Sensory Engineering: Investigating Altered and Guided Perception and Hallucination

一系列针对我们感官体验的新干预措施将很快在我们的社会中变得司空见惯。虚拟现实有望提供我们周围的物理世界和虚拟数字世界的沉浸式体验。增强现实技术可以极大地改变我们所处的环境，无缝地将虚拟物体和特征插入其中。感官修复技术可能会给我们带来前所未有的新感官。频闪灯和迷幻物质可以引起感官幻觉，并有望获得治疗效果。这些都是“感官工程”的案例。在这个项目中，我们将研究这些干预措施，以更好地理解这些新干预措施提供的感官体验，以及普通的感官体验。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识上的好处，以及它们可能带来的相关危险。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，降低我们通过感知世界来了解世界的能力。我们的项目将通过研究感知哲学中的三个基本问题来实现这一目标：（1）错觉和幻觉的本质，（2）直接和间接感知，（3）感知知识。重新审视这些问题至关重要，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，我们将更好地了解旧的基础问题，也了解新兴的感官技术及其为我们提供的可能性。我们将考虑许多感官工程的案例研究，如上面提到的那些。项目小组作为一个集体，而不是单独，拥有涵盖所有情况的专门知识。因此，团队必须在整个项目中协同工作，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“梦工程”（卡尔等人，2020）中概括出我们的感官工程概念。当人们做梦时，他们有感官体验，但他们不是典型地感知世界-他们是幻觉。研究人员发现，他们可以通过引入感知元素来影响梦的内容。例如，他们对睡觉的人的四肢施加压力，他们向他们的耳朵播放声音，并将气味引入他们的鼻孔。这些干预产生的梦既有幻觉的成分，也有知觉的成分。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。我们将其定义为：任何感官体验被改变或引导的情况，目的是将新的知觉、幻觉或幻觉元素引入其中。事实上，操纵我们感官体验的技术有着悠久的历史。从显微镜到望远镜，从电唱机到电视，从眼镜到盲文，感知技术使我们能够感知我们无法感知的东西已经存在了几百年。从某种意义上说，这些形式的感官工程已经变得熟悉和平凡，但在另一方面，仍然让我们充满敬畏，并继续扩大我们对周围世界的理解，例如当我们看到詹姆斯-韦伯望远镜的深空图像时。但我们即将看到，我们的日常生活将因对我们感官体验的激进新干预而发生变化。案例范围从涉及更多感知元素的感官体验到涉及更多幻觉元素的案例。迫切需要对这些情况进行哲学分析和理解，从而评估其潜在用途、利益和危害。

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.