Illusion and Hallucination in Virtual Reality

Plus d'information sur le colloquium de l'Institut Jean Nicod.

What is the nature of the expriences of people who use virtual reality devices? The contemporary debate sees philosophers either claiming that the experiences are totally illusory or hallucinatory experiences of a scene that does not exist, or that the experiences are totally veridical experiences of a vitrtual computational reality. I argue that these options are not the only ones available to us. Drawing on the cosiderations given in the first lecture about how to define illusion and hallucination, I outline how virtual reality experiences contain complex mixture of veridical and illusory/hallucinatory elements. This work also sheds light on the more basic question of what it is to perceive something.