The Meaning of Presence
Abstract
Terminological
and other confusions about what comprises presence, and what does not, have
impeded progress in the field. In this speculative short paper we suggest
that presence has a biological purpose and that a consideration of this
purpose may provide a way forward.
We see presence as the feeling a conscious organism experiences when
immersed in a concrete external world. This feeling must be distinguishable
from engagement in internally constructed mental worlds, in organisms
equipped to construct such inner realities. Presence depends on the form of
the media, because form determines whether a world must be constructed
internally or can be said to exist outside the perceiver.
From this claim, we speculate on possible future ways of applying presence
in psychotherapy and the arts. In viewing presence this way we are
adopting an experiential realist position, one that sees meaning as
residing ultimately in concrete experiences of external worlds, real or
virtual – in other words, in presence.
Keywords
Presence, internal worlds, perception, emotion, meaning, psychotherapy,
the arts.
1 Introduction
A recent article by Slater (2003) points to the current confusion about
what is signified by the word “presence”. Slater suggests that presence is
about form, not content. It should not be confused with degree of interest
in, nor emotional engagement with, the contents of an environment. Slater
also suggests that presence is not the same as immersion. We agree with
Slater that it is important to distinguish presence from emotional
engagement, otherwise the concept of presence will lose any distinctive
meaning. But we find the justification for this stance to be more than
terminological. We claim that feeling presence has a biological purpose. It
is only possible to motivate the need for terminological clarity, and to
apply the clarified concept to a variety of practical, therapeutic and
entertainment settings, if we understand this purpose, which is the meaning
of presence.
We begin with a consideration of presence as media form, drawing on our
earlier work claiming that level of experienced presence is an inverse
function of the degree of abstraction of the media. This allows a
distinction to be made between presence and the suspension of disbelief
with which it is often confused. We move on in later sections to expand on
our view of the biological purpose of presence, and from there to its
therapeutic and other usefulness as the “royal road” to emotional change.
2 Presence and Media Form
We have been suggesting that presence is a function of form for several
years now (e.g. Waterworth, 1996; Waterworth and Waterworth, 2000a,b;
2001). Our argument is that people routinely deal with two kinds of
information, the concrete and the abstract. Concrete information is of a form
that can be dealt with directly via the perceptual-motor systems; it
includes information coming from the world around us, and it gives rise to
the sense of presence. The information is realised as the world or, through
technology, as a world that exists outside our minds. Abstract information
must be realised mentally. An imagined world is created from abstract
information, and such imagined worlds may be very vivid and emotionally
engaging, but they only exist mentally. Waterworth et al. (2001) presented
evidence that different versions of a media production elicited different
levels of presence, depending on the degree of abstraction of the
information presentation. Specifically, the more concrete the presentation,
the higher the level of experienced presence.
We have called this engagement with an internally-realised world
“absence”. For example, Waterworth and Waterworth (2000a) claim that “Presence arises when we mostly attend to the
currently present environment within and around the body. The capacity we
have for such attention depends on the amount of conceptual processing the
situation demands. As we process more in an abstract way, we can
consciously sample fewer concrete aspects of the present situation, and so
our sense of presence diminishes; we become absent”.
We need to understand the presence-absence distinction if we are to
understand presence, and perhaps also consciousness in general. As Max
Velmans puts it: “What we normally
call the ‘physical world’ just is what we experience. There is no
additional experience of the world ‘in the mind or brain’”, whereas, “We
also have ‘inner’ experiences such as verbal thoughts, images, feelings of
knowing, experienced desires, and so on.” and “In so far as these processes
are experienced, they are reflexively experienced to be roughly where they
are (in the head or brain)” (Velmans, 2000, p. 110).
The distinction between internally- and
externally-generated worlds (and the importance of form) is clear if we
consider the difference between reading a gripping novel and acting in a
convincing virtual reality. The world of the novel is depicted in an
abstract form – the symbols of textual language. We must do conceptual work
to realise it mentally. A VR is depicted in a concrete form, and can be
experienced in the ideal case without extra work – by the same perceptual
processes by which we interact with the real world. The virtual world is
the same for everyone who acts in it, just as the real world is (though, of
course, our experiences and reactions differ). But the world I realise in
my head when I read a novel is not the same as the one you realise, though
it will have similarities. Put even more simply, we can share external
worlds, but we cannot share imagined worlds. Media form determines the
extent to which information is realised externally or internally. Presence
is what it feels like to be conscious and embodied in an external world.
We have previously suggested that degree of presence versus absence is
orthogonal to both the real-virtual distinction, and the level of
attentional arousal of the experiencer (Waterworth and Waterworth, 2001).
By this view, we can be highly present in a virtual world, highly absent in
the real world and vice versa. Level of attention can be high when we feel
present, but also when we feel absent, and presence can be high even when
attention level is low. Since emotional content is one of the factors that
can be expected to affect attention level, Slater’s (2003) statement that
“Presence is orthogonal to emotional content” is compatible with our
earlier position, insofar as emotional content determines level of
attention.
However, it is not clear that presence and emotion can be treated as
independent. Obviously, when the content of an environment is engaging
people will tend to report higher levels of presence. More interestingly,
it may be that presence – as a reaction to being immersed in a world – is
intrinsically tied to emotional engagement. It may be that we cannot act in
the external world, nor make decisions in the internal world of the mind,
without emotion (Damasio, 1994; 1999). If this is true, to feel present is
to have emotions. But this is also true of absence! To make sense of this,
and clarify why presence cannot be the same as emotional engagement, it is
necessary to consider what biological purpose presence might have.
3 The Biological Purpose of Presence
We claim that presence is a defining feature of core consciousness (see
Damasio, 1999). It is a fundamentally biological phenomenon, in fact, a
feeling. Presence is the feeling of being bodily in an externally-existing
world. It was designed by evolution to ensure that organisms attend to the
things in their here and now that might affect their survival. This is why
it is so easily confused with emotionality or level of interest. For
organisms in a natural environment, it is vital to pay attention and
respond rapidly to present threats and opportunities. Our emotional life is
built on this evolutionary substrate. But as extended consciousness
evolved, imagined situations became increasingly important to survival and
biological success. Because of this, these imagined situations evoke the
same mechanisms of interest and emotion, but they do not elicit presence.
When we imagine, think, plan and generally deal with information that
does not constitute our experience of things and events in the currently
present external situation we are exercising extended consciousness. And it
is extended consciousness that allows us to create an internal world in
which we may suspend disbelief. Extended consciousness relies on working
memory (Damasio, 1999), which can be seen as the “active scratchpad” of
mental life (Baars, 1988; Baddeley, 1986, 1992; Hitch and Baddeley, 1976).
It is in working memory that the internal world we are currently
experiencing is largely created. Its function is to allow us to consider
possibilities not present in the current external situation. In contrast,
core consciousness is directed exclusively to the here and now – the
present – and is what we share with all conscious animals. This reinforces
the idea that presence is a common biological state, as well as the
seemingly more fanciful suggestion that virtual worlds could engage animals
as well as people (Waterworth, 1996).
As Damasio puts it (1999, page 195), “Extended consciousness goes beyond
the here and now of core consciousness, both backward and forward”.
Extended consciousness gives us obvious advantages over organisms without
it, such as the ability to plan and generally enact in the imagination
possible scenarios in the future, as well as to increase the sophistication
of learning from the past. Language depends on it, because we must retain
linear sequences of symbols in working memory if we are to understand
utterances, whether spoken or written. It is presumably because of these
advantages that consciousness has become extended in this way through the
process of evolution (Pinker, 1998).
The advantages of extended consciousness depend on the fact that we can
distinguish between the experience of the external word and the experience
of imagined internal worlds; in other words, between presence and what we
call absence. Viable organisms must be able to tell the difference between
an imagined future situation and the actual, present, external situation.
Confusions of the two indicate serious psychological problems, problems
which, until recent times, would have prevented survival and the passing on
of this condition. Simply put, if we react as if the external world is only
imaginary we will not survive long (think of this the next time you cross a
busy street). And if we think that what we are merely imagining is actually
happening, we may omit to carry out basic activities on which our survival
depends. We are suggesting that presence is the feeling that evolution has
given us to make this vital distinction.
It should be clear now why we consider
the suspended disbelief we have, for example, when reading a gripping
novel, and the sense of presence we experience in a convincing VR, to be different
things, although both can lead to emotional engagement. Confusing these two
has led to the lack of terminological clarity, which, as Slater (2003)
rightly emphasises, has contributed to a certain lack of recent progress in
our understanding of presence. As we put it in an earlier paper (Waterworth
and Waterworth, 2001) “The root of the problem with many existing
models of presence is perhaps confusion between presence and suspension of
disbelief”. Our view is that suspension of disbelief does not result in
“the illusion of nonmediation” that, as Lombard and Ditton (1997) aptly
suggest, characterises presence. Rather, suspension of disbelief results in
imagined presence, which can be highly engaging.
Thanks to the evolutionary nature of the development of the mind,
current events from the surrounding external environment are only confused
with mentally constructed events in exceptional cases of psychological
disturbance. This is true no
matter how vivid or emotionally engaging the mentally created world may be.
Suspension of disbelief (in a mentally constructed world) is only confused
with presence (in an externally surrounding world) when the organism’s
sensory systems are seriously impaired or artificially “turned off” (see
Humphrey, 1992; Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998, Chapter 5). What we are experiencing when we
interpret the imagined as the real is hallucination, and is usually
indicative of a serious problem for the organism concerned. It is from the
experienced distinction between imagined and real presence that the
therapeutic potential of presence derives.
4 Speculations on the Therapeutic Use of Presence
We have suggested that presence is how it feels to be engaged with an
external world, and that this can be distinguished from how it feels to be
engaged with an internal world. Both kinds of world, the external one
eliciting presence and the internal one producing what we call absence,
evoke emotion. We feel embarrassment when we are publicly humiliated, and
we feel it again when we imagine ourselves being so treated. Normally, and
naturally, the external world – and presence – is given priority. When
driving, we must act to avoid the traffic hazard before we continue our
absent-minded daydreaming about the weekend – even if what we were imagining
was much more exciting than the present situation. It is because of the
priority given to presence that VR has such potential as a powerful
psychotherapeutic tool.
The aim of much psychotherapy is to change the linking between life
events and emotional responses to those events. We are not psychotherapists
and we will not attempt here to review the many, often successful, attempts
to apply VR to a variety of psychological maladjustments (see, for example,
Riva et al., 1999). However, we do suggest that presence may provide a
“royal road” to the evocation of emotion and change, just because it has a
psychological precedence based on its biological and evolutionary
importance. As Damasio (1999) suggests on the basis of neurological
findings, “the ‘body-loop’ mechanism of emotion and feeling is of greater
importance for real experience of feelings than the ‘as if body-loop’
mechanism” (page 294).
As we understand it, most psychotherapies take the internal world (or
‘as if body-loop’) route to emotion. Ideation of a situation might be used
to provoke an emotional response that can then be discussed and addressed,
perhaps in conjunction with relaxation techniques. VR is most often seen as
an adjunct to ideation, a way to strengthen this approach to change. But
the basic approach remains the same and rests on the idea that meaning
resides primarily in internal worlds, and that change should arise first
and foremost in those internal worlds. The result is that psychotherapy,
although successfully exploiting VR technologies, does so within a
framework that perhaps fails to capitalise on the organismic priority of
presence.
The conventional framework could be described as “imagining evokes
emotions and the meaning of the associated feelings can be changed through
reflection and relaxation”. We would suggest as an alternative that
“experience evokes emotions that result in meaningful new feelings which
can be reflected upon”. The conventional framework is limited by the
secondary nature of the feelings evoked, based on the internal world route.
We speculate that the alternative approach may be more effective, because
by using VR it can take the external world route. We suggest that meaning
derives ultimately from bodily experiences of being in an external world. It
seems reasonable to predict that the meanings of feelings can be more
effectively changed when they are addressed at source.
Our view of meaning rests
on recent trends in philosophy, such as Lakoff and Johnson’s “experiential
realism” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; 1999), and we have applied this
approach successfully to the design of navigable information landscapes
(Waterworth, 1999: Waterworth et al., 2003). By this view, meaning derives
ultimately from embodied experience, in core consciousness; in other words,
from presence. Presence comes first, both in evolutionary terms and in
epistemological terms. Presence provides the grounding for meaningful
reflections in extended consciousness. And presence may be intrinsically
emotional, as mentioned earlier.
5 Future Research Directions
Unfortunately, little
research in psychotherapy has so far investigated how to evoke a range of
different emotions through the use of virtual worlds, and we see this as a very
promising area for future research. This is one aim of the recently started
EMMA project, in which we are involved (see Alcañiz et al., 2002). As an
example of possible approaches, we have started to develop linked virtual
world-zones that can be navigated by what we call the ‘body joystick’. This
technique was inspired by the immersive art works of Char Davies,
especially Osmose (see Davies, 2003). Breath and balance are used to
navigate within and between these world-zones, each of which is designed to
evoke a specific emotion. Navigation in the virtual space becomes some kind
of “psychofeedback”, as immersants learn to control their bodies to move
between different emotion zones. The main aim of the environment is as a
test-bed to explore the role of presence in the evocation and alteration of
emotion.
Interactive art is another important area of future research on the
nature of presence, and one that also provides insights into the
therapeutic possibilities of presence. We have found that a sophisticated,
shared VR environment combining a high level of immersion with a strong
sense of social co-presence, can be effective in overcoming participants’
self-conscious fears of participation (Waterworth et al., 2002). It seems
almost as if, given sufficient presence and suitable contents, participants
have no choice but to abandon their fears. We think that this can
potentially form the basis of learning experiences that facilitate adaptive
psychological change. Note that the experience comes first – by our account
it has its own inherent meaning – and reflection and consolidated change
would come later.
The phenomena of altered and exaggerated presence open up additional
research questions and possibilities. After experiencing environments such
as Osmose, immersants often report extraordinary changes to their
sense of being. Standard
immersive VR technology, combined with the bodily style of interaction
(using only breath and balance) and engrossing and evocative content, seems
to facilitate an unusual level of presence. Participants feel changed by
the experience, and report a loss of reflective self-consciousness, which
is compatible with the idea that presence is a product of core
consciousness. When presence is sufficiently strong, attention is directed
exclusively towards the here and now of the external world. There is no
space left for internal worlds in which the self is modelled as an actor.
This “superpresence” is
abnormal; in everyday life we are never – except perhaps very briefly, and
on rare occasions – so completely present. Normally, we experience a
balance of presence and absence, depending on the needs of the situations
in which we find ourselves. We must almost always attend to both, because
the real world is a physically and socially dangerous place. But we have found
that a well-designed and framed virtual world can serve as a safe haven, a
place in which people report feeling extraordinarily present (Waterworth et
al., 2001).
Another way of achieving extraordinary presence may be through
“transfers between sensory experiences”, as Slater (2003) points out. By
presenting information in altered modalities (sights as sounds, and so on)
we are likely to not only change the nature of presence, but also elicit
enhanced levels of presence. This new way of perceiving may also generate
new creative insights (Waterworth, 1997).
We speculate that many common psychological problems, such as phobias,
depression, anxiety, debilitating shyness and so on, arise from an
imbalance in the relative levels of presence and absence. Specifically, we
suggest that these problems may arise as the result of too little presence,
sometimes in only specific situations, sometimes more generally. The
sufferer focuses too exclusively on their idea of what is happening and
their own place in it (their internal model of the situation or world), at
the expense of experiencing their own, relatively unreflective, presence in
the external situation or world. To lose the sense of presence is to lose
one’s sense of being in the world, and is both an unnatural and a
distressing condition.
We suggest that VR treatment for such conditions will be effective to
the extent that it redresses the balance between presence and absence.
People tend to settle into habits of mind that resist change. Evoking
superpresence might be a particularly effective way of promoting beneficial
psychological change from conditions characterised by an over-emphasis on
the internal world. We imagine a future where immersive environments,
designed in particular ways to elicit extra-ordinary presence, are
routinely used to help both patients and normals recover or reinforce their
sense of being.
6 Summary
There are often obvious biological reasons for many of the feelings we
experience. We get hungry so that we will not allow ourselves to starve. We
look for sex so that we will perpetuate our genetic heritage. We feel pain
when we have been damaged, perhaps so that we won’t damage ourselves that
way again, and also to ensure that we attend to our own repair. We feel
fear when we are in a dangerous situation. And we feel present when we are
conscious and in an external world.
We have presented the feeling of presence as a manifestation of core
consciousness, which allows people to deal with the perceptual here and now
of their current situation. VR can trigger a sense of presence by engaging
the same capacities of core consciousness as are engaged by the real world.
This is why, in principle, VR could engage any animal possessed of core
consciousness. It is necessary, in organisms such as ourselves who also
possess extended consciousness, that this feeling is distinguishable from
involvement in what may be an equally emotionally engaging internal,
conceptual, world, such as might be created when reading a gripping novel,
or when fantasising about one’s own future or past.
Extended consciousness allows us to imagine almost anything. We often
imagine presence in imaginary or fictional situations and, when we do, some
of the same psychological processes are activated that allow us to
experience an actually present world, including emotional responses. This
is sometimes called suspension of disbelief, as when we read a gripping,
highly descriptive novel. We have called this mental absence. But we do not
confuse presence and absence. We may cry when we read a moving story, but
we do not try to comfort the protagonists because we do not feel their
presence in our world, nor our presence in theirs. To be truly present in a
world is to feel and respond accordingly.
We have pointed to possible ways in which this approach might have an
impact on research in psychotherapy and the arts. There is a particularly
urgent need for more work to investigate the relationship between presence
and emotion. Our view of presence suggests at least a couple of psychotherapeutic
approaches. Presence can be elicited through designed experiences that lead
to changes in the way the individual feels about a situation. It may also
be that exposure to enhanced presence over time leads to fewer distressing
reflections on the self in general. In other words, presence training may
potentially lead to more balanced mental habits.
We see meaning as residing ultimately at the lowest level of concrete
embodied experiences of external worlds – in presence – and not in the more
abstract, higher level thoughts, reflections and imaginings that constitute
our internal world. Our internal worlds and their meanings are built on the
foundation of what it feels like to be consciously in a concrete external
world, on what it means to be present.
References
Alcañiz
Raya, M, Baños, R, Botella, C, Cottone, P, Freeman, J, Gaggioli, G, Keogh,
E, Mantovani, F, Mantovani, G, Montesa, J, Perpiñá, C, Rey, B, Riva, G & Waterworth,
J A (2002). The EMMA project: engaging media for mental health
applications. Presented at Presence 2002. Porto, Portugal, October.
Baars,
B J (1988). A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Baddeley,
A (1986). Working Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baddeley,
A (1992). Working Memory. Science, 255, 566-569.
Damasio,
A (1994). Decartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New
York, USA: Penguin Putnam.
Damasio,
A (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of
Consciousness. San Diego, USA: Harcourt Inc.
Davies,
C (2003). Landscape, Earth, Body, Being, Space and Time in the Immersive
Virtual Environments Osmose and Ephémère. In Malloy, J, (ed.) Women in
New Media. Boston, USA: MIT Press.
Hitch,
G J & Baddley, A (1976). Verbal reasoning and working
memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 28, 603-631.
Humphrey,
N (1992). A History of the Mind. New York: Simon and Shuster.
Lakoff, G, & Johnson, M (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied
Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lombard,
M & Ditton, T (1997). Presence: at the heart of it all. JCMC (3)2.
Pinker,
S (1998). How the Mind Works. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.
Ramachandran,
V S & Blakeslee, S (1998). Phantoms in the Brain.
New York: William Morrow.
Riva,
G, Wiederhold, B & Molinari, E (eds.)
(1999). Virtual Environments in Clinical Psychology and Neuroscience.
Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Slater,
M (2003). A Note on Presence Terminology. Presence-Connect, 3 (3).
Velmans,
M (2000). Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge.
Waterworth,
J A (1996). VR for Animals. Proceedings of
Ciber@RT'96, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain, November 1996.
Waterworth,
J A (1997). Creativity and Sensation: The Case for Synaesthetic Media, Leonardo, 30 (4), 327-330.
Waterworth,
J A (1999). Spaces, Places, Landscapes and Views: experiential design of
shared information spaces. In Munro, A, Höök, K &
Benyon, D
(eds.) Social Navigation of Information Spaces. Springer-Verlag,
London, 1999.
Waterworth,
J A, Lund A & Modjeska, D (2003). Experiential Design of
Shared Information Spaces. In, Höök, K, Benyon, D &
Munro, A
(eds.) Designing Information Spaces: The Social Navigation Approach.
London: Springer.
Waterworth,
E L & Waterworth J A (2000a) Using a Telescope in a Cave:
Presence and Absence in Educational VR. Proceedings of Presence2000: Third
International Workshop on Presence, Delft, Holland, March 2000.
Waterworth,
J A & Waterworth, E L (2000b) Presence and Absence in
Educational VR: The Role of Perceptual Seduction in Conceptual Learning, Themes
in Education, 1 (1), 2000, 7-38.
Waterworth,
E L & Waterworth J A (2001) Focus, Locus and Sensus:
the 3 Dimensions of Virtual Experience. Cyberpsychology and Behavior 4
(2) 203-214.
Waterworth,
E L, Waterworth, J A, & Lauria, R (2001). The
Illusion of Being Present. Proceedings of Presence 2001, 4th
International Workshop on Presence, Philadelphia, May 21-23.
Waterworth,
J A, Waterworth, E L & Westling, J (2002).
Presence as Performance: the mystique of digital participation. Proceedings
of Presence 2002. Porto, Portugal, October 9-11.
|