One of the things that inspires me to do the Voices of VR podcast is being able to talk with hundreds of people listening for the underlying patterns of experiential design. VR & AR are reflections of the human experience, and so any experiential design framework for immersive technologies should also describe aspects of our conscious experiences. I’ve found that Eastern Philosophies, Chinese Philosophies, Natural Philosophy, and Hermetic Philosophies have useful ways of describing qualitative aspects of the human experience through concrete metaphors that can be adapted into holistic experiential design frameworks. Any good design framework will provide tradeoffs and equivalence classes, and making sense of the underlying patterns of reality is both a scientific, mathematical, and philosophical venture. VR/AR as well as AI are experiential technologies that are catalyzing new paradigms and new models for how we’re making sense of our world and our experiences, and this episode will see what kind of insights can be gained by analyzing a variety of different philosophical approaches for describing the human experience.
I had the opportunity to give the open keynote at Design Reality’s Immersed Conference in Portland, OR on April 23, 2018, where I gathered more visual metaphors for thinking about experiential design. I introduce some concrete metaphors from Chinese Philosophy & Natural Philosophy that are helpful in thinking about time, the different qualities of experiences, but also the natural rhythms that unfold through the constant fluctuation through polarity expressions of yang and yin energies. I talk about the differences between Kairos Time vs Chronos Time, and how VR is cultivating a more yin and subjective understanding of time. I also recount how the four elements from natural philosophy can be used as an experiential design framework for VR & AR with mental and social presence (air), active presence (fire), embodied & environmental presence (earth), as well as emotional presence (water). I recently expanded on how Chinese Philosophy concepts of the yin and yang can be applied to immersive & interactive stories with the authorial control of the story that will be received (yin) versus how the participant can participate, interact, and change the direction of the story (yang). Finally, I cover some of the philosophical implications of VR, as well as how the Quine Putnam Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Math argues for the ontological reality of mathematical entities within Platonic realms, as well as some of the open questions around the nature of consciousness.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
I recommend watching the video of this presentation as there are a lot of visual metaphors contained in the slides, but there is a bit more discussion and unpacking of concepts that are in the podcast version.
This latest keynote presentation is a continuation and refinement of previous talks, and so here are the links to the previous elaborations of these ideas:
- Maps for Understanding VR & Reality: Kent Bye’s ITC Keynote (November 6, 2017)
- Philosophical Implications of VR: How VR Changes the Sense of Ourselves and Reality (Aug 1, 2017)
- Historical Context of VR: An Elemental Theory of Presence (March 30, 2017)
- The Human Experience of Virtual Reality: A Model of the VR Landscape (April 28, 2016)
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So in today's episode, I'm going to be airing a keynote that I gave at Portland's Design Reality Immersed Conference. So every time I give a keynote, it's an opportunity for me to try to distill my latest thinking on various different topics and to try to really tell the spatial story and really put the visuals to it. And I think As I do that, it starts to have this feedback loop of trying to really distill down the essence of some of these larger concepts and ideas. I think the big thrust of what inspires me with the Voices of VR podcast is trying to discover these underlying patterns of not only reality, but also human experience. And what are going to be the most useful metaphors and experiential design frameworks to be able to not only understand how to design these immersive experiences in virtual reality and augmented reality, but also to have this framework to describe the human experience and what it means to be alive. And so So in that spirit, I've been pretty open in terms of trying to pull in all sorts of different worldviews and perspectives. And in this talk in particular, I start to pull in a lot of Chinese philosophy and natural philosophy to see what the bridges are to the East-West thinking. Because I think that there's a lot of dimensions of virtual reality that is completely embodied and internal and noetic and what I've been calling like the Yen archetypal journey. the yin and the yang is a part of Chinese philosophy and I figured it'd be worth to try to expand out my understanding but also some concrete metaphors to try to grasp the differences between these expression of energy outward with the yang and the reception of energy with the yin. And so we'll be tying together the experiential design framework with the four elements and how that relates to Chinese philosophy and how that relates to the future of immersive and interactive storytelling. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you do have a chance to watch the video of this particular podcast, I highly recommend it because there's a whole layer of information that's being communicated. So this talk that I gave happened at the Portland Immersed Conference that was happening on Monday, April 23rd, 2018. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Thank you all for coming out today for this conference, and my name is Kent Bye, I do the Voices of VR podcast, which I've been going to about 40 or 50 different conferences since May of 2014, and I've done about 850 different interviews with all sorts of pioneers in virtual reality, academics, experienced creators, people that are all dimensions of the industry, trying to track the evolution of virtual reality, as well as augmented reality as well. So, the question that I ask every single one of my interviewees is, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality is? And I find that it's an interesting litmus test to see what they focus on, and it's kind of an impossible question, really. because the potential of VR is limitless in so many different ways, but there's some patterns that I think emerge, and those patterns, they tend to focus into one of the domains of human experience, and this is kind of a reflection of, like, virtual reality as a technology is merely a mirror of what it means to be human. And like all the applications you're going to do with virtual reality are the same things that humans do as our experiences. So whether that's entertain ourselves, connect to our home and family, use it for your career in engineering, architecture, design. education, communication, higher education, travel, spirituality, connecting with business partners, our partners going on dates and virtual reality is something that people will be doing here at some point. Friends and community, dealing with isolation in some ways if you can't move around. Identity and embodiment as well as your finances and resources. And also grieving and death as, oop, microphone went off. That was right when I said death, by the way. I'm also having deja vu right now. So death and grieving and as things ending, but also medicine, so how we're going to use this technology to be able to heal ourselves. And so you notice that there's things that are public and private. Everything that's sort of below that line has to do with things that are very intimate and private. And I think that there's a dimension that's happening right now where a lot of technology companies are trying to quantify all those things and create psychographic profiles on us and I think this is a tension and dynamic that's happening within all of tech industry and I think what I would say is that the body kind of represents this new frontier of biometric data and there's a lot of really concerning aspects for what that biometric data is going to reveal to our unconscious patterns to the point where Companies are going to understand us better than we understand ourselves. And so there's a lot of risks that I've been focusing on. But there's also upsides for us to maybe understand our unconscious behaviors in new ways as well. So with technology, there's always this exalted, amazing potential, but also the things that are so scary that it could be the worst surveillance technology that we've ever created, or it could be the last action of privacy that we have. So I think that you tend to see that with technology is the good and the bad. But one of the things that I've been trying to do after doing all these interviews is come up with different frameworks and maps and it's actually just trying to come up with different maps of reality and seeing how those different maps of reality apply for us to help understand this new medium and we can start to discern the underlying patterns. And I think an important point is that the map is not the territory. These are just models and maps and it's going to be impossible to ever fully come up with a complete map of reality, just Gödel's incompleteness theorem says that we'll always be creating new math and it'll never be complete. So it's a little bit of like a continual process of us trying to understand the nature of reality. And that's what science is. And so there's lots of different maps that are out there and I'm just going to be going through what I have found to be some of the most useful maps to be able to help describe and understand this new immersive medium. So, first of all, we're moving from the information age to the experiential age, so let's unpack that a little bit. So, back in 1454, we had the Gutenberg printing press, which allowed us to be able to do mass production of books. This was the democratization of information and knowledge in new ways, and I think that you could look at the equivalent of computing technologies of this era that the computers are kind of like the printing press of our era, which means that you're able to capture experiences, interactive experiences, in new ways. So, if we look at books on one side, on the other side, we have computers, we have video games, we have mobile computing, we have the internet, we have mobile phones, and now, for the first time, we have virtual reality technologies that are allowing us to have our body and our embodiment within technology for the first time. So Pine and Gilmore, they had this Welcome to the Experienced Economy book and article in the Harvard Business Review, but they're saying we're moving from delivering intangible and customized services on demand to staging memorable and personal experiences that are revealed over a duration of time. Now, if you're trying to define an experience, it's like, okay, you have a beginning, middle, end. It happens over time, but, like, what is time? I think the deeper you look into this, there's a little bit of, like, it's a bit of a mystery. You can't have space without time, and so they're actually connected together, and so we look at how motions of planets move around to be able to mark time, but it's also something that There's a This American Life episode where a daughter had written down all these questions and it was time, why, explain. And if you actually try to explain time to someone your age or someone who's like a six year old, it's something that you have to really think about. What is time? So the Greeks actually had two words for time. They had kairos time and chronos time. The kairos time was the quality of the moment at the time. It was kind of like this auspicious moment that was happening. And the Kronos time is how we mostly live our lives. It's like we set a schedule, we have to be there on time. Like when you're on vacation, you actually don't want to be in Kronos time. You want to just not plan anything, you want to see what emerges, you want to be in the quality of the moment in the time, and you want to be able to listen to what is emerging, and you want to just go do whatever you feel called to be doing. and that's not how we organize our society right now. Right now we are completely driven by scheduling and planning and having everything figured out. So the way that I produce the podcast is I'll go to conferences and I won't schedule anything, I'll see just what emerges and that's, it's like going on vacation. But you see a different quality of a story that emerges when you're doing that and I think that that's part of what virtual reality is doing is that it's cultivating this awareness of Cairo's time. So there's other philosophical frameworks that I think have more sophisticated ways and metaphors, concrete metaphors for understanding time, and one of those that I find is Chinese philosophy that has the yin and the yang. So you can see that over the course of one day you have the sun rise and then the sun rises to the peak of the day and that's the zenith of the yang energy and then it goes down and that's where the yang is the day and the yin is the night and so you have this cycle of time. So that's one way that we mark time is through cycles of the day. But there's also cycles of the year, where there's the summer, and then the fall, and then the winter, and then the spring, and so you have this, again, this similar type of cycle, and you can see that this wave kind of creates that yin-yang symbol that we're all familiar with, and that if you actually go over the course of a year and you plot how much light is over the course of a day relative to other days, you actually can also find it forms this yin-yang symbol where in the summer solstice you have the most light and in the winter solstice you have the most darkness and so you have this correspondence between yang and yin and you know within Chinese philosophy they've kind of embedded it into their entire philosophy for how to think about the balances of time in different ways and I've just found that it's kind of a useful framework when you're thinking about either cycles or stories because it has a beginning, middle and end and experiences also have a beginning, middle and end and so you have this growing yang, declining yang Declining the end and then growing from the end. So you have this, what's very similar to how we see stories is this hero's journey. It's a cycle. It's someone going out on a journey. They have some unknown and they face some challenge that they have to figure out and then they get through it and then they. come back and they have this return. And I think that music is also very similar in terms of creating harmony of consonance and dissonance. And the Pythagoreans and the Greeks, they actually had the quadrivium, which is numbers, numbers in space, which was geometry, numbers in time, which is music, and numbers in space and time was astronomy, so the movement of the heavens. And so, you have this, like, music also has this embedded within it, this quality of the moment of the time that invokes our emotions in different ways. But also, what I see is that each individual is on many multiple overlapping hero's journeys at any given moment, and so we have these cycles upon cycles at different scales, and I think when we think about storytelling, it's going to be like, well, how are we going to actually encapsulate these different cycles and these stories, and it's actually, the hero's journey has a very young archetypal journey. It's much more about you going out into the world and expressing your agency, but I see that virtual reality and augmented reality is actually like this new yin archetypal journey. Like what does that actually look like to have a yin journey, which is more about you being centered in your body and present and receiving an environment or having an inner noetic experience that's more about you having a sensory experience than it is about going on an outward adventure. And so I think this is an open question is like what does this yang and yin archetypal journey look like? Are they ever fully separated or is there always an external and internal correspondence between these different journeys and I think as a culture we haven't been able to identify what that Yen archetypal journey looks like which means that we get to discover what that is and I see that there's indications of Eastern cultures that actually they have different storytelling structures that are focused on that and so I think there's actually probably a lot of evidence that's out there of what this Yen archetypal journey looks like but We haven't necessarily integrated into our storytelling yet, but I think that if we think about that, that there's new patterns that we haven't been able to identify, and what does it mean to be able to center yourself in your embodied and emotional experience? So, just to summarize, there's these polarities that happen between the yang and yin, between the shady and the sunny, the moon and the sun. being receptive and active, night, day, cold, hot, intuitive, logical, winter, summer, these are all these different polarities that are embedded within the philosophy, but I think these are actually polarities that we go through each and every day, and it's actually, if you look at the Hegelian dialectic, you have a thesis and an antithesis, and you find a way to try to synthesize the two, and that is kind of like one model of how our culture over millennia has evolved is through this dialectic between the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and so those polarities and these sort of evolution I think is a way that I found a very helpful way to kind of think about how things evolve and progress. So, let's move on to an experiential design framework from VR and AR, using natural philosophy of the elements, the air, fire, earth, and water. And so, this came about because Mel Slater, he had embodied presence, and he was thinking about the place illusion and the plausibility illusion as hacking your sensory motor contingencies for what the unique affordances of VR were. Well, I was going out and knowing Mel Slater's theory about what's essentially embodied presence, and I was seeing, like, well, I'm able to interact with the participant, like an experience, and the more that I feel like I'm able to actually express my agency and it reacts in the way that I expect, then I have this sense of active presence. Or if I feel like there's another person in the room and I have this conversation with them, then I have this sense of social presence. Or if I believe everything that's happening in the world, I have this sense of mental cohesion and mental presence. And then there's an element of stories that were happening that would get me really emotionally engaged in the narrative that was happening, and I had this sense of emotional presence, and so I found that there was kind of a limitation for what the academia was really thinking about, all the different qualities of presence, with virtual reality, trying thousands of experiences, I started to see these different qualities of presence that were there. And I think still, academia is very focused on the things that you quantify with the embodied experience, but they're not experiential design creators, and so academics aren't telling stories, they're not thinking about how to design a game, they're not thinking about social VR experiences, and so in some ways, that's happening in the consumer market is actually eclipsing the types of things that the academics are able to put together to be able to study this. And so in some ways, there's this new collaboration that needs to happen between the experiential design creators of the consumer market with the academics to be able to fully kind of flesh out these different dimensions and qualities of presence. But I think if we just look at natural philosophy, we can actually get a lot of huge insight with these primary metaphors, which I've found to be incredibly useful to start to see the different trade-offs between these different qualities of presence. And, you know, there's also a temperament where on the earth and water it's cold, and so those are more the yin elements, the receptive, and then the yang elements of fire and air, or the hot, and so you have cold and hot, and dry and wet. And this is just the temperament theory that shows the different cycles, both over the course of the day as well as the year as well, that correspond to Chinese philosophy, but these elements of air, fire, earth, and water are part of the Western history of our Western thought, but yet, at some point, it was kind of discarded as being like, well, we've figured out what the actual material properties are of the different weak and strong forces, but it's less about the physical or like a model for being able to represent the quantified world, and these are still more qualities of experience. I think that Human experience can't be falsified and can't be repeated, and so there's certain dimensions of human experience that kind of transcend what empirical science is able to tell us, and so I think once you get down at the low levels of physics, you're able to see quantified world in a way that science reductive materialism as a way to be able to describe that, but once you get higher and higher up into the stack of human consciousness and human behavior, then you start to have like open loop systems that are impossible to control, the variables, and it just, to me, I just find that these metaphors of the elements actually kind of describe the quality of experience a little bit more. And so if we look at the communication technologies, we can see that there's kind of a center of gravity of like the fire element is the expressing of your agency, taking action. The air element is being able to connect to all these ideas through the internet or to be able to communicate with your friends through your phones. You have the film, which is so much about you just receiving a story and you having an emotional experience through that engagement, through those different cycles of the hero's journey. And the thing that's new is putting the body within technology for the first time and using the experiential aspects of hacking all of your sensorimotor contingencies and being able to include dimensions of the earth in augmented reality where you're layering aspects of metadata or information on top of your physical reality and augmented reality. And so again, the mental and social presence, it's choices, communication, mental abstraction, mental friction and puzzles, natural language processing, conversational interfaces, models of the future, brain-computer interfaces, social interactions, the active presence is much more about actually expressing your agency, the gameplay mechanics, taking action, expressing your creativity, exploration, exercise, behaviors, performance, And the emotional presence, engaging emotions, and story, and character, and plot, and music, and rhythm, and cycles, and ambiance, it's like just the vibe that you get. But there's also like tracking your face to be able to express your emotions as well as empathy and symbols. And then the embodied presence is much more about the sensory perception of the body, body cognition, hand presence, the virtual body ownership illusion, the haptics, being able to replace and add new senses, all of your biometric data, body language, and the environment as well. There's lots of different dimensions of these, and whenever I have an experience, I try to sort of see what new things are happening in that experience, but the more that you start to pay attention to how are you able to express your agency, how am I being able to interact with other people, or stimulate my mind, how present in my body am I, what's the quality of presence that I have, as well as the emotions that you have in any experience. And as you pay attention to that, then you can start to see what the trade-offs are, and how all experiences are just some different combinations of these things. And so Aristotle actually had a different way of organizing these, with the earth and water being the more yin receptive elements, with the earth being at the bottom, and then the fire and air were up top because of the heat rising. And if you look at the cone of experience, you can see that there's a bit of a correspondence here, where the higher on the cone of experience is, the more abstract and text you have, and then as you go down, you're able to express your agency through field trips and make choices and be able to explore on your own But there's also the feeling is like the dramatized experiences and the stories and having a docent tell you the story, as well as the sort of the most rich experiences being able to engage all of your sensory experience. And I think that what they are showing is that as you engage all of your senses, it just makes it a much more memorable experience. And so as experiential design creators, we're trying to figure out how to use the technology to give those rich full experiences and try to engage all these different dimensions of the cone of the experience. But there's also this really interesting thing about the conscious mind and the subconscious, unconscious minds, like the way that we think is our mind and that there's so much about our behavior, our feelings, and our senses that are completely below our conscious awareness. They're just almost unconscious habits. And so if only 10% of our mind is like the story that we tell ourselves after something's happened, there's so much of our habits and behaviors that are happening just completely at an unconscious level. And I think that's something that also is very interesting with VR, is that you're able to really tap into that unconscious part of yourself and be able to really communicate in that way. But embodied cognition is probably one of the most important and crucial concepts to be aware of, especially if you're doing education, because it basically says that we don't just use our mind to think, we actually use our entire body to think. There we go. You use your entire body to think, which means that your environment also impacts your cognition. So as you're able to go into virtual environments, that actually changes how you think. So you can start to think about memory palaces that are available within virtual reality. And so there's different dimensions of the fire element being intuition, air being thinking, the earth being sensing, and the water being the feeling, and so these are more like personality dimensions that the Myers-Briggs typing indicator were actually inspired by Young's work by looking at all these symbols and kind of making these different connections to the personality and temperament. And the Galen temperaments are actually used in some schools. Basically, there's different learning styles that people have. And so it's important to know how you learn. Do you learn by interacting with things? Do you learn by having experience? Do you learn by story? Do you learn by just someone lecturing at you? And so people have different types of ways that they learn. I think it's in different schools, they start to see what your learning temperament is and then how to interact with you. And I think that all of us are going to be sort of having a little bit more of like what our temperamental center of gravity might be. So there's also many different types of intelligence. You know, Gardner has multiple intelligences. And as I started the Voices of AI podcast, or Raul Camapade started, I was thinking about intelligence in terms of left and right brain. He's like, no, no, no, no. There's actually like different dimensions of intelligence from cognitive and social intelligence, manipulative intelligence, perceptual intelligence, and emotional intelligence. And so I suspect that the elements will also be handy in being able to describe like what even intelligence is and how to create intelligent experiences. So, the future of storytelling is going to be immersive and interactive, which means that on one end of the authored narrative, that is all of the decisions of, like, mostly the water element of you really deciding what the story is going to be, and then the generative aspect is how you participate. That's much more the fire element. And so, there's a spectrum between authored narrative and generative narrative, and the big open question is how do you balance these two extremes of having authorial control over a story versus how are you going to allow people to participate? And so there's a whole range of different types of stories that are out there, whether they're traditional stories, interactive stories, multiple ending stories, branching path stories, open-ended stories, or fully player-driven stories. And so they just have like a general structure here where, you know, there's a traditional three-act structure. That's at the extreme of the authored story. That's what we have today. But we're moving more and more towards the generative aspect where you're able to allow the people to make choices, and maybe there's simple branchings in that. Or maybe it's more of a choose-your-own-adventure where you spend a lot of time describing what all those different branches are going to look like. Or maybe it's more like a sandbox, and once you get up to the sandbox, it becomes less and less about a story, and it becomes more of a game, where you're just having an open-ended sandbox to be able to play around with. And then, finally, there's the generative narrative, which is a little bit more of a drama manager, where you're able to actually have the different beats and have the narrative arc over time, but being able to engage people's participation, have this feedback loop that is listening to what the people are doing, and then you're able to modify the story as you go forward. And I think that's, in the future, we're gonna be doing much more designing probability spaces of things that are possible, And so the big question is, what is the model of storytelling by which you're gonna be able to create these dramatic arcs and have these overlapping cycles in different ways? And I think that's, again, another big challenge for how you balance that interactive space with the story. So I'm just gonna kind of zip through these last slides. And I will say that right now, this is what is reality. Right now, our reality is that we can't even see what I'm trying to say, which is, maybe perhaps a deeper thing. So you'll have to kind of catch glimmers of this. But there's a lot of philosophical implications about VR in terms of what is the nature of reality? And I think you go into VR and you feel like you have a real experience that's just as real as anything else. But if you look at it through the lens of reductive materialism, then you have these different conclusions. So depending on your metaphysical assumption, you have these basic questions of whether or not virtual objects are real or fictional. Do virtual events really happen or not, are virtual experiences non-illusionary or illusionary? And are experiences in VR as valuable or not as valuable as experiences outside of it? And depending on your metaphysical assumptions, you're gonna have different answers. And so if you believe that consciousness is emergent from a neurology and there's nothing outside of space and time and that naturalists would just be like, just our empirical reality, that's all we got. There's no sort of metaphysical reality outside of our empirically observed reality. That is taking the position that physics is base-leveled in chemistry, biology, and consciousness is emergent from our neurology. That is one perspective, and that may be true. And if you believe that, then it can be very easy to sort of draw conclusions that virtual objects are not real. They're just fictional. It's just a perceptual illusion. These events don't happen. They're illusionary, and they're not really even as valuable as real experiences. And I think if you believe that, then you can start to bring these conclusions that harassment in VR isn't real, it's just pixels on a screen, therefore I'm just going to start to just really harass people, because it's not real. It doesn't matter. That's sort of the logical extreme of the reduction of materialism, is that these are fake experiences and so it doesn't matter. But if you look at something like an Eastern philosophy, they say that consciousness is actually primary. It's actually below space and time. It's actually a field that transcends physics. And so if you believe in Eastern philosophy or panpsychism or transcendental idealism or even Platonism where there's these ideal forms that are beyond space and time where mathematical structures could exist. And so if you believe that consciousness is primary, then you start to see, like, well, virtual objects are real. These events do happen. They're non-illusionary. And they're just as valuable as any other experience that we have in life. And one book that I think has been a huge inspiration for me is Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark, where he goes into this mathematical universe hypothesis of saying, well, maybe all of reality is just a math structure, it's just isomorphic to a math structure, and we're all just these deeper patterns of energy. And this is going back to like a Pythagorean idea that all is number and that mathematics is the basis of all reality. And this is, you know, the deeper I've gone into VR, the more I've gotten into these questions of what is the nature of reality. And so I actually went to a math conference, a joint mathematics meeting, and talked to 37 different mathematicians, asking them about the philosophy of math. Are mathematical objects, are they invented, are they discovered? Is there some process by which there's eternal forms outside of space-time that we're intuiting through mathematical intuition combined with the social construction of humans? So maybe it's cultivated, maybe there's some sort of combination where there's a seed of eternal form but it takes a community to be able to actually make it and cultivate it and it sort of gets into the dimension of consciousness and these are these big open questions of what is the exact nature of a mathematical object and so I think of virtual reality as a form of archetypal reality and symbolic reality where we're able to actually interface with these symbolic ideal forms in a way that is almost as a real experience as we have in real life. And so, this question is to, are there objects that exist in non-local space, these quantum effects, or maybe there's other mathematical structures beyond the four dimensions of space-time that are out there, and what is the causal relationship between math and reality? And those are like these deep, underlying, open questions that even the mathematicians have debates about. So it's sort of like, you know, these ideas of panpsychism where everything is conscious, everything is embedded with life, and they're kind of coming from a lot of these natural philosophies, and as well as the Chinese philosophies as well, which from the Western mind can be, you know, sound superstitious or crazy, but I think the deeper you look into the math of things, then we use math and science, but yet the relationship between math and science is that we have so much a domination of our philosophy of science, of reductive materials, and that we've forgotten the platonic Over half of the mathematicians I've talked to believed in these platonic ideal forms because they have a direct experience of feeling like they're discovering these objects, that they don't feel like they're creating these objects, that those objects are already there. And so we have this kind of split between math and science right now where the experiential dimension of it, I think, is the more that we go into virtual reality, the more that we're going to be able to get in touch with that and have our own direct experience with it. So, I guess the final thing is, you know, there's different ideas about what is conscious and not conscious, and the primal worldview is that the entire world is conscious, like the Anima Mundi in the world soul, and that, you know, the modern worldview is that only the self is conscious, and I think that the nature of consciousness is actually a huge question that perhaps as we go further and further down the road we'll be able to maybe have some more empirical research into trying to look at some of these experiential technologies and seeing if we can actually get some bigger insight into the nature of consciousness. So, that's all that I have for today and I want to just thank you for joining me on this keynote here. So that was me, Kent Bye, at the Portland Immerse Conference giving the keynote talking about the philosophical foundations of experiential design. So I have a number of different takeaways about this keynote that I gave. Of course, whenever I give a keynote, there's always gonna be things that I can't cover. It's kind of an impossible task to try to like only have 25 minutes to try to cover the breadth of all the different content that I want to. But each time I give one, it allows me to expand out on different things that I hadn't been able to tell the visual story of before. And then this time, there's a couple things I was focusing on, which is the Chinese philosophy, but also these concepts of time and the relationship between time and experience, and the kairos time, the quality of the moment of the time, and Also just the whole aspects of Chinese philosophy of how they have the yin and the yang and how those have these different polarity relationships and those polarity relationships kind of create this Hegelian dialectic that then through that consonance and dissonance of the polarities and the opposites it actually gives this experience of time And in that, that's sort of embedded into music, it's embedded into storytelling, and it's embedded into what we consider to be an experience. And so as we start to think about how to kind of generalize a framework for storytelling and experiential design, I think it's worth looking to some of these Eastern philosophies and natural philosophies, these philosophies that were a part of the history and tradition of the Western thought, but there's for various reasons, there's always this kind of split between whether or not there's a realm of the platonic realm that exists beyond spacetime or not. And I think we're actually in a time period now where we don't really necessarily have that within the Western thought. But it's been preserved within the Eastern ways of thinking that there are these non-spatio-temporal realms of existence beyond spacetime, And I think that's kind of embedded within the foundation of Chinese philosophy with the I Ching. But also, math is something that I've been really getting into a lot more lately that I talked a bit about in the actual keynote. But one of the things about math is the philosophy of math is completely different than the philosophy of science. It's an axiomatic system by which you come up with a number of axioms, then you create these rules that then generate different aspects of math. And math is kind of mysterious in so many different ways. And I sort of went to this math conference and were able to interview all these different professional mathematicians, which, by the way, is probably one of the most difficult things that you could possibly do. an interviewer is to go to a math conference with professional mathematicians you have no idea what their expertise is and it's like Difficult to mediate a conversation when the things they're talking about are so beyond your comprehension and beyond words that unless you understand the math it's kind of difficult to have a conversation with the mathematicians and so It took a little bit of time for me to actually find my way into how to cover math, but the fascinating thing about math is that there's this open question as to what is the exact nature of mathematical objects. And I didn't get a chance to really flesh out the full philosophical argument. I interviewed over 37 mathematicians at the Joint Mathematics Meeting, and they'll be starting an entirely new podcast, The Voices of Math, at some point to really kind of dive into these deeper philosophical questions. But just a thumbnail sketch, because I think it's really important to this discussion. The Quine-Puntenham Indispensability Argument says that anything that is indispensable for scientific theories, we should be also assigning an equal amount of ontological reality to those entities. For example, mathematical objects are arguably indispensable for science, so we should consider those objects to be real. The problem is, is that nobody really knows what these mathematical objects are. Where do they exist? Are they discovered? Are they invented? If they are invented and created by humans, then why do they work so well? That's the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, which is, if it's just coming out of the minds of humans, then why does it work so precisely to like 12 decimal points when it comes to quantum electrodynamics? I mean, that kind of like pushes the limits of credulity as to what is the connection between these imaginary objects that we're just creating as a semantic description of reality, but yet those descriptions of reality describe reality to a level of precision that makes you question like what is the causal relationship between these mathematical objects? Is there some sort of ideal realm, this platonic realm, where there's some sort of like Aristotelian formal causation where There's an interface between the realm beyond spacetime and these objects and patterns are somehow interfacing with things that are condensed down into spacetime. And I think, you know, within the Western paradigm right now, Western thoughts and the scientific paradigm is that you have a much more naturalistic perspective, which is that there's absolutely nothing that exists beyond spacetime and that anything that is talking about these metaphysical ideas is just non-falsifiable. So you can't ever really know for sure. But the mathematicians I talked to were like, well, we have a direct experience of kind of feeling like we're discovering these objects. We're not like actually creating them. And so that to me seems to be like there's this experiential component of what it means to do math and to discover math and to work into the realms of pure math, where you're just creating these mathematical toys just for the sake of creation. And I think that part of the reason why I'm going into a lot of this elaboration of the philosophy of math is because I think there's actually some connections and relationships to Chinese philosophy, because they have the yang and the yin, and the yang elements actually are kind of into more of this eternal realm beyond space-time, then you may not be able to actually measure it in any way. So you know this can keep kind of going down the wormhole of all these different metaphysical debates where there's actually no conclusion that's why they're metaphysical is that we don't know for sure but the cross-section and relationship between math and science I think is worth looking at and to really see, like, well, if there is this connection that is a formal causation between this eternal realm and this space-time, then what else could be out there? Could consciousness be out there? Could consciousness be a non-local field that is beyond space-time? And could that be embedded into every single dimension of reality? And I think that When you look at these more hermetic philosophies and Chinese philosophies, as well as the Eastern philosophies, you get a lot more of that panpsychic or transcendental idealism where consciousness could be a universal field or could be a fundamental field. And the naturalist perspective is that consciousness is just merely emergent from our physical neurology, that there is no metaphysical realms beyond the space-time. So, you know, I got into a conversation with somebody after I gave this keynote, and they were really kind of just challenging me as to, like, why is this important? Why do we need to put all these labels on all this? And I think the thing that I would say is that we all make these different metaphysical assumptions, and those metaphysical assumptions actually drive our behavior because they sort of orient us into some sort of model of reality that can drive our sort of moral behaviors. So what I would say is that sometimes we make metaphysical assumptions that we can't really falsify, but yet that is driving our behaviors in different ways. And the example that I gave specifically is that if you don't believe that mediated experiences using technology are real experiences, then you're more likely to not have empathy with other people through those experiences and to cause harm to them by trolling them or to not Really be tuned into what they're experiencing and you just turns into people who are just acting without good morals or boundaries around their behavior now I want to make clear that I'm not trying to Say that if you do believe that consciousness is emergent from neurology that all of a sudden you're supporting Trolling that's not I'm saying at all. There's other layers of ethics and morality and the differentiation between ought and is and So I think that the thing that I am saying and arguing, I guess, is that I suspect that it's actually going to be technologically impossible to try to completely engineer a perfect system that's going to be able to eliminate aspects of our human behavior. and that if you're dealing with human behavior, then you have to deal with the psychological and cultural aspects of that human behavior, and that technology is more of a mirror to those behaviors, and that you can't use technology to kind of fix humans out of things that they're already gonna be doing, independent of whether or not it's being mediated by technology or not. So what that means is that I personally believe that there's always going to be some combination of culture as well as designing systems and technologies that take into account the ability to be able to have safe spaces. So if you are being trolled then you're able to actually report it and feel like you can protect yourselves and have safe bubble spaces or just be able to block people if you need to. So, you know, because there's these different dimensions of metaphysical assumptions that we're making, if you make the assumption of rejective materialism, then that may actually lead you down a path of trying to engineer culture when I think that there's dimensions of consciousness and culture that transcend what technology is able to do and that you actually have to have the free will and the agency of individuals as well as collective groups and culture that generates out of that. And it's some sort of combination. So actually after talking to a lot of mathematicians, I think it's some sort of weird combination that we don't fully understand yet. That is to say that mathematics is some combination of both discovery and social construction. the metaphor that I like to use is like a community garden. So maybe there's like a seed of an ideal form of an idea or a thought or the technological implementation. But yet, in order for that to really take root, you actually have to hand it over and surrender it to a community where they cultivate it and grow it into the community garden where it's able to really manifest into the full potential of that seed, but it takes that social construction and that participation from the community. And so there's this kind of a weird cultivation, that process that happens in both technology, as well as in mathematics, as well as in anything that you're creating as an experience that you're putting it out and people have to receive it. which kind of goes back to this Chinese philosophy, which is the yang and the yin of you putting stuff out, but it also has to be heard and received to have this full completion of creation that we all are trying to engage in with these immersive technologies. So there's lots more to unpack and to explore. I'm a huge fan of the Hegelian dialectic, so I love to put these ideas out there and to be challenged and then to talk about them on the podcast. So if there's anything that you want to talk about about these ideas or frameworks, please do come talk to me. I'm going to be at a flurry of conferences coming up here over the next couple of weeks, including F8 and then VRLA and then Microsoft Build and then Google I.O. If you're going to be at any of these conferences, then keep an eye out for me. Ping me on Twitter. I'm going to be roaming around, both covering what I'm seeing and experiencing the different experiences, but also talking about a lot of these ideas. Because I think everything happens in the conversation, and we just have to keep on putting out these ideas, and being challenged, and have this dialectic of the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. 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