From Presence Towards Consciousness

Immersive virtual environments can break the deep everyday connection between where our senses tell us that we are and where we actually are located and whom we are with. ‘Presence research’ studies the phenomenon of acting and feeling that we are in the world created by computer displays. We argue that presence is a phenomenon worthy of study by neuroscientists and may help towards the study of consciousness, since it may be regarded as consciousness within a restricted domain. Suppose that you are in a place that you know to be fictitious. It is not a ‘place’ at all in any physical sense, but an illusion created by a virtual reality system. You know that there is no place, and you know that the events you see, hear and feel that are happening there are not really events in the every day physical meaning of that word. You are conscious of that ‘place’ and those ‘events’, and simultaneously conscious of that the fact that there is no place and there are no events. Yet, you find yourself thinking, feeling and behaving as if that place were real, and as if those events were happening. For example, you see a deep precipice in front of you that you know is not really there in a physical sense. Your heart races and you are frightened enough by what you see to be very reluctant to move yourself closer to the edge. From a cognitive point of view you know that there is nothing there, but both unconsciously (e.g., heart rate) and consciously (your awareness of your own fear) you respond as if there is something there. How is this possible? This paradox, observed daily in virtual reality laboratories around the world, is at the root of the concept of ‘presence’ studied by virtual reality specialists, and also relates to many of the concepts studied by neuroscientists ranging from perception through to the consciousness.