Is Virtual Reality Experience Veridical, Illusory or Hallucinatory Experience? Prof Fiona Macpherson
Channel: Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow
Date: 26/02/2020

Virtual Reality, Illusory, Hallucinatory, Macpherson

Does virtual reality involve illusory or hallucinatory experience of things that are not present, or does it involve veridical experience of virtual objects? I answer this question by outlining a new theory of illusion and hallucination and applying it to virtual reality experience. In so doing, I pay attention to a feature of virtual reality experience unduly neglected in the philosophical literature: how it is actually produced. The result is a new account of the nature of virtual reality experience that shows that it is far more complex than the extant accounts envision. It involves veridical, illusory and hallucinatory elements related in a multifaceted fashion. Developing this account of the experience had in virtual reality reveals an important feature of indirect perception and new forms of illusion and hallucination that any successful theory of perception and perceptual experience must be able to accommodate.
Fiona Macpherson, FRSE, MAE, is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow. She is president of the British Philosophical Association, sits on the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the UKRI Creative Industries Advisory Group, and is a trustee of the Kennedy Memorial Trust.
The illusions Index website referred to in the lecture has a very interesting range of illusions and superb written descriptions and explanations.
https://www.illusionsindex.org/    

More information on the University of Glasgow research project 'The Philosophy of Virtual and Augmented Reality, at the Centre for Perceptual Experience is available at:
https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/cspe/projects/vrar/  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiona_Macpherson
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/fionamacpherson/