With the rise of highly advanced imaging technology and A.I., there are now “deep fakes” of images and even hyperrealistic videos. Some of the more disturbing applications of these fake nudes of person, where a head or face is realistically imprinted unto a nude body, and being spread around.
I want to use this idea as a launching point to discuss some very fundamental epistemological issues, which has fundamentally to do with the pre-modern and modern epistemology divide.
I discussed this a very long time ago on my previous profile, but premodern epistemology is primarily focused on being a certain kind of person who is “in tuned to reality”, “knowing” was primarily about character and being a kind of person. If we take the platonic image as the paradigm case, the wise man is not he who accumulates masses and masses of information, but he who, true ascetic practices, self-control, discernment, and contemplation, transcends the world of appearances to discern the forms. Even though Aristotelian epistemology would place more emphasis on empirical knowledge for forming the appropriate knowledge character, pre-modern epistemology was very much focused on *who* is doing the knowing rather than *what* you know.
The transition to modern epistemology can be characterised by the shift from knowing as being a certain kind of person to knowing as grasping external objects “behind the veil of appearance” as it were. It is about factual and informational mastery, *what* stuff out there in the real world you know, rather than what kind of person you are. Descartes, “I think therefore I am” turns knowledge of the self as an object of knowledge, the thought itself is an object of contemplation, by knowing the thought, he knows that I am. It is not about epistemic virtues or character. Today the expert’s “moral character” is secondary compared to *what* he knows and whether his field of expertise itself is relevant to the topic at hand, it is the masses of information and facts itself concerning the relevant part of reality which determines knowledge, and not the moral character of the knower.
The best way to understand this is via the law of evidence and how it has changed from the premodern to modern period. Consider Christ’s injunction that if your brother sins and you confront him, and if he refuses to repent, take two or three other “witnesses” to confront him with his sin. Here’s the question: what are they witnessing to? Are they witnesses to the brother’s sinning in the sense that they saw them with their own eyes doing the deed? It’s not often that one has actual eyewitnesses to crime. They are clearly not “eyewitnesses” or source of knowledge in the modern scientific sense of having personally seen the man do the deed themselves. Rather, they are “witnesses” in the sense of being willing to stake *themselves*, by oath and sworn testimony, to condemn a person as a sinner and risk being condemned themselves if they were found to be lying. It is a knowledge based on their personal character and willing to “put skin in the game”. We can trust and rely on this “witness” and testimony because of a sort of “law and economics” logic based on their personal incentives and motivations to tell the truth. In English law until the 17th century there used to be a defence known as “compurgation” or a “wager of law”, where if you can get 12 friends/neighbours to take an oath or swear to your innocence, that’s a valid defence. This isn’t them swearing that you were with them when the crime was committed, this is just straight up: trust me, he’s innocent, I know this guy, because I am willing to be punished if you found that I am lying.
This sort of knowledge, which comes from trusting persons, is very different from the sort of modern scientific enquiry today. In evaluating eyewitness testimony today, while the “trustworthiness” is still part of the equation, but we focus a lot more on, did you see the witness in the day or night? How’s your eyesight? Isn’t the person you saw too far to see or make out clearly? We’re focused, not on the character of the person, but the external reality and situation itself and what sort of facts or information it can convey to us. Again, the transition from premodern to modern epistemology can be characterised by a shift from focusing on character of the knower as a source of knowledge, to focusing on the thing or external realities itself which we grasp or master.
So to bring it back to the title, in the era of deep fakes, edited images, even hyperrealistic A.I. generated videos, it seems apt to revisit this fundamental epistemic question again: is it a *who* or a *what* upon which you base your source of knowledge? If you see a video on twitter, fundamentally do you check first *who* sent it, and then based on the *who* tweeted it, believe or reject it, or do you try looking at the video itself to determine if its video itself makes sense and whether it fits with your knowledge of “reality”?
Maybe to go back to my postmodern theme, maybe all reality, and all knowledge, in the end is subjective, it’s *somebody* and some subject all the way down, there are no objective “facts” out there for your “lying eyes”, and at the bottom you need to trust *somebody* for what you can even see with your own eyes in this world, and that somebody is the Creator of this world and of your eyes.