Since the previous Thursday was a holiday, we will have two presentations now again: by our former PhD student Alexandra, now assistant professor at the University of Marie Curie Sklodowska (UMCS) in Lublin, and by Tomir who is currently visiting us from there. Both presentations will be ca. 30 minute long, and be followed by 20 minute discussions. As usual, welcome from 15:00, with cameras on. The zoom link will announced in the email invitation.

Determining Choice Awareness, Alexandra Mouratidou

Language is often privileged over bodily expression, despite the expressivity of the body in revealing states that speech may conceal or fail to articulate. Investigations of choice making and awareness in experimental settings often rely on participants’ verbal reports. When participants fail to verbally detect manipulations – such as when the preferred option is covertly replaced with a rejected one – this is interpreted as a lack of awareness of their own choices. This binary understanding has been used to support broader claims about the illusory nature of agency, the unreliability of decision making, and even the epiphenomenal nature of consciousness overlooking the constitutive role of the body in cognition. Drawing on experimental studies in cognitive semiotics and integrating insights from phenomenological philosophy, I show that under conditions of manipulation, choice awareness manifests not only verbally, but bodily. These non-verbal expressions include bodily signs and signals such as adaptors (i.e., self- or object-directed movements) and more subtle bodily features that are not intentionally communicative and mostly operate below the level of reflective awareness. This gives rise to a central paradox: how can bodily signals and more concealed bodily features that are typically viewed as “unconscious” count as meaningful expressions of choice awareness? I address this by adapting the Semiotic Hierarchy model to argue that choice awareness is distributed across different levels of intentionality and semiosis. By understanding subjectivity as a prerequisite for semiosis, embodied affective expression discloses a form of awareness that is neither fully transparent nor reducible to the merely physiological.

On the phenomenology of VR, Tomir Jedrejek

Virtual reality (VR), and the experiences supported by this technology, have often been compared to dreams, illusions, or hallucinations. These comparisons were connected to the view that VR could transfer the subject into a world made of information, free from borders and limitations. Even the human body, with its boundaries, was expected to be transcended. In contrast, I will argue that VR experience is not radically different from everyday interactions with the physical world. In fact, VR experience is fundamentally grounded in bodily experience, since it engages the body as the basis for interaction with virtual objects and environments.

In a first step, I provide an initial analysis of VR experience and distinguish three key features: interactivity, (tele)presence, and immersion. In a second step, I compare VR with several types of immersive experience, including books, films, video games, and dreams. This comparison is based both on the concepts used to describe VR experiences and on basic ontological features of experienced objects. In a third step, I argue that VR differs fundamentally from pictorial experience. During deep immersion in VR, from the user’s perspective, virtual objects cease to function merely as representations (computer-generated images) and begin to be experienced as tools or quasi-objects of action. This phenomenon requires a temporary suspension of the asymmetrical relation between the sign and its referent.