Abstract
This chapter is intended to be both theoretical and a little speculative. It draws upon psychological, neuro-dynamic and philosophical sources to create an account of what happens when we experience presence, that is, when we become aware that we are present. This chapter also offers an alternate treatment of the work of Riva and his colleagues with respect to their bio-cultural approach to presence.
Rather than appealing to evolution, biology or technology, this account starts like this: affect precedes cognition. We feel before we think. These feelings (or affective responses) are primarily evaluative and effectively prime our cognition for the world (real or digital) we find ourselves in. All of the apparatus of sense making, reasoning and so forth follow fairly quickly but they are not the first responders. Our affective response is very fast – much faster than our cognition.
In answering the question, how do we find the world, that is, just what is this affective response in response to, we must switch from psychology to philosophy.
Heidegger tells us that we encounter the world as available. Psychology and sense making follow this. We connect with this available world by what Merleau-Ponty calls an intentional arc or intentional threads which “anchor us” to it. This is not simply philosophical discourse as Freeman is able to explain the neuro-dynamics of this arc by invoking the operation of the limbic system – that is, those parts of the brain responsible for our emotional response to the world.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that in their more recent treatments of presence, Riva and Waterworth have modified and significantly extended their position. For example, they treat extended presence as, “related to the emergence of the extended self: the intuitive perception of successfully acting in the external world towards a possible object” (Riva and Waterworth 2013, p. 207).
From this short quotation we can see that they propose that presence is intuitive and is concerned with goal-directed behaviour. By intuitive, they mean that the experience of presence, as a product of our cognition, does not require conscious deliberation while the term object carrying with it the suggestion of objective, motivation and, possibly, intentionality. Here presence is seen to have an evaluative role, providing the organism with feedback on how it is doing with regard to achieving its object or goals. Riva and Waterworth have also suggested a neurological mechanism for this involving a particular form of simulation theory (cf. Blackemore and Decety 2001).
- 2.
To illustrate the importance of recognizing presence as intentional it is worth contrasting it with a non-intentional state. One such non-intentional state is anxiety. Anxiety is, by definition, a sense or state of nervousness or unease about something uncertain or ill-defined, for example, “I am anxious about the state of the world”. Presence is about feeling one is somewhere or engaged with something in particular.
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Turner, P. (2015). Affect, Availability and Presence. In: Lombard, M., Biocca, F., Freeman, J., IJsselsteijn, W., Schaevitz, R. (eds) Immersed in Media. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10190-3_4
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