In a message dated 1/8/99 2:06:49 AM EST, Vest, in his review of Dawkins'
"Unweaving the Rainbow" writes:

> Another topic discussed
>  in the book's final chapters is Dawkins' concept of a shared "virtual
>  world, constructed from elements that are, at successively higher levels,
>  useful for representing the real world," that we all inhabit in our brains.
>  These interesting and enlightening musings leave the reader with a
>  voracious appetite for the advances in understanding the mind, memory, and
>  consciousness that we all hope will unfold in the years ahead.

One irony of Dawkins latest book is that while he has strongly denounced
subjectivism in science studies (as in his review of Sokal and Bricmont in
Nature) he now is led down the garden path of tradition Cartesian and Humean
subjectivism in his enthusiasm about virtual reality.  If we live in a virtual
reality world then we have no direct access to genuine reality.  This leads to
a representative theory of knowledge and all the problems it raises, as
Berkeley raised for Locke, for instance, if we know only our virtual reality
which supposedly corresponds to genuine reality, how do we know the
correspondence?  Is the genuine reality like the virtual reality? If so, how
do we know this. (Substitute "virtual reality" for "idea" or "impression" and
"genunine reality" for "matter" or "thing in itself"  and Dawkins will
regenerate all the old issues of the respresentative theory of perception that
Berkeley, Hume, and Kant raised for Locke. Dawkins, of course, thinks he knows
objectively the virtual reality mechanisms of the brain, but, of course, if we
only know those alleged mechanisms through virtual reality and not directly,
the same problem comes up.   If Dawkins took the logical consequences of some
of his chapter about virtual reality seriously he would be led into the very
idealism and skepticism he denounces and attributes to postmodernists and
science studies people.   A little philosophy is a dangerous thing. Dawkins
would probably dismiss all those issues of representative perception and make
fun of them, but that only shows an unwillingness to think carefully about
what he himself has written.

Val Dusek