Orders Of Reality, Continued

expanding on an earlier post

My take on Reality is that it’s ordered: internal reality (mental Set, which is itself a sort of Setting, with mutable features) that registers input from the body, including the mental inventory of memory processing, emotional tone, etc.; external reality input (i.e., what’s often referred to as Setting--the interface of sensory perception, which is around 70% devoted to the visual faculty, but which also includes the other four senses, and also conditions like heat and cold perception that are typically dependent on external input); and social Setting, input processed from immediate proximity to other beings, humans typically assuming the most importance.

That’s all 1st order reality. Defined by its immediacy. Like https://etymologyworld.com/item/immediacy says: “Direct, happening or existing without any intervening time, space, or person.”

After that, it gets trickier.

Imagine two humans with roughly normal sensory perceptions together in the same space. Is there significant difference of perspective, simply on account of the parallax effect? Of course. Always. We don’t adopt each others 1st person perspective; “seeing through each others eyes” is not literal truth, at least not in the narrow neuroscience sense of the phrase. Despite the fact that humans are foreclosed to having that ability, as a rule both humans have a shared sense of space. That level of overlap of perceptions and attention is superimposed on the 1st person baseline of experience.

A phone call or a Facetime call to another human is technically mediated--indirect, remote by definition--but the immediacy of communication with another conscious being that’s a common feature of 1st order social Setting reality is typically present. Print media interactivity can facilitate person-to-person social communication with other humans, but not immediacy. Some pre-existing level of friendship and familiarity have to be present in order for such communications to approximate the intimacy of a conversation with someone sharing the same Setting in physical space. (Which is what makes interactions like making and maintaining online acquaintance so tricky. Particularly one that involves extra investment, like courtship.)

With the recent development of chatbots and AI, the social Setting of real-time camaraderie is entirely absent, replaced by an illusion. You can cuss a chatbot out, and it won’t care. A chatbot--or an online stranger--can cuss you out, and if you’re upset by it, that reaction is the result of being sent up by an illusion.

This is why I’ve never understood people getting upset by personal insults directed at them in social media posts by complete strangers online. To me, it’s like someone telling me I have two noses. Like, whoa, sick burn, anonymous person/bot entity who has never seen me and knows nothing about me. I’m able to comprehend the high quotient of illusion in the interaction.

But many people apparently don’t. Indicating that they’ve to some degree assented to treating an indirect, mediated, remote illusion as if it possessed the same importance as experiencing direct, unmediated, immediate reality.

We humans tend to be even more vulnerable to the suggestions provided by visual media. Some millions of years of evolution went into crafting us as a primate mammal species with front-facing eyes, binocular vision, and a perceptual faculty that’s around 70% devoted to making coherent signal out of our visual input. And then the first photographic images show up, less than 200 years ago. The first images that reliably reproduce visual settings with realistic verisimilitude--as a gestalt, generated pretty much instantly. A photograph being the artifact of a technological advance.

That’s a long way from the caves of Altamira. It’s even a long way from naturalistic realism in oil painting. Paintings are as a rule readily recognized as artistic works of imagination. (Trompe’l’oeil technique being a specialized niche exception to that rule- an intriguing emphasis, but also an unusual one.)

The advent of camera photography--with its implicit a priori assumption of providing a “realistic reproduction” of a visual setting--also allowed for more convincing fakery. A quantum leap in the ability to convincingly counterfeit currency, for example. But also an opportunity to create even more subtle and fantastical examples of visual trickery, such as the retouched photographs that convinced some people of the physical existence of fairy beings. Even educated, accomplished, civilized Englishmen like Arthur Conan Doyle.

But that was nothing, compared to the capability to produce illusions that is generated by a series of photographs arranged in series as frames to provide the illusion known as Motion Pictures.

So it isn’t really accurate so speak of visual media like photographs, cinema, video, CGI, and I-Max in terms of being “more direct depictions.” They’re depictions that product a result that’s perceived as being relatively “less indirect”. But never “direct.” Never 1st order reality. Always remote. Inherently mediated. The difference between being absorbed by the movie playing on your computer screen and realizing that, bottom line, you’re just looking at a flat piece of plastic or glass with pixels arranged on it. As a “display.”

Humans aren’t naturally equipped to distance themselves from their visual input. I can attest from my own experience that I get a visceral reaction from watching a film scene depicting a knife fight. We’re naturally inclined to grant credence to what we’re seeing as conveying direct unmediated perceptual Truth. It isn’t. It’s just a bunch of pixels, or still frames run very fast in an orderly series through a projection device.

We humans are now at a point where we can no longer afford an the naive suggestibility and gullibility of taking mediated illusions uncritically--or with insufficient critical rigor--as if they possess the same fidelity and significance as the unmediated external Settings of 1st order experienced Reality. Technological advances in media have made it all too easy to craft externalized illusions--or even to compose them practically on command--and then, when witnessing the results, to forget their essentially phantasmal character. And also to forget their actual source--their internal generation and composition, by the mind. Imagination. Fantasy, exteriorized.

It’s enough to drive anybody crazy unless they’ve developed a cognitive immune system to override all those millions of years of awareness processing as a primate species taking the world almost entirely at face value. Developing that immune system is an achievement, requiring a learning effort. It involves strengthening that extra gear of metacognition that accounts for the reflective self-aware consciousness unique to humans, and applying that capacity to a relatively new and unfamiliar purpose. But it has to be done. AI-generated media input- inherently illusory, limitlessly plastic and elastic, programmed for allignment with human suggestibility- is bound to increase.

Murphy’s Law of Manipulation: if a trick can be tried, it will be. Mediated input isn’t trustworthy, the way first-order reality is. Even the first-order reality of feeling ones way though a room in the dark is more trustworthy.

My earlier post on this- topic, phenomenon, whatever- is here