Interaction with the Virtual: Rather Unreal
…our most fundamental concepts - time, event, causation, the mind, the self, and morality - are multiply metaphorical…if one somehow managed to eliminate metaphorical thought, the remaining skeletal concepts would be so impoverished that none of us could do ay substantial everyday reasoning. Eliminiaintg metaphor would eliminate philosophy. Without a very large range of conceptual metaphors, philosophy could not get off the ground. The metaphoric character of philosophy is not unique to philosophic thought. It is true of all abstract human thought, especially science. Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possile. Not only can it not be avoided, but it is not something to be lamented. On the contrary, it is the very means by which we are ale to make sense of our experience. Conceptual metaphor is one of the greatest of our intellectual gifts. [Phil. In the flesh, 128-129]
…when we are in the real world, not just as minds but as embodied vulnerable human beings, we must constantly be ready for dangerous surprises. Perhaps, when this sense of vulnerability is absent, our whole experience is sensed as unreal, even if, involved in a sort of super-Imax interactive display, we are swaying back and forth as our car careens around dangerous-looking curves…[Merleau-Ponty] holds that there is a basic need we can never banish as long as we have bodies. It is the need to get what Merleau-Ponty calls an optimal grip on the world. When grasping something, we tend to grab it in such a way as to get the best grip on it. Merleau-Ponty points out that, in general, when we are looking at something, we tend, without thinking about it, to find the best distance for taking in both the thing as a whole and its different parts. Merleau-Ponty says: 54 On the Internet For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen: . . . at a shorter or greater distance we have a perception blurred through excess or deficiency. We therefore tend towards the maximum of visibility, and seek a better focus as with a microscope.11 According to Merleau-Ponty, it is the body that seeks this optimum: My body is geared into the world when my perception presents me with a spectacle as varied and as clearly articulated as possible, and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they expect from the world. This maximum sharpness of perception and action points clearly to a perceptual ground, a basis of my life, a general setting in which my body can co-exist with the world.12 So, perception is motivated by the indeterminacy of experience and our perceptual skills serve to make determinable objects sufficiently determinate for us to get an optimal grip on them. Moreover, we wouldn’t want to evolve beyond the tendency of our bodies to move so as to get a grip on the world since this tendency is what leads us to organize our experience into the experience of stable objects in the first place. Without our constant sense of the uncertainty and instability of our world and our constant moving to overcome it, we would have no stable world at all.13 Not only is each of us an active body coping with things, but, as embodied, we each experience a constant readiness to cope with things in general that goes beyond our readiness to cope with any specific thing. Merleau-Ponty calls this embodied readiness our Urdoxa14 or “primordial belief” in 55 Disembodied telepresence the reality of the world. It is what gives us our sense of the direct presence of things. So, for there to be a sense of presence in telepresence, one would not only have to be able to get a grip on things at a distance; one would need to have a sense of the context as soliciting a constant readiness to get a grip on whatever comes along. This sense of being embedded in a world with which we are set to cope is easiest to see if we contrast our experience of the direct presence of other people with telepresence such as teleconferencing. Researchers developing devices for providing telepresence hope to achieve a greater and greater sense of actually being in the presence of distant people and events by introducing high-resolution television and surround sound, and by adding touch and smell channels. Scientists agree that “full telepresence requires a transparent display system, high resolution image and wide field of view, a multiplicity of feedback channels (visual as well as aural and tactile information, and even environmental data such as moisture level and air temperature), and a consistency of information between these”.15 They assume that the more such multi-channel, realtime, interactive coupling teletechnology gives us, the more we will have a sense of the full presence of distant objects and people. But even such a multi-channel approach may not be suf- ficient. Two roboticists at Berkeley, John Canny and Eric Paulos, criticize the attempt to break down human–human interaction into a set of context-independent communication channels such as video, audio, haptics, etc. They point out that two human beings conversing face to face depend on a subtle combination of eye movements, head motion, gesture, and posture and so interact in a much richer way than most roboticists realize.16 Their studies suggest that a holistic sense 56 On the Internet of embodied interaction may well be crucial to everyday human encounters, and that this intercorporiality, as MerleauPonty calls it, cannot be captured by adding together 3D images, stereo sound, remote robot control, and so forth. [Dreyfus, 54-57]