Abstract
What’s presented in our normal waking perceptual visual experiences feels present to us, while what we “see” in pictures and imagine does not. What about dreams? Does what we “see” in a dream feel present? Jennifer Windt has argued for an affirmative answer, for all dreams. But the dreams which flow from the brain’s registration of myoclonic twitches (body-driven dreams) present a challenge to this answer. During these dreams (so I argue) motion-guiding vision is shut off, and, as Mohan Matthen has argued, motion-guiding vision seems to be a key mechanism underlying the feeling of presence. I propose that the feeling of presence in fact involves two components: the feeling of immersion, and the feeling of availability for action. I suggest that only the feeling of availability for action derives from motion-guiding vision, and, hence, hypothesize that body-driven dreams lack this component to the feeling of presence (while still having the feeling of immersion). Finally, the distinction between these two varieties of presence has implications for measures of presence in virtual environments, as these measures can diverge over which of the two varieties they track.
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Notes
As Dokic and Martin (2017) point out, this idea that perceptual experience involves a feeling of presence goes back to at least Edmund Husserl.
Here I put the word ‘seen’ in scare quotes to indicate that it’s not successful visual perception. This use of scare quotes to talk about dreams is shorthand for more cumbersome locutions. For example, when I refer to “seeing” something in a dream, what I mean is that the phenomenal state of the dreamer is very similar to their phenomenal state when successfully using their eyes when awake. The dreamer phenomenally seems, from within their private stream of consciousness, to be seeing.
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery are strange cases. These are the static, picture-like imagery (or auditory sensibilia) which one sometimes seems to be “looking” at (or “hearing”) during sleep onset or when waking up. Windt (2010, p. 304) excludes this imagery from dreaming proper because it’s something one “looks” at, as opposed to seeming to be immersed in.
I thank Mohan Matthen (personal communication) for suggesting this way of putting the idea, which I’ve here reproduced with only slight paraphrase.
I will follow the standard philosophy convention of using single quotes when mentioning terms, and using double quotes for direct quotations and scare quotes.
This is an explanation, not a conceptual or logical deduction. It, of course, does not necessarily follow from the mere lack of motor integration that visual representations would generate experiences without the feeling of presence. Perhaps there might have been other physical mechanisms or metaphysical bases for the feeling of presence. Matthen’s proposal is that, in fact (in normal humans), this integration of motor-relevant representations is the actual mechanism or basis behind the feeling of presence. His argument, as I lay out below, is that (again, as a matter of empirical fact), when you disconnect visual experience from these motor-relevant representations, you lose the feeling of presence.
I assume the distinction between a picture (e.g., a physical canvas with marks, or an illuminated screen with some pattern of pixels) and what it depicts (e.g., a house, person, rock, etc) is familiar to the reader. Matthen (2005, pp. 306–307) cites Wollheim (1973) and Lopes (1996) as his sources for the distinction.
The classic experimental result here is from Aglioti et al. (1995). There have been subsequent experiments which seem to show that grasping motions can be affected by the Ebbinghaus illusion, although current research suggests a complicated explanation that still is supportive of Matthen’s overall point (e.g., see Katsumata 2019; Smeets et al. 2020). Since my purpose is not to defend Matthen’s theory of the feeling of presence, but examine its compatibility with Windt’s claim that dreams involve the feeling of presence, a rigorous examination of Matthen’s argument is outside the scope of this paper.
Thanks to the Einsteinian equivalence of gravitational force with acceleration in a gravity-free frame of reference, vestibular feedback while sleeping supine is the same as the vestibular feedback you would receive, were you upright and accelerating forward (Windt 2018, p. 2610). So the vestibular feedback received while asleep is ambiguous between those two states, and dreams of flying, at least, might be explained by the brain misinterpreting these signals as indicating that your head is upright and moving forward. Coupled with the lack of proprioceptive feedback indicating walking, it’s not hard to see how representations of flying could result. Windt suggests (ibid) that sleep-onset out-of-body experiences may likewise result from the combination of prior knowledge that one is lying in bed and misinterpreted vestibular feedback (see also Wong 2017, pp. 322–323).
If you haven’t observed another person or infant sleeping lately, you may have at one point watched a dog or cat sleep and observed how their legs forcefully twitch or “kick”.
Here I’m using the term ‘perceptual’ as philosophers often do (e.g., Chisholm 1957, p. 162), to indicate that the experience is not hallucinatory. On this usage, in a perceptual experience the object of the experience is some actual distal stimulus with which you are engaging through your sensory systems, while in hallucinatory experiences the object of the experience is merely intentional, i.e., it isn’t anything presently out in the world with which you’re interacting through your sensory systems. Illusory experiences, under this classification, are perceptual experiences that are in some way inaccurate, nonveridical, or distorted (see Macpherson 2013). While there are, of course, ways of defining hallucinations that exclude dreams (e.g., by defining them as clinical cases involving neurocognitive disfunction), the standard view of dreams takes all experience during dreams to be hallucinatory in the sense just outlined, including any dream experiences of a body. That is, the standard view has it that the body you experience while dreaming isn’t your actual sleeping body (with which you’re interacting through your proprioceptive and tactile systems), but instead is some merely intentional, hallucinated body. This is what Windt is denying when she claims that bodily experience in dreams is perceptual.
The contrast here is between dreams generating or causing RBD behavior (“acting out dreams”), vs RBD behavior causing the dreams (“dreaming our actions”) (Blumberg and Plumeau 2016, p. 35).
Windt’s idea that the feeling of presence depends on correspondence between exteroceptive sensory experience and proprioceptive experience is also found in, and supported by, the literature on inducing the feeling of presence in virtual reality environments (see Sanchez-Vives and Slater 2005; Slater 2009). Windt’s specific suggestion that vestibular orienting plays a role in the sense of presence is echoed by Hong Yu Wong. Wong (2017, pp. 320–326) argues that the vestibular system plays a key role in establishing self-location and a sense of being embedded in the world. Specifically, his point (ibid, p. 320) that vestibular reference frames anchor the reference frames of other sensory systems to fix a referent of “here” is at least within the spirit of Windt’s claim that correlation with vestibular feedback is what makes the scene represented by vision feel present.
Thanks to Mohan Matthen for helping me to sharpen the contrast between Windt’s and his proposals, including suggesting some of the wording used here.
Windt’s and Matthen’s explanation for why visual imagination lacks the feeling of presence differ as well. Matthen would attribute this to the disengagement of motion-guiding vision from the imagined scene. Windt (2018, p. 2583) says that “ongoing perceptual and bodily experience prevent us from feeling fully present in these imaginary worlds”, although clearly it’s also open for her to say that imagined scenes fail to feel present because they don’t depend on interoceptive feedback from the body (e.g., from the eyes). This latter explanation still would not match Matthen’s.
The standard theory of this efferent activity (resulting in twitches) is that it results from the nonfunctional “leakage” of cortical motor commands through the brainstem’s motor blockade (Blumberg 2015, pp. 32–33).
Windt is not the first to attempt to explain dreaming with a predictive-processing framework (e.g., see Clark 2012; Hobson et al. 2014; Hobson and Friston 2014). But other attempts (e.g., Clark 2012) explain dreaming as the result of the brain’s prediction mechanisms running offline, without the constraints of sensory input. Windt explains dreaming as resulting from those mechanisms attempting to predict the consequences of bodily self-sampling.
The actual processing is more complicated than this brief summary suggests. Efference copies are not entirely absent from twitches. Evidence for them being sent to the cerebellum has been found (Mukherjee et al. 2018), suggesting that post-twitch cerebellar activity (e.g., Sokoloff et al. 2015) may actually be instantiating a forward model of twitching. This dampens talk of fundamental wake-sleep motor-processing differences, although, at least in neonatal rats, wake vs sleep reafference leads to drastically different responses in primary motor cortex (Tiriac et al. 2014). The presence of efference copies for twitches and possible twitch-related forward models in the cerebellum is helpful for Windt’s predictive-processing interpretation of this work, which requires these copies and models.
Much of this picture and its supporting evidence is highly speculative. For example, the work Blumberg (Blumberg 2015; Blumberg and Plumeau 2016) and Windt (2018) cite in support of the claim that reafferent proprioceptive input is processed differently during REM sleep than it is while awake is work done in rats that are 8–11 days old (see Tiriac et al. 2014; Sokoloff et al. 2015), and the differences largely disappear by day 12 (see Dooley and Blumberg 2018). Evidence that twitching originates in the brainstem largely comes from work in cats. The only evidence for processing differences in adult humans is indirect: in Parkinson’s patients who suffer from RBD, the tremors of waking movements are absent during RBD movements, suggesting motor processing differences (Blumberg 2015, p. 33). Referring specifically to the REM sleep of adult humans, Blumberg himself (2015, p. 35) says, “None of these ideas has been tested; indeed, it is not yet known whether twitches trigger brain activity in adults as they do in infants.” My aim here is not to critique the Windt-Blumberg proposal, but to discuss whether it’s consistent to accept that proposal, while also accepting Windt’s claim that the visual dream scene feels present and accepting Matthen’s account of the feeling of presence.
Given the character of some real-life clinical hallucination cases, such as in Charles Bonnet syndrome (ffytche 2013), it seems unlikely that motion-guiding vision is still running in these cases. Still, if we consider more radical hallucination cases, such as in traditional philosophical thought experiments in which sensory stimuli are removed while proximal receptor stimulation is maintained, it seems that motion-guiding vision will continue to run as normal.
It’s a widespread view in cognitive science and neuroscience that imagination and other offline forms of representation (e.g., episodic memory) are facilitated by the reactivation of representations in the neural circuits responsible for online sensory perception (Hesslow 2012; Horikawa and Kamitani 2017; Bone et al. 2020).
Compare this case with a hypothetical case of wakeful hallucination. If I hallucinate an object and motion-guiding vision is still engaged, presumably my motor system is still taking those visual representations as input. For example, a hallucinated spider still primes me to recoil away, evincing that visual output still had an affect on motor processing.
Actually, all sensory processing is presumably unit-free, or at least not in our units of degrees and meters.
Windt’s claim that all dreams involve (what I would call) the feeling of immersive presence is influenced by Antti Revonsuo’s (1995) work on consciousness. Revonsuo highlights the immersive character of dreaming, which he takes to reveal something about the fundamental structure of consciousness. Specifically, he says it shows that, whether asleep or awake, consciousness is a kind of virtual world construction akin to what happens as we use virtual reality systems.
Depending on precisely how we want to define ‘motor presence’, it might be possible to have immersive presence without motor presence. Consider the situation of standing in the middle of a room, enclosed in a small glass box. The room is immersively present, but, because of the glass enclosure, is not actually available for action. If the glass is not seen (or is seen but doesn’t affect the neural processing underlying the feeling of motor presence), this might be a case in which you inaccurately experience objects as motor present.
My discussion here is limited to the feeling of motor presence (or any variety of presence) in visual experiences, or experiences with visual components (since there are few pure visual experiences that don’t involve aspects of other sensory modalities, O’Callaghan 2019). I don’t mean to make any claims about the role of motion-guiding vision in the feeling of presence in nonvisual modalities.
Matthen would presumably agree with this point, as he agrees (personal communication) that egocentric spatial connection is not enough for the sense of presence.
Windt is likely amenable to this proposal, given that she notes that some dream reports indicate a lack of “self”, as in, the dream scene was experienced passively, instead of the dreamer feeling like an active participant (Windt 2010, p. 300). Although “phenomenal selfhood” (feeling like an active agent) is not the same thing as the feeling of motor presence, one would expect dreams lacking phenomenal selfhood to lack the feeling of motor presence.
Specifically, Valerie Bernard (personal communication) reports to me that this is what her dreams are like. She reports items sometimes crumbling when touched. I assume that many other people (although perhaps still a minority) would second this report. My own dreams are seldom, if ever, like this, although I have not attempted to keep a systematic log.
If motion-guiding vision does run (albeit in a misfunctioning way) during some dreams and these dreams do involve the feeling of motor presence, that would speak against those dreams being a form of imagination, or, at least, be a major way in which these dreams are unlike typical waking imaginative states. Thus, these cases would provide a challenge to anyone who wanted to argue that all dreams are imaginative states (e.g., Ichikawa 2009, 2016). (Of course, if we can and do perceptually experience our sleeping bodies while dreaming, then that itself is a major challenge to an imagination view of dreams; but here I’m specifically thinking of the visual experiences within dreams and attempts to explain those, specifically, as imaginative states.)
An anonymous referee has pressed me on cases in which a subject dreams they are rock climbing or skiing—activities that normally require a high-degree of motion-guiding vision. Assuming reports of such dreams were taken after twitching, they will face this same issue. Just because someone reports they dreamed they were climbing or skiing does not mean that the visual scene around them felt motor present, as opposed to merely being an imagined scene overlaying a twitch-driven bodily experience.
At first glance, you might wonder if the feeling of motor presence isn’t just what VR researchers have identified as the feeling of reality, or the “plausibility illusion”. To see that the two are different, consider how the feeling of reality/plausibility illusion can attach to what you see on a TV screen, e.g., as it does when you watch live video of an event of some significance. Although, in this case, you feel as if what you see is real, it lacks the feeling of motor presence. You do not, for example, feel as if you could reach into the screen and grab what you see.
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Acknowledgements
Jennifer Windt, Mohan Matthen, Valerie Bernard, Evan Westra, and two anonymous referees provided valuable feedback on this paper. Mohan, especially, provided critical feedback for helping me to sharpen my analysis, including suggesting formulations of main points which I’ve adopted or paraphrased here. Referee 1 deserves special mention for pushing me to clarify how my hypothesis might be tested, as well as for pointing out the connection to work in virtual reality. Referee 2 deserves special mention for pushing me to clarify that descriptive vision involves both allocentric and egocentric spatial reference, and that the important distinction between descriptive and motion-guiding vision isn’t allocentric vs egocentric spatial reference, but body-based vs action-based coordinates within egocentric reference.
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Barkasi, M. Does what we dream feel present? Two varieties of presence and implications for measuring presence in VR. Synthese 199, 2525–2551 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02898-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02898-4