Sensory Engineering: Investigating Altered and Guided Perception and Hallucination

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sascha Benjamin Fink
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 527947799

A range of new interventions on our sensory experiences will soon become commonplace in our society. Virtual reality promises to provide immersive experiences of the physical world around us and of virtual digital worlds. Augmented reality can dramatically change how our environment appears to us, seamlessly inserting virtual objects and features into it. Sensory prosthetics will potentially give us new senses we have not had before. Stroboscopic light and psychedelic substances can induce sensory hallucinations, with the promise of therapeutic benefit. These are all cases of "sensory engineering". In this project, we will study these interventions to develop a better philosophical understanding of the sensory experiences these new interventions provide, but also of ordinary sensory experiences. We aim to fully understand the wide range of perceptual and epistemic benefits that these technologies may offer and the related dangers that they may pose. Such dangers include increasing our biases, threatening our autonomy, compromising our capacity to act morally, and reducing our ability to know about the world by perceiving it. Our project will achieve this goal by examining three foundational issues in the philosophy of perception: the nature of (1) illusion and hallucination, (2) direct and indirect perception, and (3) perceptual knowledge. It is essential to revisit these issues because the new sensory technologies offer up novel cases that force us to fundamentally reconsider them. As a result, we will have a better understanding of the old foundational issues but also of the new emerging sensory technologies and the possibilities that they afford us. There are numerous case studies to consider (alluded to above and described in more detail below). While each of the project team members has expertise in some of the cases of sensory engineering, and one of the foundational issues, only the full team allows us to compare and contrast the full range of sensory interventions. Further, the foundational issues cannot be understood in isolation from each other when studying cases of sensory engineering. It is thus imperative that the team work collaboratively throughout the project, pooling and combining their expertise.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom
• Partner Organisation: Arts and Humanities Research Council
• Cooperation Partners: Privatdozent Derek Brown, Ph.D.; Professor Jack Lyons, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Fiona Macpherson