Sameness of place and the senses

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Alisa Mandrigin ◽  
Matthew Nudds
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Single Location ◽  
The World ◽  
Multisensory Information ◽  
Content Of Experience

When we watch a film at the cinema, we typically experience the speech we hear as coming from the mouths of the actors depicted on the screen, rather than from the loudspeakers. This is an everyday example of the spatial ventriloquism effect. In this chapter, we are interested in what it is for things that we are aware of through different senses to appear to be in a single space, or even—as in spatial ventriloquism—at the same place. The answer may seem trivial: all that is required is that we pick out places in the different senses in the same way. However, as Millikan (1991, 2000) has argued, representing a single location in the same way is not the same as representing sameness of location. What we need, either instead of, or as well as, sameness of reference frame, is for sameness of place to be a part of the content of experience. Empirical evidence suggests that there exist peripersonal representations that encode multisensory information about the region of space that immediately surrounds the body. Their existence generates a puzzle for accounts of perception—namely, what is the relation between peripersonal representations that figure in empirical discussions and our everyday perceptual experience of ourselves and the world? Here we examine whether peripersonal space representations might play a role in our conscious awareness of the spatial relations between entities experienced in vision, audition, and touch.

Feeling the world as being here

2021 ◽  
pp. 181-196
Author(s):  
Frédérique de Vignemont
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Visual Field ◽  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Vast Array ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
Psychiatric Syndrome ◽  
The World

A vast array of experimental results has recently shown that there is something specific in the way we perceive the space immediately surrounding the body, also known as ‘peripersonal space’, by contrast with the perception of what lies farther away. However, we seem to have no conscious awareness of peripersonal space as being ‘special’ in any sense. Instead, we are presented with a continuous visual field without a phenomenological boundary between what is close and what is far. The computational peculiarities of peripersonal perception thus seem to have no phenomenological consequences. Here I will argue that, when you see an object in the immediate surroundings of your body, not only do you have a visual experience of the object (comparable to the experience you can have of further objects), but you also experience what you see as being here. This sense of here-ness can be conceived of as a specific type of sense of presence. To better understand it, I shall turn to illusions in virtual reality and to the feeling of disconnection in the psychiatric syndrome of depersonalization.

scholarly journals Appearances and dis/dys-appearances

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth El Refaie
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Conscious Awareness ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Conceptual Metaphor Theory ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Dynamic Perspective ◽  
Complex Fluid

This article draws on phenomenological and sociological notions of the ‘lived’ body in order to develop a dynamic perspective on embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. My main argument is that even our most basic sensorimotor experiences are more complex, fluid, and more deeply imbued with socio-cultural meanings than many metaphor scholars assume. While our conscious awareness is ordinarily directed towards the world, making our physical actions and perceptions appear to be natural and straightforward, at times of dysfunction, such as illness and disability, the body suddenly seizes our attention and is perceived as alien. In these moments bodily experience often becomes not just the source, but also the target of metaphorical mappings. I demonstrate the usefulness of the notion of dynamic embodiment by applying it to the example of verbal and visual cancer metaphors.

Expérimenter la pensée en schémas-images. Des adolescents s’interrogent « d’où viennent les pensées ? »

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2 supplement) ◽  
pp. 79-95
Author(s):  
Anda Fournel ◽  
Jean-Pascal Simon
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Philosophy For Children ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Inquiry Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind

"Experimenting Thinking in Image Schemas. Teenagers are Wondering “Where Do Thoughts Come From?” An intellectual view of philosophy as an activity focusing on understanding abstract concepts and their relationships deprives philosophical exercise of the participation of the body and senses. If we reject the mind-body dualism, as Dewey, Johnson, etc. did, then we are constantly engaged in interactions with the world and others, and can thus consider the act of thinking from our own experiences. Inspired by an experimentalist conception of school and life, as well as the method of inquiry developed by Dewey, the Philosophy for Children program provides an inquiry process that invites participants to conceptualize and reason philosophically in a collaborative manner. Do these practices implement an embodied cognition? To find out, we selected a discussion as a case study and analyzed it based on the observation that the issue to be discussed by the participants - “where do thoughts come from?” contains two image schemas: path (come from) and source (where). We have noted a variety and a significant number of expressions (“they come from within”, “they come from what happens outside”, etc.) whose analysis enhances a better understanding of how an experience of understanding the origins of our thoughts fits into the discourse and contributes to a collective conceptualization of “thinking”. Keywords: image schemas, perceptual experience, conceptualisation, community of philosophical inquiry, experimentalism "

The Horizonal Structure of Perceptual Experience

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-141
Author(s):  
Carleton B. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Intentional Content ◽  
John Mcdowell ◽  
Philosophy Of Perception ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Subject

Edmund Husserl’s account of the horizonal character of simple, sensuous perception provides a sophisticated account of perceptual intentional content which enables plausible responses to key issues in the philosophy of perception and in Heidegger interpretation. Section 2 outlines Husserl’s account of intentionality in its application to such perceptual experience. Section 3 then elaborates the notion of perceptual horizon in order to draw out, in Section 4, its implications for four issues: firstly, the relation between the object perceived and perceptual appearance (qua item “in consciousness”); secondly, the relation between the subject perceiving and perceptual appearance; thirdly, what sense of the body is inherent to perceptual experience of the horizonal kind; and fourthly, what John McDowell is getting at when he claims that traditional conceptions fail to capture how perception puts us in cognitive contact with the world. The paper concludes by using the interpretation developed to show how Husserl’s account of perceptual experience as horizonal enables one to draw out the sense and worth of what Heidegger means by worldliness and the “Da” of Dasein.

scholarly journals Auditory roughness elicits defense reactions

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marine Taffou ◽  
Clara Suied ◽  
Isabelle Viaud-Delmon
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Information ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Defensive Responses ◽  
Defensive Behaviors ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Multisensory Information ◽  
Tactile Integration

AbstractAuditory roughness elicits aversion, and higher activation in cerebral areas involved in threat processing, but its link with defensive behavior is unknown. Defensive behaviors are triggered by intrusions into the space immediately surrounding the body, called peripersonal space (PPS). Integrating multisensory information in PPS is crucial to assure the protection of the body. Here, we assessed the behavioral effects of roughness on auditory-tactile integration, which reflects the monitoring of this multisensory region of space. Healthy human participants had to detect as fast as possible a tactile stimulation delivered on their hand while an irrelevant sound was approaching them from the rear hemifield. The sound was either a simple harmonic sound or a rough sound, processed through binaural rendering so that the virtual sound source was looming towards participants. The rough sound speeded tactile reaction times at a farther distance from the body than the non-rough sound. This indicates that PPS, as estimated here via auditory-tactile integration, is sensitive to auditory roughness. Auditory roughness modifies the behavioral relevance of simple auditory events in relation to the body. Even without emotional or social contextual information, auditory roughness constitutes an innate threat cue that elicits defensive responses.

scholarly journals The Primacy of the Perceptual Experience in Maurice Merleau-Ponty

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-316
Author(s):  
Alessandro Ballabio
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
The World ◽  
Practical Synthesis

Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques (1946) is the transcription of the discussion that Merleau-Ponty had on November 23, 1946, at the Société française de Philosophie on the results of Phénoménologie de la perception (1945). Merleau-Ponty states that perception is not an intellectual but a practical synthesis that implies the movement of the body, as the origin of the perceptual experience of the world.

scholarly journals A Minimal Sense of Here-ness

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (4) ◽  
pp. 169-187
Author(s):  
Frédérique de Vignemont ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Buffer Zone ◽  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
External World ◽  
Perceptual System ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Tactile Sense ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

In this paper, I give an account of a hitherto neglected kind of ‘here’, which does not work as an intentional indexical. Instead, it automatically refers to the immediate perceptual environment of the subject’s body, which is known as peripersonal space. In between the self and the external world, there is something like a buffer zone, a place in which objects and events have a unique immediate significance for the subject because they may soon be in contact with her. I argue that seeing objects as being here in a minimal sense means seeing them in the place in which the perceptual system expects the world and the body to collide. I further argue that this minimal notion of here-content gives rise to a tactile sense of presence. It provides a unique experiential access to the reality of the seen object by making us aware of its ability to have an effect on us.

scholarly journals Consciousness as Generative Entanglement

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (12) ◽  
pp. 645-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Clark ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Computational Neuroscience ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
The World ◽  
Perception Action ◽  
Shed Light

Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the human brain as a complex, multi-layer prediction engine. This family of models has had great success in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena involving perception, action, and attention. But despite their clear promise as accounts of the neurocomputational origins of perceptual experience, they have not yet been leveraged so as to shed light on the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness—the problem of explaining why and how the world is subjectively experienced at all, and why those experiences seem just the way they do. To address this issue, I motivate and defend a picture of conscious experience as flowing from “generative entanglements” that mix predictions about the world, the body, and (crucially) our own reactive dispositions.

Dissecting the experience of space as peripersonal

2021 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Wayne Wu
Keyword(s):  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Peripersonal Space ◽  
Perceptual System ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
Distinctive Type ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
Content Of Experience ◽  
Distinctive Role

Are we aware of peripersonal space as peripersonal? Is there a distinctive way that peripersonal space is perceptually experienced that differs from the perceptual experience of other parts of space? I explore two ways of thinking about peripersonal experience. A substantial view takes the content of experience of peripersonal space to effectively represent that space as peripersonal while a deflationary view understands peripersonal experience to be constituted by specific sensory-motor links and implicates a distinctive role for attention. In both, there is a distinctive type of peripersonal experience, but only on the substantial view does the perceptual system speak in terms of the peripersonal. By examining the role of attention in peripersonal experience, I argue that we should not endorse a substantive conception of peripersonal experience over a deflationary conception. I explore what a deflationary account of peripersonal experience might be.

A Phenomenology of/with Total Movement: Response to Erin Manning

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 208-221
Author(s):  
Jodie McNeilly
Keyword(s):  
Critical Points ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Movement Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Total Movement ◽  
The Subject

In ‘Wondering the world directly’, Erin Manning criticizes phenomenology by drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the problems of his own project and the criticisms of José Gil. Manning claims that phenomenology goes ‘wrong’ in its privileging of the subject and processes of intentionality: the ‘consciousness–object distinction’. While phenomenology on this understanding alone is inadequate to account for movement and the body, process philosophy has the ‘ability to create a field for experience that does not begin and end with a human subject’. This article responds to Manning’s criticism by arguing that phenomenology never intended to perpetuate a concept of subject that fixes an inexorable gap between itself and objects. A historical assessment of subjectivity and intentionality in the work of five different authors, alongside critical points that address Manning’s misconstrual of phenomenology, leads to an understanding of movement that need not ‘outrun the subject’ or become a precarious limit to perceptual experience because of its primacy.

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