Sensory Engineering: Investigating Altered and Guided Perception and Hallucination

一系列对我们感官体验的新干预很快就会在我们的社会中变得司空见惯。虚拟现实有望为我们周围的物理世界和虚拟数字世界提供身临其境的体验。增强现实可以极大地改变我们对环境的看法，将虚拟对象和功能无缝地插入其中。感官假肢可能会给我们带来前所未有的新感觉。频闪光和迷幻物质可以引起感官幻觉，并有望带来治疗益处。这些都是“感觉工程学”的例子。在这个项目中，我们将研究这些干预措施，以更好地从哲学上理解这些新干预措施提供的感觉体验，以及普通的感觉体验。我们的目标是充分了解这些技术可能提供的广泛的感知和认知益处以及它们可能构成的相关危险。这些危险包括增加我们的偏见，威胁我们的自主性，损害我们道德行为的能力，以及降低我们通过感知世界来认识世界的能力。我们的项目将通过考察知觉哲学中的三个基本问题来实现这一目标：(1)幻觉和幻觉的性质，(2)直接和间接知觉，以及(3)知觉知识。有必要重新审视这些问题，因为新的感官技术提供了新的案例，迫使我们从根本上重新考虑它们。因此，我们将对旧的基础性问题有更好的了解，也对新兴的传感技术及其为我们提供的可能性有更好的理解。我们将考虑许多感官工程的案例研究，比如上面提到的那些。项目团队共同拥有涵盖所有案例的专业知识，但不是单独的。因此，团队必须在整个项目中合作，汇集和结合他们的专业知识。我们通过从一个更具体的概念--“梦想工程”--概括出我们的感觉工程概念(Carr等人)。2020)。当人们做梦时，他们有感官体验，但他们并不是典型的感知世界--他们是在幻觉。研究人员发现，它们可以通过在梦中引入感知元素来影响梦的内容。例如，它们对熟睡的人的四肢施加压力，向他们的耳朵播放声音，并将气味引入鼻孔。这些干预产生的梦既有幻觉因素，也有知觉因素。在我们的项目中，我们将超越梦的情况，研究更普遍的感觉工程现象。我们将它定义为任何改变或引导感觉经验的情况，目的是将新的知觉、幻觉或幻觉元素引入其中。事实上，操纵我们感觉经验的技术有着悠久的历史。从显微镜到望远镜，从录音机到电视机，从眼镜到盲文，感知技术--使我们能够感知否则无法感知的东西--已经存在了数百年。这些形式的感觉工程在某种意义上已经变得熟悉和平凡，但在另一种意义上，仍然让我们充满敬畏，并继续扩大我们对周围世界的理解，比如当我们从詹姆斯-韦伯望远镜看到深空图像时。但我们即将看到，我们的日常生活因对我们感官体验的激进新干预而发生了爆炸式的变化。案例的范围从涉及更多知觉元素的感觉体验到涉及更多幻觉元素的案例。迫切需要对这些案例进行哲学分析和理解，从而评估它们的潜在用途、益处和危害。

A range of new interventions on our sensory experiences will soon become commonplace in our society. Virtual reality promises to provide immersive experiences of the physical world around us and of virtual digital worlds. Augmented reality can dramatically change how our environment appears to us, seamlessly inserting virtual objects and features into it. Sensory prosthetics will potentially give us new senses we have not had before. Stroboscopic light and psychedelic substances can induce sensory hallucinations, with the promise of therapeutic benefit. These are all cases of "sensory engineering". In this project, we will study these interventions to develop a better philosophical understanding of the sensory experiences these new interventions provide, and also of ordinary sensory experiences. We aim to fully understand the wide range of perceptual and epistemic benefits that these technologies may offer and the related dangers that they may pose. Such dangers include increasing our biases, threatening our autonomy, compromising our capacity to act morally, and reducing our ability to know about the world by perceiving it. Our project will achieve this goal by examining three foundational issues in the philosophy of perception: the nature of (1) illusion and hallucination, (2) direct and indirect perception, and (3) perceptual knowledge. It is essential to revisit these issues because the new sensory technologies offer up novel cases that force us to fundamentally reconsider them. As a result, we will have a better understanding of the old foundational issues but also of the new emerging sensory technologies and the possibilities that they afford us. We will consider numerous case studies of sensory engineering, such as those mentioned above. The project team collectively, but not individually, has expertise covering all cases. It is thus imperative that the team work collaboratively throughout the project, pooling and combining their expertise.We developed our notion of sensory engineering by generalising from a more specific notion, that of "dream engineering" (Carr et al. 2020). When people dream, they have sensory experiences, but they are not typically perceiving the world-they are hallucinating. Researchers have found that they can influence the content of dreams by introducing perceptual elements into them. For example, they apply pressure to the limbs of sleeping people, they play sounds into their ears, and introduce smells into their nostrils. These interventions produce dreams with both hallucinatory and perceptual elements. Expanding beyond the case of dreams, in our project, will we study the more general phenomenon of sensory engineering. We define this as consisting of any case in which sensory experiences are altered or guided, with the intention of introducing new perceptual, illusory or hallucinatory elements into them.There is, in fact, a long history of techniques to manipulate our sensory experiences. From microscopes to telescopes, from record players to televisions, and from spectacles to braille, perceptual technologies-which enable us to perceive what we otherwise could not-have been around for hundreds of years. These forms of sensory engineering have, in one sense, become familiar and mundane, and yet, in another, still fill us with awe and continue to expand our understanding of the world around us, such as when we see images of deep space from the James-Webb telescope. But we are about to see our everyday lives changed by an explosion of radical new interventions into our sensory experiences. Cases range from sensory experiences that involve more perceptual elements to cases that involve more hallucinatory elements. The need for philosophical analysis and understanding of these cases-and thereby assessment of their potential uses, benefits and harms-is pressing.