虚拟现实现象学批判纲要

An Outline of Phenomenological Critique of Virtual Reality

英美哲学和现象学对虚拟现实的哲学分析大多集中于具身性概念上。文章从世界现象学、图像现象学、身体现象学和现象学的主体性概念四个基本层面,全面分析虚拟现实技术的逼真的“现实性”、数字化图像生成的“虚拟性”、虚拟身体的具身性与去具身化以及体验者的主体性自由等四个基本问题,从现象学哲学的视角对虚拟现实技术进行深入分析并提出相应的批判观点,深化学界对虚拟现实的哲学理解。

Virtual reality is one of the most important comprehensive technologies developed at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.Along with the promise of the technology's broad application,there has been an ongoing debate about the risks that virtual reality pose to our real-world order.If the linguistic turn of twentieth-century philosophy was concerned with the extent to which language shapes our thinking,perception,thought,and culture,21st-century philosophy focuses on the extent to which the mixing of images and words will affect our perceptions,experiences,and emotions about the world,and in a particular whether technologies like virtual reality will become tools of falsification and surveillance,so that people can no longer live in an orderly real world.There are two main paradigms for critical reflection on virtual reality in Western thought circles,namely,the paradigm of philosophy of mind,cognitive science and neuroscience,and paradigm of phenomenology,both of which focus on the concept of embodiment.Compared with the reductionist tendency of cognitive science and neuroscience,phenomenology's investigation of virtual reality has always remained at the level of people's living conscious experience,always grasping our image consciousness,body perception,spatial context,empathy,the reality of the world and the freedom of the subject in the activities of living experience,meaning construction and vision transformation of the living world and interactive subjectivity.Phenomenology gives some profound philosophical principles and human standards for analyzing and criticizing the embodied knowledge experience,the multi-media image experience,the virtual world experience and the human-computer interactive subject experience of virtual reality technology.Starting with phenomenology of the world,phenomenology of the image,phenomenology of the body and phenomenology's concept of subjectivity of classical phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl,Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,the paper aims to comprehensively analyze the reality of virtual reality,the virtuality of virtual reality,as well as the embodiment of virtual reality and the subjective freedom of the user of virtual reality.Moreover,the paper also examines to what extent the verisimilitude of virtual reality meets the reality standard of phenomenology,how the digital image generation expands the virtuality of phenomenology,how the embodied knowledge constructs the virtual body and virtual personality,and how the immersive experience enhances or damages the freedom of human beings.On the one hand,the comprehensive analysis of the technical goals and application experience of virtual reality from the four principles of phenomenology promotes the phenomenological criticism of virtual reality based on Merleau-Ponty's perceptual phenomenology;on the other hand,it also provides a foundation for a broader phenomenological critique of virtual reality and artificial intelligence.