The Body and the Experience of Presence

Abstract: We experience our encounters with the world and others in differ-ent degrees of intensity – the presence of things and others is gradual. I intro-duce this kind of presence as a ubiquitous feature of every phenomenally con-scious experience, as well as a key ingredient of our ‘feeling of being alive’, and distinguish explanatory agendas that might be relevant with regard to this phe-nomenon (1–3). My focus will be the role of the body-brain nexus in realizing these experiences and its treatment in recent accounts of the bodily constitution of experience. Specifically, I compare a sensorimotor approach to perceptual presence that focuses on properties of the moving body (O’Regan 2011; Noë 2012) with a more general enactivism that focuses on properties of the living body (Thompson 2007). First, I develop and discuss a theory of access derived from sensorimotor theory that might be suited to explain the phenomenon of gradual presence. This is a theory that sees the mastery of sensorimotor, bodily engagements with the world as key elements in setting up a phenomenal expe-rience space. I object that in current versions of sensorimotor theory the corre-lation posited between presence and changes in the subject’s physical relation to the environment is too rigid. Nevertheless I defend the claim that gradual pres-ence is constituted by our temporally extended engagement with the environ-ment (4–7). Second, I consider some objections stemming from enactivism with regard to self-regulatory properties of the living body and the phenomenolog-ical claim that the organism’s value-laden relations with its environment have to be included in the theory. I will show that the latter is a necessary amendment to sensorimotor theory and its concept of gradual presence (8-10). 1