Realism and interfaces in philosophy of mind and metaphysics

In an earlier post, I discussed three theories of perception: naive realism, critical realism, and interfaces. To remind you of the terminology: naive realism is the stance that the world is exactly as we perceive it and critical realism is that perception resembles reality, but doesn’t capture all of it. Borrowing an image from Kevin Song: if naive realism is a perfect picture then critical realism is a blurry one. For a critical realist, our perception is — to move to another metaphor — a map of the territory that is reality; it distorts, omits details, adds some labels, and draws emphasis, but largely preserves the main structure. Interfaces, however, do not preserve structure. Borrowing now from Donald Hoffman: consider your computer desktop, what are the folders? They don’t reflect the complicated sequence of changes in magnetization in a thin film of ferromagnetic material inside a metal box called your hard-drive, not even at a coarse-grained level. Nor do they hint at the complicated information processing that changes those magnetic fields into the photons that leave your screen. But they do allow you to have a predictable and intelligible interaction with your computer, something that would be much more difficult with just a magnetized needle and a steady hand. The interface does not resemble reality, it just allows us to act. Although the comments section of the earlier post became rather philosophical, my original intention was to stay in the realm of the current scientific discourse on perception. The distinction between realism and interfaces, however, also has a rich philosophical history — not only in epistemology but also in metaphysics — that I want to highlight with a few examples in this post.