As we find ourselves immersed in various media, some we are “used to” such as watching video, and others we are not such as VR, we realize we need to understand the experiences we are creating. Understanding media is very hard because we are using our perceptive capabilities to experience the media, and we need to somehow get some distance from our own perceptive processes to “see the effects” of the media itself.
Perhaps one might say it’s like driving the car, and also watching yourself drive the car. It wouldn’t take long before one was greatly confused or had driven the car off the road, and probably both would be true. It’s even hard to just think about perception and consciousness.
But it’s not an impossible situation; we can learn about our perceptive apparatus, and how we interact with mediated realities. Science can help. Studying how “Mythology” works, how narrative works, and various other approaches, can help too.
If one studies our senses, it becomes clear that we don’t perceive reality directly, but rather through mediated processes in our bodies, including our nervous systems, and our brains. We construct our experience, so there’s something to “constructivist theories” of learning.
Constructivist Theory (Jerome Bruner) A major theme in the theoretical framework of Bruner is that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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Then there’s Connectivism, which is discussed here at our blog.
Connectivism is a hypothesis of learning which emphasizes the role of social and cultural context. In this sense, Connectivism proposes to see knowledge’s structure as a network and learning as a process of pattern recognition.
What sets connectivism apart from theories such as constructivism is the view that “learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing”.
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And then there’s Connectionism which is:
Connectionism is a set of approaches in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, that models mental or behavioral phenomena as the emergent processes of interconnected networks of simple units.
The term was introduced by Donald Hebb in the 1940s.[1] There are many forms of connectionism, but the most common forms use neural network models.
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One example of our perceptive processes which is counter intuitive: red doesn’t exist outside of our sensory apparatus. A spectrum of light frequencies exists, a continuum that is not differentiated. But we need to turn those frequencies into useful information, in order to act in our world. So we come up with an abstraction, a representation, a symbolic system which we call red, and we make use of that representation to act in the world.
In a sense, we need to curate sense data and turn it into something we can consciously manipulate. Not surprisingly, this is very close to what we call learning.
So, there’s an important correlation between our consciousness and perceptive processes and what we call learning, and since our brave new world includes elaborate new means of perception and new forms of information…we need to push ahead and become smarter about all that.
This is similar perhaps to the need Europeans had in the 15th century to grasp that the world was round, and not flat. A round world had certain very important implications for exploration, trade, and various components of progress. We need that level of breakthrough in awareness, that goes beyond present conventional understanding, and reveals something much more accurate and useful.
How do we get there? This TED talk says (paraphrasing) evolution has equipped our perceptive capabilities to do exactly what we need to survive…to curate out of all the present information, useful patterns, representations, and symbolic systems and connections that empower us to act.
TED has a lot of presentations on aspects of perception and mind and consciousness and reality…”how your brain constructs reality” is one list. “Can you believe your eyes” is another. Both sound a lot like explanations and elaborations on “what is VR?”.