BACKGROUND:

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How do you know what is real and what is not real? Why is it that you are so sure that the
computer screen you are reading these words from exists in our shared reality, and is not
some kind of advanced hallucination? The answer to these questions is unclear, but perhaps
the broadest response would be to say that you immediately ‘feel as if’ this object exists in
shared reality. The philosopher Jerome Dokic describes this phenomenon as the ‘sense of
acquaintance’ - the sense that you have some kind of unmitigated access to the object in
front of you, which allows you to reasonably conclude that sed object exists and is not some
kind of hologram or hallucination.

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Similarly, Descartes might tell you that the sense of touch is the real determinant to tell
whether an object truly exists. Just seeing an object is not enough to fully verify its existence;
our vision is constantly tricked by both internally and externally generated hallucinations. It is when we touch something, he says, that we can be sure of that thing's reality.

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But what if we reach out to touch and object, but that object does not feel the way it should? For example, if you reached out to pet the fur of a particularly cute kitten and were met with a sticky, jelly-like consistency, would you still be able to verify that this object exists despite its incongruent sensory signals? You are still touching an object, which Descartes asserts should verify its reality, but does the ‘feeling’ of its existence still remain?

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I aim to identify exactly what causes objects to feel ‘real’, both in regard to how we are able to interact with objects and the properties of the objects themselves. We are hoping that the results of these studies will have widespread implications in discussions of the philosophy of felt reality as well as helping to create more realistic virtual environments.

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METHODOLOGY:

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We plan to use VR in combination with haptic technology to determine whether aberrant
multisensory signals alongside the permitted actions of participants cause differential effects on the sense that an object exists. Further work would incorporate Ultrahaptic technology to create haptic feelings that are either congruent or incongruent with visual feedback.

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FUTURE WORK: 

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The next obvious step for this research would be to determine how our sense of the reality of objects around us causes the sensation of our phenomenal realities often discussed in
philosophy. I.e is the sense that objects are real directly connected to the sense of reality
that is altered in cases such as hallucination, depersonalization and derealization? Are the
mechanisms for this primarily predictive, as theorised by Anil Seth, or are they more
metacognition-based as theorised by Jerome Dokic and Remy Martin?

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