Digital Escapism and the Miracle of Cave Art

Prehistoric cave art provides a window into the earliest days of humanity. It is almost a miracle that these artistic messages reached us, under the sheltered darkness of caves, after tens of thousands of years.

Hand prints are common among the most ancient of these paintings. We may not know exactly what these prints mean, but we immediately feel gripped by them, partly because we understand the fact that a prehistoric human knew this was a way of communicating with the future and with humanity as a whole. They somehow knew this could work—that we would feel connected to them, despite our enormous communicative and cultural differences.

The miracle of “cave art” is both that they succeeded in making us feel connected to them and that their beautiful artistic creations actually survived for so long. The first miracle is explainable in terms of our common cognitive and moral needs—our shared humanity. The second was sheer luck.

Pigments on rocks would not be valuable, at all, unless they constituted an act of joint attention between prehistoric humans and humanity as a whole. This timeless power of joint attention is constitutive of humanity. The value and energy of joint attention depend fundamentally upon real facts, as opposed to contraptions or simulations that would create a communicative farce. For instance, the farce may be that the hand prints were placed there under fake conditions by an imposter, who is just messing with us. Then they are neither ancient nor real acts of communication.

A fake can manipulate the recipient of a message, making the recipient feel connected, but only the truth can establish a genuine and valuable connection between sender and recipient, one that even has a liberatory power through communication, as these early creations of prehistoric humans demonstrate. Truth is deeply related to this notion of communicative care and permanence. The world has epistemic value because it has a real history, and we understand that we are part of its history. We are not arbitrarily here as the result of a whimsical decision of an impostor that places us in an enslaved or subservient situation, similar to the characters that live in a simulation, as in the movie “the Matrix”.

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina

"By Mariano"/commons.wikimedia

Humans are keenly aware of the imminence of their own death. This makes them realize how important it is to communicate truthfully and unequivocally. Cave art transcends the specific circumstances of our very limited human lives, but it is radically different from the escapism of living in a fake or simulated world.

The care for truth and genuine communication (the more traditional human epistemic drives) stands against epistemic escapism, which is the idea that living in a simulation would be of equal value as living in our real and precious planet. The old version of this idea is that everything is a dream, an illusion. The new version is about the wonders of living in a virtual world, aided by technology that is smarter than us. Clearly, our new version is more dangerous because it implies that a fake world may actually be better than reality—this was never the point of the traditional, skeptical version.

There is little hope to connect truth with freedom if epistemic escapism is true. Our world is familiar to us because we are part of it, and this depends fundamentally on the factual history of the world. In a simulation, there would be no connection between truth and justice either. Genocides, pandemics, the slave trade, and starvation could all be interpreted as part of the fakery, just events that are added to the simulation with no substantial significance other than perhaps entertainment or shock (they are not real!). They would be on a par with fake football games and horse races. When this kind of disconnection between truth, freedom, and justice is encouraged by our fascination with technology, recently with artificial intelligence, we are opening the door to all sorts of communicational and societal risks (Montemayor, 2023).

The solution is not to destroy machines or prevent the development of artificial intelligence. What is needed is the reinvigoration of our communicative capacities, which have suffered from the exploitation of communication for commercial purposes. Instead of creating more risk and misunderstanding, we need to create more trust. This is the next technological challenge we have to face, and more voices are contributing to this discussion.

But it is worth asking, why are we so fascinated by the new forms of epistemic escapism? A plausible answer is that this is because we are facing a transitional point in society, and our problems seem to be larger than our collective wisdom. No wonder we want to escape from the world—to Mars, to a simulation, or to the virtual worlds that will be created by our technological overlords. What would be an easier way to escape than turning our world into a mere simulation? If we are to keep our humanity and trust in each other, then we need to fully appreciate the efforts of our ancestors to connect with us. Joint attention would not be a thing if we were not driven by the need to communicate with each other and create an understanding that allowed us to evolve (despite the inability to learn from our mistakes).

The superficial interpretation here is that it is nice that the cave artists simply painted such beautiful images for their ancestors. The deeper lesson is that they knew that the only way of transcending the constraints and seemingly insurmountable problems of living a limited life is by appealing to our needs for representing and caring about the world and each other, thereby creating a strong bond between truth, freedom, and justice. The drive to seek truth and to share knowledge is best exemplified by the evolution of humans, with varying degrees of challenges along the way. Now we must assess the challenge that the seduction of an idealistic, yet simulated, world will detract from the truth, enabling manipulative forces to exploit this unreality in favor of their own motivations. We must step back and scrutinize the compelling simulations emerging today and the ethical implications of our ingenuity.