Here you will find a summary of my DNL philosophy class in english related to our representation of the reality and its complexity.
Russell and Descartes: why do we believe that the reality is the reality ?
There is an evidence for every one who is not a philosopher: we are living in the reality. We are not dreaming, we are not locked into a machine. The taste and smell of coffee is related to a real cup of coffe put on this real table in front of me. And if someone disagrees, we should bring him to a psychiatrist !
During the 17th century, the french philosopher, René Descartes, demonstrated that actually our relation with the reality is not that simple. In his “Metaphysical Meditations”, its greatest book, Descartes showed that the only thing I can be sure about, is that here and now I am thinking. I think, I feel, I taste, I see. This is for sure. But the fact that a reality effectively correspond to this experience is not evident at all. Actually, it is doubtfull !
As Russell says, repeating the conclusions of Descartes, “no logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy.”
To demonstrate that, we just have to think about our dreams: everynight, we think, feel, see sometimes even taste, and think that this experience is real… but we are just dreaming. It prooves that the intensity and clarity of my experience is no evidence of it realness.
If it was, the Wachowsky Brothers couldn’t have imagined their fiction of a Matrix, where Néo discovers that all is “real” experience is just a very long and complex dream that is generated by a machine.
Well… no, not exactly. Russell says “although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us.”
We cannot demonstrate that the reality is real. But… it is our best guess. Why do you know that dreams are not true ? Because you wake up ! You have many reasons to assert that dreams are not real. But when we analyse our experience of the reality, we have no reason to put it in doubts.
And the people who do that, (for example schizophrenic people) are doing that because they experience data (they ear voices, see reality distorsions) that leads them to put in question the realness of the reality. And the psychiatrists function is to help them understand that their perceptions are brain hallucinations and should be treated as anomalies, not as sense-data.
Ok, so many words to says that the reality is the reality ? Why is this interrogation so usefull ? To understand it, let’s consider the psychological process implied in cults.
Anil Seth: our brain hallucinates our conscious reality
Anil Seth uses a metaphor to describe our consciousness: he calls it an “inner movie”. A movie is a stream of images generated by a film maker, a director ! It is something that is created by a mind. It means that consciousness is not just a mere miror of the reality.
Sensations are the immediate feeling of taste, sounds, lights, smells, skin sensibility. They don’t have any shape. They are immediate, vivid, not connected. It is a flux with no order, a “stream”, a multitude of little informations.
The perception is the result of a process, a process through which our brain synthesizes this flux information and identify objects. This is why Anil Seth says a perception is “our best guess”.
“perception, figuring out what’s there, has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines the sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is, to form its best guess of what caused those signals”.
To be even more explicit:
“we don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it”.
Yuval Noah Harari: our fictional relation to the reality
This author emphasizes the importance of the cognitive revolution. We, humans, are different from the other animals because we developed langage. Through langage the human consciousness has been able to go beyond the immediate boundaries of the natural life.
Our relation to the reality is wider : we can speak and think about the past and the future. We are not stuck in the present anymore
Our relation to the reality is more complex: we conceptualize it. Our words are concepts with wich we are able to build a complex understanding of the reality
Our relation to the reality is imaginative : our concepts are the fruit of our imagination, so that we can say that our world is a fictional representation.
Does it mean that I can see the world as I want ? Is the reality only a subjective and personal imagination ? No, it is not that simple. When a baby is born, she will be raised in a certain society with its special beliefs and representations of the reality. The baby, growing and becoming a child, will integrate little by little the social representations of his social group.
As a consequence, the individuals do not know that the concepts through which they see the reality are fictional. They strongly believe, at the contrary, that they are the true meaning of the reality.
Yes, humans are believers. But we cannot be satisfied with the idea that the whole human representation of the reality is fictional. Our humanity has created procedures to test our ideas and concepts and check if they do correspond to the reality. We tried to formulate methods to do so: the scientific method. Thanks to this method we can differentiate, between our concepts, which are mere fictions, which are valid representations of the reality
The social dilemma
Harari explained to us that since the beginning of humanity, our representation of the reality is a social construction. This construction implies humans (old) speaking and teaching to other humans (young) through social interactions (family, schools, universities, etc…). But a new interaction aroused 15 years ago: social medias based on the internet infrastructure.
Hence our smartphones are a “window” opened to the reality that played an increasingly important role. We are engaged in brand new activities: we “scroll”, “forward”, “like”, “spoil”, “troll” etc…
This documentary exposes the important consequences on our relation to the reality.
Between us, and the reality, there are networks, such as “facebook”, “Instagram”, “google”, etc. And while we use those devices, these networks are gathering datas about us. Firstly, those datas were sold to companies. It is not anymore the case. Now they are gathered and processed by those companies so that they can predict and influence our vision of the reality and our behavior. In the word of Harari, they have a huge power to influence and ultimately shape our “fictional relation to the reality”.
1) the first one is attention: the social network are able to create an attraction and to point images and messages to the consumers. The social networks are competing for our attention. Their goal is to keep us engaged on the screen. The advertisers pay for our attention.
2) the second one is data: the social netword is able to gather and analyse an always increasing amount of informations about the consumer. Every single action we take on the internet is a data. We are placed under a constant surveillance of our attention, our state of mind, our psychological profile, our social links, our desires. Surveillance capitalism.
3) the third one is prediction: They try to predict our attention, behavior, perception. New marketplace that trades in human futures. It is the biggest market in the history of humanity. It is about using the data to build models to predict our actions. Who has the best model wins. We have now an “avatar vodoo doll”, a model of ourselves that helps to predict what we are going to do.
4) the last one is influence: they try to guide the attention, behavior, perception of the users. The slight change in our perception and behavior is the final product. It is a gradual change, slight, but finally very powerful. Here the “avatar voodoo doll” is finally supposed to take the control or at least influence our real self.
the social networks
Are supposed to be | Are effectively |
– places of freedom – places of privacy – places where you can express and explore your idiosyncrasy = a place where a human being is a free person | – places of “reverse engineering”. – places under surveillance – places where you are inconsciously submitted to “massive scale contagious experiment” = a place where a human being is a product. |