The Cognitive Neuroscientific Approach
The illusion of virtual reality—the creation of an extended simulation that implies real ontology—has thus far relied almost exclusively on vision and secondarily on hearing. This makes some immediate sense. As the next section will outline in brief, vision has long been tied almost without fail to cognition, suggesting by way of distance both objectivity and ontological undecidability (from classical philosophy to the stalwarts of 20th century analytic philosophy like Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein and the logical-positivists). Taste, especially, and touch secondarily have long been derided for their reliance upon proximity, negating the chance for transcendental truth. As Alberto Gallace and Charles Spence detail in In Touch with the Future: The Sense of Touch from Cognitive Neuroscience to Virtual Reality (which will form the backbone of this analysis because of its ease of use and collation of much of the literature on the subject), however, touch intuitively guarantees the real. Gallace and Spence refer to St. Thomas probing a wound in Christ’s resurrected body in order to ensure his identity (4). Moreover, the sense of touch, which is “likely the first to have evolved in the animal kingdom,” also is integral to setting the boundaries of the self” and therefore to “differentiating ourselves from the external world” (6).
How, then, to simulate that which makes us (feel) real?
