word “real,” or that kind of comparison, when I speak of
fictional characters. When I do this, a more appropriate comparison would be
with the contrast between “real duck” and “toy duck.” Of course, there are
differences as well as similarities. But just as a toy duck isn’t a real duck,
though of course that doesn’t mean that the toy duck doesn’t really exist, so I
want to say that a fictional person isn’t a “real” person, though that isn’t to
say that, in and of himself, he doesn’t really exist, or isn’t real, in the
sense of “doesn’t exist.” On the contrary, just as there can be real toy ducks
… so Hamlet is a real fictional character … (Kripke forthcoming 2012, 3 Lecture
2)
Fictional entities do not have a shadowy kind of
existence. However, ordinary language is ambiguous with respect to the divide
between real and fictional, and that creates problems, since we do not ordinarily
preface our remarks with a description of the context to which they apply. In
speaking of fictional entities it is easy to conflate one context with another.
When we speak of what happens in a fiction we implicitly employ an operator “in
the fiction” that we prefix to the sentence. Hamlet does not exist in the real
world, but exists in a fiction. However, the fictional character Hamlet exists
in the real world. It is false in the play Hamlet
that Hamlet is a fictional character. But it is true in the real world that
Hamlet is a fictional character. Notice that the truth-conditions of the
sentence “Hamlet is a fictional character” are different in different contexts.
It is false in one context (within the fiction), while it is true in another
context (outside the fiction).
An objection
There is an objection to the preceding account of
fictional entities and augmented reality. It is that actual agents can communicate with and learn from
fictional entities. For instance, you can learn the Pythagorean Theorem from a
fictional comic book character, Donald Duck. For another, if Donald Duck is in
your augmented reality and he appears to talk to you, he is talking to you. How could he not be talking to you?
Although this objection has intuitive force, it fails.
In the first place, fictional characters can make statements that are true, and
one can learn from these statements. If we know it is the intention of the
author of the fiction that her fictional characters utter actual world truths,
then we are rational to take their utterances to be true. On the other hand, if
we do not know the intentions of the author of the fiction, and do not
antecedently know that the utterances of fictional characters in the fiction
are true, we must independently confirm that they are true. In the second
place, although it appears that a fictional character is talking to you, unless
you know the intentions of the author of the fiction, you cannot assume it is
talking to you. If the intention of the author of the fiction is that the
fictional characters in it talk to a particular actual world person, then they
are talking to the actual world person. One might even have a fiction in which
the author allows for an actual world person to make responses to which a
fictional entity in the fiction responds. Or one might have a fiction where the
fictional characters address the reader of the fiction. But without knowing the
intentions of the author of the fiction, one cannot assume that a fictional
entity is talking to you, where it inhabits your augmented reality. There is
certainly no causal connection between you and the fictional entity, although
there might be a causal connection between you and a representation of that
fictional entity. Similarly, there is no causal connection between you and the
natural numbers, although there is a causal connection between you and a
representation of the natural numbers, viz., the numerals.
However, one might also object that even if there is
no communication between a fictional character and an actual person, it does
not matter if an actual person takes there to be communication between them and
fictional characters. I will argue in several sections below that doing this
can create serious problems which might jeopardize the life of the user of an
augmented reality. By the way, it might happen that an augmented reality
technology allows a user to create her own fictions within her head. In which
case, the user of the augmented reality is pretending that they are talking to
the fictions in their augmented reality. However, since the user is the author,
her intentions are transparent to her, and although her relations with her
fictions are based on pretense, she can arrange things so that the fictions
speak truths or speak to her.
Fictional entities in
augmented reality: the cross-barrier communication problem
Jaakko Hintikka has argued that Descartes’ cogito ergo
sum argument is fallacious, since there are instances of it in which the
premise is true, but the conclusion is false (Hintikka 1963). Hintikka chose as
a counterexample the following: It is true that Hamlet thinks, but false that
Hamlet exists. In which case, it is fallacious to infer that Hamlet exists from
the premise that Hamlet thinks. In his Locke lectures, Kripke points out that
Hintikka is incorrect, for he confuses the context in which we make a true
statement about what happens in the play Hamlet
with the context in which we, from the outside, talk about the play Hamlet (Kripke forthcoming 2012, 1-2 Lecture
3). From inside the fiction, it is both true that Hamlet thinks and that he
exists. Outside the play, it is false that Hamlet exists and false that Hamlet
thinks. Outside the play, it is true that the fictional character Hamlet
thinks, but it is equally true that the fictional character Hamlet exists.
Unless one’s claims about fictional entities are subscripted with the context
in which they are made, it is easy to make false claims about them.
If Shakespeare’s fictional character Hamlet appears as
a virtual fictional being in one’s total experiential field, even if it appears
to the user, phenomenologically, that Hamlet is speaking directly to him, it
cannot be that this is really happening. If Hamlet says that he wishes anyone
standing near him to leave the room, he is not talking to the user (even though
the user appears to be standing next to Hamlet and even if there is no other
being standing near Hamlet). There is a barrier to communication between the
user and a virtual fictional entity, even though when virtual fictional
entities appear in one’s total experiential field, there is no physical barrier
between them and the user of augmented reality technology. (In reading fiction,
seeing a fiction in a film, or in a stage performance, we know what the barrier
between real and fictional consists in.) It is a metaphysical impossibility for
a virtual fictional being to communicate with the user of an augmented reality technology,
even if, it appears, to the user, that communication is exactly what is
occurring to the user. Suppose that the virtual fictional being uses the name
of the user and says personal things about the user that only the user knows.
No communication has taken place, since the virtual fictional being is not
talking to the user.
Fictional beings in augmented
reality: the foolish inference problem
Suppose that there is a real geographical location
that a fictional character is described by its author as inhabiting. Let’s say
that the fictional character Hamlet lived in Denmark. If we do not pay
attention to the context in which a statement about a fictional character is
made, we can easily commit Hintikka’s mistake. For instance, we might say
Hamlet lived in Denmark and Hamlet appears in a play of Shakespeare, from which
it follows (by existential generalization) that someone who lives in Denmark appears
in a work of fiction (Kripke 1974, 224). It is true that in the fiction, Hamlet
lives in Denmark. But unless the context is specified, it leads to the silly
conclusion that there is someone living in
Foolish inferences can be combated by not conflating the
contexts in which they are made. In an augmented reality, though, I conjecture
that it might easily appear to the user that there is one uniform reality and
that the virtual fictional beings in it are just as real as the actual beings
in it.2 (Here there is the psychological problem of whether someone
who could not distinguish virtual fictional beings from real beings would be
said to suffer from some form of mental illness, such as having schizophrenic
hallucinations.)
Consider an augmented reality in which there are
multiple virtual beings, some of which are fictional, that function to help a
human who has a motor impairment walk safely in a crowded city. At some point all
of the beings will appear as real to the user as the actual beings in the real
world. Just as it is easy to become adjusted to inverting glasses, it might be
easy to become “adjusted” to virtual beings in one’s reality enhancement. The
user may easily become confused about the ontological status of the virtual
fictional beings. He might come to believe that they are in the actual world
and navigate accordingly. If so, he may well injure himself as a result of this
false belief. Are there any fallacious inferences (based on a conflation of
contexts) he might make that would jeopardize his safety? Even if he does not believe
that the virtual beings (fictional or otherwise) are a part of the actual
world, he might make many different kinds of fallacious inferences. For
instance, he might infer that a virtual fictional being has real money, since
it has a virtual wallet. Or he might infer that since the virtual being is
really a fictional being, he really exists, in just the same way that his
friend Harold exists. Or he might infer that the virtual beings have causal
relations with all of the other objects in his total experiential field, in
which case he must be careful that his actions do not have inappropriate causal
consequences. There are many silly inferences that one can make; the point is
that they can easily be made if contexts are ignored or conflated and there is
no way in which the context conflation can be checked. Suppose that the
deliverances of one’s inferences are given to cognitive or motor processes that
are below the level of consciousness. If so, there is ample room for actions
performed on the basis of the fallacious inferences that could jeopardize one’s
life in multiple ways.
Fictional entities in
augmented reality: the problem of authentic identification
Since a fictional being does not have a
microstructure, there are no essential properties of it that can be used in
determining under what conditions it would have existed. It follows that
propositions describing fictional beings are merely pretend propositions. This
creates a problem for the integration of virtual properties and real properties
in reality augmentations involving fictions quite different from the
integration problems we have already discussed. Suppose that an image of Hamlet
is now in your total experiential field, walking in unison with you as you walk
to the grocery store. You look at Hamlet as you walk and think that Hamlet
looks rather worried and tired. If you think that you are thinking about
Hamlet, though, you are dead wrong. You are not –
even though it appears to you that this is exactly what you are doing. You are
thinking about some image that bears a strong resemblance to what you think is
the way the fictional character Hamlet looks.3 But since there are
no identity conditions for the fictional character Hamlet, there is no way of
determining whether the Hamlet that appears in your total experiential field is
really Hamlet (unless it is the intention of the designer of the reality
augmentation that it is the fictional character Hamlet). Similarly, if you
encounter an animal that appears visually identical to a unicorn, you can’t say
that it is a unicorn, since there are no identity conditions for unicorns. Only
if you were, per impossible, to be in
the fiction (of either the play Hamlet
or the myth about unicorns) would you be able to tell if it was Hamlet or was a
unicorn. But that cannot happen – even if you
are the author of Hamlet or the
author of the unicorn myth (unless it is the actual play Hamlet or the actual unicorn myth). It is not that you are in the
play Hamlet when you are its author,
but rather that you create the pretense and so are in a position to say what is
and is not part of the pretense. However, if Shakespeare were transported to
the twenty-first century and given a reality augmentation in which Hamlet is a
fictional being appearing in his visual field –
but it is not the fiction Shakespeare created (his play Hamlet) – then Shakespeare would
not be able to say whether this fictional being appearing in his visual field
is Hamlet or not (unless he knows the intentions of the designer of the reality
augmentation).
This particular integration problem for fictional
entities appearing in augmented reality might strike one as having no unwelcome
consequences for any of the manifold uses of reality augmentations. That is,
the user is simply wrong about taking the virtual fictional being to be Hamlet
and “so what?” That is not true, though. One possible use of fictions in
reality augmentations would be to have the user experience what it is like to
be in a certain, say morally troubling, situation described in the fiction. One
of the ways in which fiction is important is in describing how characters
extricate themselves from difficult moral problems –
from which one can learn a great deal. One develops a moral sensitivity by
reading good fiction, such as the novels of Iris Murdoch. Suppose that future
technology has the means to project and integrate fictions from Iris Murdoch’s
novels into one’s total experiential field. The hope would be that the user
would be able to experience what it is like for the characters in her novels to
engage in various forms of human experience by interacting with them on an
individual basis. You interact with, say, Bradley Pearson, the protagonist of
Murdoch’s novel, The Black Prince.
(This might also be used as a form of therapy for psychopaths or education in
moral thinking for school children or for business executives.)
The experience would be different from simply watching
a film. The user will be integrated with the fictional landscape (just as the
fictional landscape will be integrated with the actual landscape in which the
user lives) and will experience it as though he were in it. Moral education
(indeed, any kind of education), though, will be problematic, at best, if the
user is unable to correctly identify and interact with the virtual fictional
beings that appear in his visual field. Suppose that Bradley Pearson appears in
one’s total experiential field. To the user, Pearson appears to be a real
person: he is visible, his speech can be heard, he can be touched by the user.
The authentic identification problem is two-fold. The first identification
problem is not unique to fictional virtual beings –
it involves any kind of virtual being, whether it is fictional or non-fictional.
The problem is that the user must be able to distinguish real objects in his
local environment from the virtual objects that appear in his total
experiential field. If he fails to make the proper distinctions, his life might
go quite badly.
The second identification problem is how virtual
fictional beings are distinguished from virtual beings that are not fictional. The
Bradley Pearson that appears in one’s total experiential field is a virtual
fictional being. Suppose another virtual being appears in one’s total
experiential field, but this being is not fictional. It might, for instance, be
a virtual object that looks like a human being but functions to transmit
information to the user. In that way, it is not a fictional being, since, it is
not in a fiction of any kind. Suppose it looks like Bradley Pearson (as he is
described by Iris Murdoch). If the user cannot distinguish the fictional
Bradley Pearson from the virtual object that looks like Bradley Pearson, he
will encounter serious problems in performing, among other things, everyday
activities. The fictional Bradley Pearson might say it is raining outside,
while the non-fictional Bradley Pearson might say it is not raining outside (if
his function is to inform the user of weather conditions). For any sentence
about one’s local environment, a fictional virtual being might say it has one
truth-value, while the non-fictional virtual being says it has the opposite
truth-value. Sometimes the two will agree in the truth-values they assign to
sentences. Where a user of augmented reality technology cannot distinguish
fictional virtual beings from non-fictional virtual beings, he might be wrong
about the truth-values of many sentences about the condition of his local
environment.
Fictional entities modeled on
real persons
A complication in the authentic identification problem
arises when fictional virtual beings are modeled on real persons. Suppose we
read a fictional story in which the central character is named “Bill Clinton.”
Suppose that in this story the character does some, but not all, of the things
that the actual Bill Clinton did, as well as having some, but not all, of the
physical and psychological characteristics of the actual Bill Clinton. Should
we say that the fictional
Which view is more natural: that there are two
entities or that there is just a single entity? What depends upon the answer we
provide will be both the kinds of dialogues we can carry out in augmented
reality between actual and fictional beings and the kinds of assertions actual
beings can make about fictional beings. If we take the one entity view, then
when we observe the virtual Bill Clinton, we can truthfully say that he looks
better as a virtual being than he now looks as an actual being.
Moreover, what we think we are seeing when we observe
Bill Clinton in our augmented reality landscape will depend upon which view we
adopt. If we take the one entity view, then when we see the virtual fictional Bill
Clinton talking with his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, we are
actually looking at Bill Clinton. Similarly, when we look at videotapes of
The question thus arises: when is there a need for a
one entity view and when is there a need for a two entities view? Notice that
if a two entities view is adopted, an extra referent for the name “Bill Clinton”
has been created. Is the need determined by the intentions of the creator of
the fiction? Or is it determined by the intentions (and perhaps other things) of
the users of the virtual fictional being? For instance, suppose that it has
been established that there is no actual person on whom James Bond is modeled.
What happens, then, if Smith, in whose total experiential field the virtual fictional
James Bond appears, decides that there is just one entity: the actual man who
is named “James Bond” and who lives down the street from him? Is this a
legitimate decision or can we fault it on the grounds that the James Bond who
lives down the street from Smith is not the fictional James Bond who figures in
his reality augmentation? Notice that if Smith adopts the one entity view, then
there is nothing to stop anyone else from doing the same in similar situations
involving the same or different fictional characters. In which case, there
would no longer be any difference between being right or being wrong about
fictional entities and their relation to actual entities, since any differences
between actual and fictional entities would evaporate. I take this to be a
powerful consideration against the view that we can simply decide whether we
want to adopt a one entity or two entities view.
Fictional entities modeled on
real persons: employing the two-entity view
Suppose that a virtual fictional entity is based on a
real person. One can easily imagine the usefulness of virtual characters who
resemble actual people who have close, if not intimate, relationships with the
user. Smith goes to a strange city for a job that will last several months,
while his spouse must remain in another part of the world during that period of
time. Smith is subject to depression whenever he has feelings of loneliness,
and is a devout man of faith who is, however, incapable of refusing the
attentions and attractions of another woman. The reality augmentation employed
would have an image of his wife in his visual field at all times while he was
awake.
It was earlier claimed that the one entity view is
more natural than the two entity view. On this view, it is natural for Smith to
say that he likes the way his wife is portrayed in the reality augmentation as
well as in real life. On this view it is not natural for him to say that he
does not like the reality augmentation wife, but he does like his real wife. However,
there are occasions on which a two entities view is more natural than a one
entity view. Certainly it is easy to imagine situations in which it is more
natural to create a fictional character than to say that there is just one
being, the actual person who is his wife. Obvious cases are where he encounters
his actual wife, in which case he does not want to conflate the virtual wife
with the actual wife. But there are other cases where a two entity view is more
natural than a one entity view, even where Smith does not encounter his actual
wife. Here is one such case: Smith witnesses his virtual wife sadistically
pummel a tough-looking virtual character. An augmented reality containing this
scenario is designed to discourage Smith from visiting a part of the
But this raises a problem: are there any general
principles by which it can be determined whether the one entity or the two
entity view is most natural? It would appear there are no such principles,
since it appears to be a contingent matter as to how someone will react to the
virtual characters populating their reality augmentation. It is, admittedly, a
complex contingent matter, since it partly depends upon the psychology of the
user and that psychology can either remain the same under the reality
augmentation or itself change under it in ways that are wholly unpredictable.
Levels of fiction and their
relation to reality
It is commonplace that there are fictions within a
fiction. In principle, there could be arbitrarily many levels of fiction within
a fiction. This creates new difficulties for the cross-barrier communication
problem, the foolish inference problem and the authentic identification
problem. With the introduction of new levels of fiction, there are more ways in
which contexts can be conflated and thus more ways in which the three problems
for augmented reality involving fictional entities are exacerbated. There are
numerous instances in fiction of a fiction within the fiction. One well-known
example is Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.
In it, a fictional play called “The Murder of Gonzago” is staged – thus there
is a play within the play. This raises various issues: Is there a fictional
character Gonzago? Can we say, in speaking about the play Hamlet, that there are in it the fictional characters Hamlet and
Gonzago? The answer is that we cannot. From outside the play, speaking about
what happens in it, it is true that there is no such fictional character as
Gonzago in the play. It is true that there is a fictional character Hamlet in
the play.
The reason why it is false to say there is a fictional
character named “Gonzago” in Hamlet, but
true to say that there is a fictional character named “Hamlet” in it, is that
Gonzago is a fictional fictional character and not a fictional character.
Suppose we wish to speak within the play – that is, we wish to make assertions
that have the truth-conditions of what is in the play. In which case, it is
true that there is a real person named “Hamlet,’ but false that there is a real
person named “Gonzago.” Rather, it is true that there is a fictional character
named “Gonzago.” Now suppose we wish to make assertions that have the
truth-conditions of “The Murder of Gonzago.” That is, we speak within the
fiction within the fiction. If we do this, then we would say that there is no
such fictional character as Gonzago. Rather, there is a real character Gonzago.
What about Hamlet from within the play within the
play? Can we say that there is a fictional character named “Hamlet” in the play
Hamlet? No, we cannot. The reason is
obvious: From within the play “The Murder of Gonzago” there is no such
fictional or real entity as Hamlet or even a play with the title “Hamlet.” From
within “The Murder of Gonzago” there is no such fictional character or real
person named “Hamlet.” Similarly, from within “The Murder of Gonzago,” there is
no such real person named “President Obama.” What we can legitimately say “within
the fiction within the fiction,” is a contested matter, since Shakespeare (in Hamlet) says almost nothing about what
happens in the play “The Murder of Gonzago.”
To make matters perspicuous, we contrast assertions
about Gonzago and about Hamlet that are each made within three different
contexts:
(i) In real life: It is true that there is
no such fictional character as Gonzago.
(ii) Inside the play: It is false that
there is no such fictional character as Gonzago.
(iii) Inside the play within the play: It
is true that there is no such fictional character as Gonzago.
The difference between (i) and (iii) is that even
though the assertion is true in both cases, it is true in (i) because Gonzago
is a fictional fictional character, while it is true in (iii) because Gonzago
is a real person. Now consider Hamlet:
(iv) In real life: It is true that there is
a fictional character Hamlet.
(v) Inside the play: (i) It is false that
there is a fictional character Hamlet. (ii) It is true that there is a real
person Hamlet.
(vi) Inside the play within the play: (i) It
is false that there is a fictional character Hamlet. (ii) It is false that
there is a real person Hamlet.
The difference between (v) and (vi) is that even
though the first assertion – (i) in each – is false, it is false in (v) because
Hamlet is a real person and it is false in (vi) because Hamlet is neither a
real person, a fictional character, nor an iteration-of-fictions character.4
It makes no sense, however, to speak of utterances
made within the play within the play, since in Hamlet the play within the play is only alluded to, but is not
actually made into a work of fiction. If Shakespeare had made it into a work of
fiction within Hamlet, then we might
be able to provide identity conditions for the characters and events that would
have occurred – had Shakespeare actually penned them – in “The Murder of
Gonzago.” But without being made into a work of fiction, we cannot do that and
so we cannot say, in either the context of reality or the context of within the
play anything about the character Gonzago other than that Gonzago is a
fictional character (in the context of Hamlet)
and a fictional fictional character (in the context of reality). There are
interesting cases in fiction of fictions within the fiction that are
substantial. For instance, in Fritz Lang’s film The Woman in the Window, the fiction within the fiction occupies
most of the film. Importantly, the character played by Edward G. Robinson is
the same in both the fiction and the fiction within the fiction. However, from
within the fiction within the fiction, one cannot say that it is true that that
character is a fiction. Rather, from inside the fiction within the fiction,
that character does not exist, in any iteration of levels of fiction. Rather,
one can only say within the fiction within the fiction that he is an actual
person.
The basic problem that the existence of different levels
of fiction creates for augmented reality is that unless the utterances made
within the reality part of augmented reality are subscripted, there is no way
of correctly determining whether they are true or false. This creates a
difficulty for any user of augmented reality technology whose augmented mental
life is replete with virtual fictional entities, each of which occupies some
level of fiction, though not the same level for each. Simply hearing words
uttered by these beings will not help in determining which level of reality
they occupy, and thus not help in determining the truth-conditions of those
utterances.
Images as representing information
and as representing fictional entities
Suppose a virtual fictional character, such as Mickey
Mouse, appears on your computer screen. Mickey announces to you the time of day
whenever you log on. It would be a mistake to say that the fictional character
Mickey Mouse is communicating with you. Rather, there is a virtual pictorial representation
of a fictional character on your screen and there are sounds that appear to
come from the mouth of that representation. These sounds convey information
about the actual world. They are not words in the fictional world of Mickey
Mouse, since the pictorial representation of Mickey Mouse is not intended to be
a piece of fiction. Rather, the spoken words and the picture are symbols that
are intended to convey information about the actual world. The image on the
computer screen is the pictorial representation of the fictional character
Mickey Mouse. Of course, it could also be the case that the virtual pictorial representation
of Mickey Mouse is intended to be the representation of the fictional Mickey
Mouse and that the utterances made are intended to be the fictional Mickey
telling, within the fictional world, a being outside that world what that being
wants to know about – the correct time of day in the actual world that being
inhabits. It can be part of a fiction that the characters in it acknowledge
they are fictions and that they acknowledge that they are talking to the reader
of the fiction. If that is so, then from the point of view within the fiction,
beings outside the fiction who are reading the fiction are fictional fictional
characters (because Mickey takes himself to be a fictional character in the
fiction).5 The existence of an “outside world” is just a fiction
within the fiction. The owner of the computer who hears the correct time
uttered by Mickey Mouse, is a fiction from the point of view of the fiction. But
this will be so only if it is the intention of the designer of the virtual pictorial
representation of Mickey Mouse for the computer that she pretend that Mickey
Mouse is pretending to provide the time for a fictional character who needs, in
his fictional world, to know the time that is, within that fictional world, the
correct time.
What shall we take it to be, when we confront a
virtual pictorial representation of Mickey Mouse on our computer screen? Just
as important, does it matter, in any way, what we take it to be? Is it a
virtual fictional Mickey engaged in a fiction or is it a virtual non-fictional Mickey
that conveys information about the actual world? If the virtual fictional
Mickey appears in Smith’s augmented reality, is it essential that Smith be able
to tell that Mickey is fictional and not non-fictional? If Smith cannot make
the distinction, then he will succumb to any of the three problems for
augmented reality involving fictional entities. Where the correct answer to the
question of whether a virtual being is either fictional or non-fictional
depends on the intentions of the designer of the augmented reality technology,
there may be no determinate answer, since the intentions of the designer might
themselves be indeterminate. (That one’s intentions – with respect to what one
means by the words one uses – might be indeterminate is argued in Kripke 1982.)
Virtual pictorial beings
without designers in augmented reality
Suppose that the virtual pictorial non-fictional beings
inhabiting someone’s augmented reality are randomly chosen from a catalog by a
computer program whose designer intends only that the subroutine that chooses them
from a catalog does so randomly. The subroutine that creates the virtual
pictorial non-fictional beings has no designer intentions. There is
sophisticated software that enables the virtual pictorial non-fictional beings to
mesh with the visual features in one’s visual field in such a way that the
being does not replace a visual feature that is important for navigating one’s
way in the actual world without injury or without losing or compromising
important information necessary for one’s projects.
There is also no intention on the part of the designer
that the virtual pictorial non-fictional beings be anything more than that – there
is no intention that they are fictional characters and that their activities
are a pretense that is part of a fictional world. If so, human verbal
interactions with virtual pictorial non-fictional beings are just like human
interactions with a clock or with an electronic audio recorder. We see the time
the clock registers and do not take the registered time to be part of a
fictional world.6 We hear sounds coming from the electronic audio
recorder and, unless we know that the sounds are from a fiction, such as actors
speaking as they play fictional characters, we do not take them to be
utterances of fictional characters, but do take them to be utterances of actual
people.
Interactions with virtual pictorial non-fictional
beings that inhabit the landscape of our augmented reality are like
interactions with real things in the real world. The software that manipulates
the position of such beings in order to either prevent an accident (such as
when they mask a large rock on the pavement that we might trip over as we walk)
or to accommodate our plans and projects does not perform the manipulations as
part of a pretense. Rather, the software receives information about the actual
world and makes adjustments in the activities of the beings on the basis of
that information. Once again, how would we tell when a virtual pictorial being
is non-fictional and without a designer rather than a virtual pictorial
fictional being or a virtual pictorial non-fictional being with a designer? If
a user of augmented reality cannot make these distinctions, then he will succumb
to the three problems of augmented reality involving fictional entities and to
an additional problem. If the user thinks that the virtual pictorial being is
in his total experiential field owing to designer intentions, then he might
falsely infer that there is a purpose for the being, falsely infer a purpose,
and then act as though that purpose is fact.
Computational simulation of
human intelligence and fictional entities
Suppose that the software technology capable of
achieving augmented reality with fictional entities can simulate human
intelligence. However, if it is the case that a human user of this technology
will make fallacious inferences if he is not able to distinguish between fictional
and real beings with respect to their utterances, or is not able to distinguish
between fictional and real beings with respect to their properties (such as
height, weight, etc.), then that technology will not be capable of providing a
safe environment for the user, even if it is sophisticated enough to
computationally simulate human intelligence. If we do not know the intentions
of the designer of the technology with respect to the ontological status of the
fictional beings that occur within augmented reality, then we will not know
whether we are correctly reasoning about them. There are various possibilities
for error: we take virtual pictorial beings to be fictions, while it is the
intentions of the designer that they are non-fictional. If so, we reason
incorrectly about them. Or we take them to be non-fictional, while it is the
intentions of the designer for them to be fictions. If so, we reason
incorrectly about them.
The intentions of a designer of the technology
necessary for achieving augmented reality might be wholly indeterminate. Or it
might be a matter of fact what they are, but we do not have access to those
facts. In either case, if we do not know the intentions of the designer, then
we will not know whether the virtual pictorial beings are non-fictional and
whose utterances convey information about the actual word or are fictional
entities and whose utterances are pretenses that are part of a fictional world
it was the intention of the designer to create. Ordinarily, we would not worry
about this kind of skeptical problem. However, where the virtual pictorial
beings are part of augmented reality, it will matter, since we are using the
information conveyed in their utterances to successfully navigate in the actual
world.7
Facts, fictions and forecasts
Facts within a fiction can be fictions outside the
fiction, though this is not necessarily so. Consider a science-fiction story
written in 2011 in which a scientist in the year 2421 creates a time travel machine
called “The Slingshot.” Within the fiction, it is a fact that “The Slingshot”
was created in 2421. Outside the fiction, it is a fiction that “The Slingshot”
was created in 2421. Outside the fiction, we can say that inside the fiction
the real entity “The Slingshot” was created in 2421. We can also say, outside
the fiction, that the fictional entity “The Slingshot” was created by its
author in 2011. Whether something is a fact or a fiction depends upon the
context in which the assertions are made. Indeed, predicates are also
context-sensitive. Kripke’s example of a contextualized predicate is “created”
(Kripke forthcoming 2012, 7-8 Lecture 4). In saying that Frankenstein’s
monster was created whenever the novel says that Frankenstein created it, the
predicate “created” is relativized to the context “fictionally.” However, in
saying that Frankenstein’s monster was created in 1818, the predicate “created”
is relativized to outside the novel (Kripke 2011; Kripke uses the phrase
“out-and-out” for the context in which attributions about what happens inside a
fiction are made outside the fiction). What is a fact within the fiction is a
fiction outside the fiction. However, whether something is a fact or a fiction
will depend upon a context. That this is so creates problems for making factual
assertions in augmented reality.
Suppose that information needs to be communicated
within different parts of an augmented reality in which some parts are real and
some parts are fictional. We can easily distinguish between the fiction we see
in a film or read in a book from the surrounding reality. When, however, the
real and the fictional form an integrated total experiential field, there may
be no means of correctly identifying the contexts of parts of it. That is, it
might be infeasible to correctly identify fictional and real beings and thus,
to identify utterances within a fiction and utterances within reality. If a
fictional entity utters a sentence that is heard by a real entity, then whether
it is communicated to the real entity and whether it is true or false will
depend upon the context. However, if no context can be specified, it will be
impossible to determine whether it is true or false and whether it is
communicated to a real entity. (For the most part, specification of a context
in asserting facts is not necessary where there is a single reality.) Suppose
that the information which is communicated is the birth date of Frankenstein’s
monster. Whether it is a fact or a falsehood (that is, a fiction) will depend
upon the context in which it is asserted. But if the context is left
unspecified, there is no transmission of information, since the assertion might
be true or it might be false. Since we have no more reason to think it is true
than we have to think it is false, we are maximally ignorant as to its truth-value
and thus have not acquired any information. It is not an assertion on which we
can act, make a decision, or solve a problem.8
However, care must be employed in describing the
context, since a true assertion made within a fiction is taken to be actual
within it. Thus within a fiction the context is that of actuality: the actuality
from within the fiction. If the utterances of fictional beings in augmented
reality are indexed by “actuality,” those indices must be changed when the
utterance is heard by a real being – such as the user of augmented reality
technology. The problem, though, is that it is only the utterances of fictional
beings that require this procedure. It is not required when the virtual
pictorial being is non-fictional and is used to convey information to the user.
Thus it must be transparent when a communication comes from a fictional entity
and when it comes from either a virtual pictorial non-fictional entity or an
actual entity. If Smith hears a message from his wife that she is ready to
leave for the movies, that information does not require redescribing the
context. But if a virtual pictorial fictional entity says that she is ready to
leave for the movies, that information does require redescribing the context.
However, there may be circumstances under which it is difficult to determine
whether information is transmitted from an actual or from a fictional entity,
since the simulation of the actual entity within the fiction is so authentic
that the user is fooled into thinking it is real.9
If we use information acquired in augmented reality to
make forecasts, we had better be ready to make mistakes, since there may be
circumstances under which we will not be able to distinguish between virtual
fictional beings, virtual non-fictional beings and real beings. We could have a
false belief in various ways. One way is to not be able to distinguish the
three kinds of beings. Another way is to think (falsely) that a fictional being
can communicate information to oneself – the user of augmented reality. A third
way is to have a false philosophical theory of fictional entities. In all three
cases, the upshot is that the user will have false beliefs and these false
beliefs will result in using information in ways that will jeopardize his well-being.
Worse yet, where virtual fictional, virtual non-fictional and real entities are
observationally indistinguishable within the framework of the total
experiential field of the user of augmented reality, the user of augmented
reality technology cannot tell the entities apart by merely looking. In that
case, natural predicates and fictional predicates might be entrenched in the same
way in the belief formation mechanism of the user. If so, the user will form
bizarre hybrid inferences, such as statistical generalizations that combine
natural and fictional predicates. Forecasts based on such hybrid statistical
generalizations will combine fictional and factual without distinguishing
between them. Beliefs about the world will be fixed where the evidence might be
purely fictional and beliefs about fictions (where a user has such beliefs)
might be fixed by facts (of the real world). Where forecasts are based on a
fusion of facts and fictions (that is, facts within the fiction), disaster may
follow the user.
Hybrid inferences might, though, suppress the
entrenchment of grue and grue-like predicates. Goodman (1983) defined
disjunctive grue and grue-like predicates, but we can also define conjunctive grue
and grue-like predicates. Grue, defined conjunctively, is: an object is grue if
and only if it is green when observed by at least one person and blue when it
is not observed by any person.10 Imagine fictions in which there are
always fictional observers making observations. If so, then perhaps we do not
have to worry that it will ever be the case that any objects that are green
when observed will turn blue when unobserved. Since a part of ourselves – though
fictional, and assuming we are persons – is making an observation, we are
making the observation. Defeating grue by fiction? That is stranger than
fiction. Such oddities are part and parcel of what might be in store for us
when augmented reality involving virtual fictional and non-fictional beings
becomes technologically feasible.
Notes
1. Given various definitions of health, what is an
enhancement on one definition is a treatment on another. This opens up the
possibility of creating pairs of cases that reverse when definitions of health
are changed. On one definition of health (say that proposed by Normal Daniels),
what is (unfairly) an enhancement for A is treatment for B and what is
treatment for C is also treatment for D. Adopting a different definition of
health, what is treatment for B is also treatment for A, but what is treatment
for D is (unfairly) an enhancement for C. I explore the ways in which
definitions of health determine how we draw the treatment-enhancement distinction
in a forthcoming paper.
2. If someone – a real person – dresses up as Hamlet,
that is obviously different from the fictional character Hamlet appearing in
one’s visual field. It is a real person who adopts a disguise or costume that
is modeled on the fiction.
3. Of course, you could be thinking both about the
image of Hamlet and also about the
fictional character Hamlet, but in that case, you would be thinking about two
different things, and not just about one thing.
4. Inside the play “The Murder of Gonzago,” there is no such entity named “ Hamlet.” Thus
there are no statements inside the play about which one can say they are true
or false. This raises the issue of existential presuppositions in the
ascription of truth-values to statements about objects that do not exist, but
the issue – that a statement uttered within “The Murder of Gonzago” might have
no truth-value or a truth-value other than true or false – can be side-stepped
here without affecting the main points about levels of fiction.
5. Where part of the pretense within a fiction is that
the fiction is itself a fiction, new complexities arise. The complexity of
embeddings of pretense fictions within a fiction could make it extraordinarily
difficult to assign levels of fiction indices to parts of one’s total
experiential field.
6. That is not to say that we could not imagine – or
pretend – that it is part of a fictional world. Another kind of interaction we
might have with entities in our total experiential field is that we pretend
that they are fictions, even though they are not. That is, we can take our
interactions with them to be a pretense. Needless to say, this kind of
interaction introduces enormous difficulties for the task of assigning levels
of fiction indices to parts of one’s total experiential field.
7. Suppose that – given software sophisticated enough
to do this – the fictional entities occupying part of your total experiential
field create new fictional entities. This is, of course, reminiscent of “The
Murder of Gonzago.” Whose intentions do we use to determine whether the new
entities we experience are indeed fictional?
8. This difficulty can also be considered a form of
skepticism, since in cases where we cannot know the truth-value of our
knowledge-claims, we cannot have knowledge.
9. This is a form of skepticism. It might be blocked
by arguing that fictional entities are no less real than real entities, since
all are computations and so all are equally real. Recently, David Chalmers has
argued that the true metaphysics of the world might be computations and thus
such a fact about the world would undercut brain-in-a-vat skepticism (in his
paper “The Matrix as Metaphysics,” available on his webpage). The idea is that
all of the images of the world that are fed into the brain-in-the-vat by evil
vat scientists are computations and thus real. Similarly, it might be argued
that all of the virtual fictional entities in augmented reality are just as
real as the virtual non-fictional entities and the real entities. There are
several ways in which it can be argued that the metaphysics of the world is
computations. In a forthcoming paper I argue that Chalmers’ argument for the
computational nature of reality (i) would imply that there is a collapse of the
hierarchical type structure of intensional objects into a single level and (ii)
is in direct conflict with Kripke’s
views on fictional entities and the logic of non-existence.
10. The conjunctive definition of grue is my own
invention. Goodman does not define grue conjunctively and has, though not in
print, disavowed any interpretation of grue that takes the grue problem to be a
form of skepticism. Obviously, the conjunctive interpretation of grue offered
in the text is a form of skepticism in addition to its role in revealing an
infirmity in confirmation theory.
References
Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. The field of consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Goodman, Nelson. 1983. Fact, fiction, and forecast. 4th ed. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1963. Cogito, ergo sum as an inference
and a performance. Philosophical Review
Volume LXXII, Number 4: 487-96.
Kripke, Saul. 1974. Reply to David Kaplan. Unpublished
manuscript.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kripke, Saul. 1982. Wittgenstein on rules and private language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Kripke, Saul. 2011. Vacuous names and fictional entities, in Philosophical troubles:
Collected works. Volume 1. 52-74.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Kripke, Saul. Forthcoming 2012. Reference and existence: The 1973
John Locke Lectures. Collected Works, Volume 2. Oxford University Press.