Reality | Reality Bending Lab

How do we know what is real? The 'Affective Reality Theory'

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I thought it would be interesting to summarize an idea developed during my PhD on “fictional reappraisal”, i.e., on the effect of the belief that an emotional stimulus is not real (Makowski, 2018). That of Affective Reality, which is a hypothesis about the role of affective reactions in the formation of reality beliefs.

The premise it lies on is that we have entered a “post-truth era”, in which the distinction between real and simulated (“fake”) objects has become virtually impossible based on physical characteristics alone. In other words, technology has developed so much that we can forge (or will be able to in the near future) “artificial” ¹ content (e.g., text and images with AIs, and even environments with VR) that is indistinguishable from its original counterpart. For instance, face generation algorithms are so advanced that it is impossible nowadays to tell the difference with the naked eye between a real photo and AI-generated image.

Once we agree on this premise of objective equivalence between reality and simulation, the question of how do we form judgments and make decisions about the reality of objects arises. In the absence of clues within the stimuli, we are left with with other sources of epistemological information, such as contextual cues (in the case of news, who is the author, what is the outlet it got published, etc.), and internal cues (subjective characteristics: how does it relate to our knowledge, how does it make us feel, etc.). The latter is of particular interest to us psychologists.

We refer to the process of forming reality beliefs as simulation monitoring (Makowski et al., 2019), which is a somewhat controversial term (that some ² have considered as almost counterintuitive). The reason for this term, instead of something along the lines “reality appraisal” ³, is the assumption that reality is our default mode of experience. In other words, we are not well equipped (neurocognitively speaking) to detect and classify things as non-real, as these objects are very recent in our evolutionary history. Thus, according to the Affective Reality Theory, by default, the brain considers the origin of its experiences as real… but this “belief” is, most of the time, not even fully formed, remaining implicit and subconscious (i.e., we don’t spend all our cognitive resources with a constant “this is real. This is real too. That too.” labelling). This default mode acts as a higher-level, transparent prior over our experiences, providing a scaffolding and structuring our perception, thoughts and reactions. We do not actively appraise the world as real (it is the baseline position), but instead can ask ourselves whether it is simulated, hence simulation monitoring.

The Affective Reality Theory posits that reality beliefs (the tendency to believe that something is real, as opposed to non-real) is related to emotions and/or bodily reactions through a quadratic (inverse U-shaped) relationship..

The Affective Reality hypothesis posits that simulation monitoring is strongly connected to “affective processing” ⁴ through a quadratic (inverse U-shaped) relationship. This means that stimuli associated with a stronger emotional and/or bodily reaction will preferentially bias our judgment towards “reality”. In other words, things that elicit feelings and/or bodily arousal, ceteris paribus, will be more likely to be classified as “real” (as opposed to fake). In fact, strongly emotional events will even “feel” more real: this transparent default prior and subconscious belief (“agnostic-real”) will be replaced in high-intensity scenarios by an explicit and conscious impression that the stimulus is very real, and, if logic opposes, that it “must be real” regardless.

Isn’t it the other way round, you might wonder: that real stimuli (as opposed to ones believed to be non-real) are associated with a stronger emotional reactions? And that it is the believed reality that drives the emotional response? Indeed, we do believe that there is a two-ways relationship between simulation monitoring and emotions. But it is not exactly that beliefs of reality are associated with stronger emotions, but rather that beliefs that something is not real leads to a lower emotional response (the usage of fiction as an emotion regulation strategy - “fictional reappraisal” - was the main topic of my doctoral dissertation). In fact, the Affective Reality theory posits that this regulatory effect of simulation monitoring starts to dominate after a certain point where the emotion becomes too strong and unbearable: beliefs such as “it can’t be real”, and other forms of reality denials are invoked automatically to protect us and help us cope with distressing information.

To summarize this summary, the Affective Reality hypothesis claims that from mild to relatively strong emotional stimuli, the effect of affect on simulation monitoring dominates (+affect → +reality) and will bias our judgment towards “reality” (strengthening awareness and confidence), up until a point where the emotion regulation benefits of unreality will be automatically invoked (-reality → -affect), increasing the likelihood and confidence of judgments of simulation (potentially far into psychopathological terrains).

Open questions

The Affective Reality theory is for now a working hypothesis that we are trying to empirically prove or disprove at the Reality Bending Lab. Moreover, some questions remain open:

Is it actually embodied reality or emotional reality? While we used the term “affective” reality to remain general, the question of whether it is emotions as a subjective psychological reaction, or merely bodily arousal (reactions of the body, e.g., stronger heart rate variability), that is the key ingredient remains unclear. The role of interoception (the ability and tendency to detect, track, attend to and rely on internal signals), while likely important, also remains to be specified.
Is it the affective context or stimulus that matters? Let’s assume we have affective reaction concomitant to the experience of an object, but not directly related to the object. Would that bias simulation monitoring? Does perceived causality between a bodily reaction and the object of experience matters?

Notes

You may notice that I used different words related to the concept of “unreal”, such as simulated, fake, artificial, virtual, simulated, fictional. While they can be used interchangeably in the context above, they are not exact synonyms. ↩︎
Like that pesky reviewer 2, obviously. ↩︎
Note that “reality monitoring” already exists as a concept and refers to a (possibly related) mechanism involved in tracking the origin of an experience (e.g., a memory) as internal vs. external. ↩︎
“Affective” is in this context used as a generic term to encompass emotions, feelings and bodily activity (the question of which exactly of these aspects is the key remains to be answered). ↩︎

Pyllusion has been published

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pyllusion has been published!

Pyllusion is a package for Python that implements a systematic way to manipulate and generate illusions using a set of parameters.

For instance, the famous Müller-Lyer illusion below, which causes the observer to perceive the 2 segments of being different lengths depending on the shape of the arrows, can be generated wit the following lines of code:

mullerlyer = pyllusion.MullerLyer(illusion_strength=30)
mullerlyer.to_image()

To understand more about the parametric approach being implemented in the Pyllusion package, we recommend reading our paper, which includes a hands-on example on how to generate some classic illusions (such as the Delbeouf Illusion), and discusses how Pyllusion contributes to address conceptual and methodological issues in illusion science.

import pyllusion

delboeuf = pyllusion.Delboeuf(illusion_strength=3)
delboeuf.to_image()

Don’t forget to keep a look out for our repo for more exciting open-source projects!

Time as a computational limit

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Note: this is a thought-experiment, not to be taken too seriously.

We live in a simulated universe

In his famous simulation argument, the transhumanist Bostrom (2003, 2011) posits that we are living in a computer-generated reality. The logic behind this assumption is that an advanced civilization, with enormous computing power, might want to create agents with a powerful artificial intelligence, that would be evolving in a simulated world (think of an infinitely more advanced The Sims Game). These sims (i.e., the virtual intelligences populating the simulation) might be endowed with consciousness, and live their lives in this world, unable to distinguish its simulated nature from the “primary” reality. Moreover, similarly to games that are running on many computers in the world, there could be an important number of these simulated worlds. Moreover, it could reach a point where a simulation could be created inside another simulation. Thus, the number of “sims” would quickly exceed the number of consciousness’s living in the primary (i.e., non-computer-generated) reality. Consequently, it is statistically plausible that we are, indeed, simulated “sims” living in a simulated reality.

Aliens watching episode 2020 of "the Earth" unfold, horrified.

It is to note that Bostrom’s argument has been criticized, mocked, revised and updated several times. But beyond the flaws in its argumentation and premisses, it is still a fairly appealing thought experiment, and a fascinating possibility. People have been mis-representing this argument, picturing some alien species playing The Sims with us on mega computers. But albeit Bostrom indeed mostly presents it as a simulation run by other intelligent agents, this idea could be generalized. The simulating system could take many forms, not necessarily created by an intelligent design. It just means that there’s a “thing” (a very scientific term, I know) outside the universe that gives rise to it, one way of another.

What does it change for our lives? Pretty much nothing. Indeed, this thrilling hypothesis is somehow irrelevant from a phenomenological and psychological perspective, for the majority of people cannot help but experience a fully deployed sense of reality. They are (normally) endowed with an intuitive feeling and belief that they are real, existing and belonging to a real world. They rarely doubt it, and even if they do so, it is mostly in a philosophical fashion, that does not entail a genuine sensation of uncertainty toward the nature of the world. This sense of reality is fascinating topic on its own (though I’m biased since its my main research topic), independent from the issue of the nature of the universe. Though we could argue that the latter opens up the possibility of tears in the objective reality (either bugs of the system or ways of accessing and modifying the fabric of reality), but this Matrix-like aspect of the simulated reality hypothesis is a topic for another time.

So no, the universe being a simulation, aside from being a breath-taking metaphysical consideration, changes practically nothing for our daily lives.

Determism

Let’s put aside this idea of a simulated universe for now and think about determinism. I consider myself, for now, as an ultra-determinist (I should rather say, “the world has made me into a determinist”). It means that I believe that the universe is unfolding according to some causality laws (many of which are not yet fully known), and that since the origin of the universe (e.g., the Big Bang), things have been evolving according to the only one possible chain of event. Naturally, the hard version of determinism leaves no room for free will (though the illusion of free will is important) and creates some issues when it comes to responsibility (again, a topic for another time).

Note that this position is not incompatible with a probabilistic view of the world (I am also a rather radical Bayesianist 😁). In this context, the probabilistic perspective is mostly a framework to describe uncertainty and hidden mechanisms. For instance, if I flip a coin, a probabilistic approach would be to consider that there is a 50/50 probability on the outcome. That said, if we manage to gather information on all the parameters (the starting position of the coin, the velocity and angle of the tossing, gravity, the weight distribution on the coin, its resistance to air, characteristics of air pressure, wind etc.), one could pretty much accurately predict what the outcome would be. In other words, the outcome is already “determined” once the coined has been tossed. That doesn’t mean that a probabilistic model is not convenient to describe it, especially when we don’t have access to all these parameters (or powerful enough models to integrate them).

Many attempts have been made to attack determinism (and especially by people trying to defend the possibility of free will), and recent advances in physics have giving them a lot of ammunition (the most striking example being the - often misunderstood - usage of quantum uncertainty to explain randomness, free-will, consciousness, god and pretty much everything). Nonetheless, determinism is one of the simplest assumption that can be made regarding causality and evolution.

The future is now

Determinism has one important consequence. As all events stem one from the others, in a unique chain of causal events, then if we know the exact state of the system (i.e., you know the state of all of the variables of the system) at one point in time, as well as the rules governing the system, we can predict with certainty the system’s state at the next point in time, at t+1. If we repeat the process, we know the state of the system at t+2, and so on, until the end of times.

In other words, the end of the universe is engraved in its beginning. The future is already contained in the now. The whole evolution of the universe is already “set”. Myself, writing this post, am an expected consequence of the combination of parameters of the universe’s origin.

Time as a computational limit of human understanding

The past, and future, are merely but illusions. All the information (about what has been, and what will be) is already known (not known by an intelligent being, but in the sense that the information is existing, encapsulated within each frame of time) The evolution of the world is, in that regards, similar to that of a movie on a DVD. All the movie is there, at once. And a computer can read, and “experience” (as far as the phenomenological experience of a computer goes) all that information at once.

Yet we cannot. We have to watch it unfold over time. We are cognitively constrained in that fourth dimension of time. The perception of time passing appears as some limitation of our own cognitive systems: we have to spend one hour and a half in order to make sense of the information. We cannot process it “at once” (we cannot yet just download the movie into our brain, and experience it without watching it). Is time passing a feature (or limitation) of our understanding?

Could we imagine (as a thought experiment) some other forms of being that are not constrained nor ever drifting onwards in the time dimension? Which, through their immensely greater cognitive abilities, are able to process a lot more information, which renders their prediction and inference of the near past and future very accurate, to a point where they are able to almost “move in time” (at least in short time ranges as the universe)

Time as a computational limit of the cosmos

One thing to note is that, in the DVD analogy, the watcher is external to the content. We are not talking about Gandalf’s experience of its own movie. Which then begs the question, who’s watching our universe?! ^{_{(note that this is a logical fallacy used here as a joke; analogy is not homology).}}

The Ancient of Days (William Blake, 1794).

But let’s go back to that “simulated universe” hypothesis that we started with, to try to integrate with it determinism and its consequence on time. When we play the sims, the sims do not really care about what the speed that we, external Humans, play the game. Their experience (albeit primitive, but you see my point) is dictated by the system (the game and the computer). To what extend it can computationally process the information.

It’s like when playing Minecraft (pardon my video games references). At the start of the game, one must first “generate” the world. This runs a procedural generation algorithm that spatially lays out and populates a world. This can take up to several minutes, depending on how much of a nerd you are (i.e., the specs of your computer). Following this example, if our universe is itself a simulation, could time be a consequence of some limitation of the system that “runs” it (or generates it - after all, maybe God is just waiting for our universe to complete building to be able to play his game of “Worldcraft” _{^{or, perhaps more appropriately, “Minehumans”}}), which might explain the particular nature of the time dimension in our typical environment.

"Riddles in the dark..."

While these are fun thought experiments to ponder over, note that until there, I have mainly speculated about time as we phenomenologically experience it. I haven’t even touched on the possible relationship between the idea of time as a computational limit, and time as it conceived in modern theoretical physics (for instance, as a geometrical dimension of the time-space continuum that can be deformed and, potentially, navigated in). But for this, you’ll need to get me talking after more beers 🍻

Cheers!

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What is Reality Bending?

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As you know, reality bending is my primary research direction. However, it is not (yet) a well-established scientific topic, nor is it clearly defined. In fact, it is not defined at all, hence the purpose of this article.

But what does it refer too? Is it some kind of Avatar: The Last Airbender thing? Or some Avengers-style superpower? Well… I sure wish it was 😁

Essentially, reality bending refers to the study of the internal and external determinants of subjective reality. In other words, we seek to understand the processes that modulate our conscious experience of reality. The word “bending” encapsulates the active nature of the mechanisms at stake. Indeed, being anything but stable, our perception of reality can be quite easily influenced, whether voluntarily or not, sometimes to extreme degrees of alteration.

Daumier, H. (1925), Don Quixote attacking the windmills.

Reality benders seek to unravel the structure and mechanisms of the sense of reality by studying natural instances of its distortion, or by directly inducing them through a variety of means.

Objective and subjective determinants of the sense of reality

Let’s take for example a guy watching some episode of his favourite TV show, Friends. As he swiftly moves from laughing to snivelling, we can confidently say that he is fully immersed in the show. He feels like he’s present in the show, from which the fictional characters feel very real: for a moment, his brain processes the perceived experience almost as if it was real.

What leads to this high sense of reality? First, there are objective characteristics of the experience (or rather, of the external source of the experience), i.e., characteristics of the environment. Here, it’s a realistic stimulus displayed on a flat screen. But one could wonder what would happen if the sensory input was richer (imagine being physically IN the show by means of some super virtual reality setup), or poorer (the same story presented as comic strips with the characters portrayed as stick figures).

However, while such manipulations could indeed be used to manipulate our immersion, there is also a subjective component contributing to our sense of reality, related for instance to the affective response, attentional engagement, or self-relevance, that will cause a stimulus to strum unique strings in each individual, depending on his history and state of mind.

Tell me your reality and I’ll tell you who you are

The fact that the sense of reality is, in the end, a subjective experience, means that is is intrinsically connected to the Self (i.e., our physical and mental identity). As such, aside from studying how our sense of reality is influenced by external and internal factors, but also investigate the reverse relationship, i.e., how the variability of our sense of reality can inform us about oneself.

Note that, although the focus is the subjective aspect of reality, it doesn’t mean that we deny the existence, or downplay the importance, of objective reality. Stating that most of our experience is “made-up” (i.e., is a construction of the brain) does not equate absolute relativism (more on that in another post). Objective truths and facts do exist, and are essential to seek.

Altered states of consciousness

Naturally, states in which our sense of reality is distorted (as compared to the consensual collective experience) are of particular interest as models or study-cases of our ideas and theories. They include long-term affections (e.g., neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia) or transcient states (induced by psychoactive substances or specific practices like meditation and trance).

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