Presentational character, feeling of presence and presentification: Affinities and differences between imaginative and perceptual experiences

Abstract

1. Introduction

Surely, there are phenomenal similarities between imaginative and perceptual experiences.¹ Its intuitive nature notwithstanding,² one may support this claim by appealing to Perky’s (1910) experiment (see Nanay 2023: 71). On the basis of this experiment, one might suppose that such experiences are phenomenally indistinguishable. But this supposition is wrong. For that experiment merely shows that while being erroneously convinced that one has an imaginative experience, one may enjoy a perceptual experience: a genuine veridical perception. Indeed, there are also phenomenal dissimilarities between such experiences. Unlike imaginative experiences, in perceptual experiences one feels intimately connected with the world, independently of whether one is really so.

In this paper, I account for both such similarities and dissimilarities: doing both things at once is my work’s most original contribution. For since such aspects affect the mode of such experiences and mode is relevant for their metaphysical individuation (Crane 2001: 4), I show that, albeit close, such experiences are metaphysically different. In §2, I claim that imaginative and perceptual experiences are phenomenally similar, since they share the presentational component of their phenomenal character, that is, presentational character. For features of both experiences present worldly properties ascribed to the objects they allegedly target. In §3, I claim that imaginative and perceptual experiences are phenomenally dissimilar because, unlike imaginative experiences, in their phenomenal character perceptual experiences are characterized by feeling of presence (FOP) towards their objects. In §4 I show that FOP constitutes the mode of perceptual, not of imaginative, experiences. They are modifications of the corresponding perceptual experiences, since their mode is constituted by presentification, that is, the make-believe neutralizing modification of FOP.

2. Presentational character

Husserl (2001: Volume 2 VI ch. 1 §1) distinguished perceptual experiences from experiential thoughts. Unlike the latter, the former are full: they apprehend their objects sensuously, that is, via certain sensory perceptual features of those experiences. Intuitively, imaginative experiences are also affected by the kind of features distinguishing perceptual experiences from experiential thoughts. Not only does an imaginative experience have a phenomenology, but this phenomenology is of a sensuous type similar to that affecting perceptual experiences. Here the similarity transpires: like perceptual experiences, in imaginatively experiencing something, one sensuously experiences it as endowed at least with certain low-level properties (e.g. colours, shapes, sounds).

To begin with, perceptual experiences have phenomenal features (e.g. Chalmers 2006, Papineau 2021: 14–16). Since such experiences are exteroceptive ones, many such features constitute their mental paint (Block 1996), that is, their presentative role: they present the worldly properties ascribed to their worldly objects.³ Thus, presentation is a relation between experiential features and worldly properties. Or alternatively, those properties are manifested in such experiences. By definition, presentation is the converse of manifestation. Necessarily and a priori, a feature an experience instantiates – say, its reddish feature – presents a worldly property – say, the redness ascribed to the experience’s object – if the latter manifests itself in that experience.

Depending on the kind of perceptual experience involved, presentation has a different ground. It is causally-based in the case of genuine perceptions, whether veridical or not. In a veridical perceptual experience, its reddish feature presents the redness of the object facing the experiencer. In an illusory perceptual experience, that feature presents the greenness of the object facing the experiencer. Indeed in both cases, the instantiated worldly properties – say, redness and greenness – of the actually experience-causing existent objects are manifested in such experiences. Yet in a hallucinatory experience, presentation can have no causal ground, but a similarity ground, since one does not face what one hallucinates, for it does not exist. The reddish feature of a hallucination presents the similar redness that is ascribed to but not instantiated by that hallucination’s object, for it does not exist.

Moreover, given their sensuous phenomenology, imaginative experiences also have phenomenal features presenting the worldly properties ascribed to such experiences’ objects. Also in their case, since the existence of their objects is irrelevant, presentation is similarity-based. Thus, perceptual and imaginative experiences share their presentational character, which contributes to constitute their whole phenomenal character. Hence, sharing that character ultimately explains why imaginative and perceptual experiences are phenomenally similar. This similarity may also explain why perceptual and imaginative experiences may seem to be – admittedly, erroneously – phenomenally indistinguishable, as the Perky (1910) experiment may suggest. In the experiment, the genuine perceptual experience one enjoys presents the same worldly properties it would present if it were an imaginative experience. Its yellowish feature presents the yellowness of the banana that the experiencer actually faces, just as it would do if it were a corresponding imaginative experience. Ditto for the banana’s shape: it is presented by the banana-ish shape of the relevant experience, whether perceptual or imaginative.

So, here is the line of my first argument. Imaginative and perceptual experiences are phenomenally similar; if they are such, this depends on the fact that they share their presentational character; hence, they share such a character.

3. Feeling of presence

Yet, although both perceptual and imaginative experiences are phenomenally similar, they are not phenomenally identical. As Nanay (2023: 12–13) says, the latter are quasi-perceptual. Actually in the Perky experiment, the perceptual experience one enjoys merely seems to one as an imaginative experience, since one is unaware that one perceives something. If one were aware of that, one would enjoy one’s experience as different from a corresponding imaginative experience.⁴ Indeed, phenomenologically speaking, imaginative and perceptual experiences differ. Unlike in imaginative experiences, in perceptual experiences one feels intimately connected with the objects of such experiences as immediately available.

Prima facie, one might allegedly account for this difference by resorting to the disjunctivist thesis that having an imaginative experience is representing a perceptual experience (Martin 2002b). For this thesis, imagining seeing an object O is imagining that one sees O, imagining hearing O is imagining that one hears O etc.; obviously, seeing and hearing O are nothing like that.

However, this thesis is problematic (Cavedon-Taylor 2021). For it accounts for a phenomenal difference as a difference in content between imaginative and perceptual experiences. For this thesis, imaginative experiences have a complex content involving a perceptual modality (seeing, hearing etc.), perceptual experiences have a simple content involving no such modality, or no content at all.⁵ Yet imaginative experiences hardly have that complex content. One may expect, hope or fear what one experientially imagines. Yet in the content of those intentional states no reference to a perceptual modality occurs (Nanay 2016: 74).

Instead, one may allow that an imaginative experience has a perceptual component, as disjunctivists claim, but account for that component as determining not the content, but the mode of that experience; namely, what counts for the metaphysical individuation of a mental state as a state of a certain kind (Crane 2001: 4). The mode of an imaginative experience is indeed a modification of the sensory modality characterizing the corresponding perceptual experience. For this account, an imaginative experience is not imagining either that one sees something, or that one hears something etc., but it is either imagining-seeing or imagining-hearing etc. that something (Mulligan 1999).

However, claiming that there is a difference in mode between imaginative and perceptual experiences merely entails that there is a difference in kind between such experiences. Yet it does not yet explain the phenomenal difference between them. For a mode difference might simply be a difference in functional role, without any difference in phenomenal character. So first, one must tell a proper story to account for that phenomenal difference. Second, one must see how that story connects that phenomenal difference with the aforementioned difference in mode.

To start with the story, I begin with an account that Matthen (2005: 306, 316, 2010: 108) originally sketched, although he was basically interested in distinguishing genuine perceptual experiences from another sort of perceptual-like experiences, pictorial experiences. Like perceptual experiences, imaginative experiences present something via their presentational character. Yet unlike imaginative experiences, in perceptual experiences one feels oneself to be intimately connected with the world, independently of whether one is really so. For unlike imaginative experiences – as various philosophers stress over and above Matthen, since it is so phenomenally evident,⁶ and neurology confirms (if phenomenology supervenes on the physical)⁷ – all perceptual experiences are phenomenally characterized by a feeling of presence towards their objects.⁸ Such objects are felt as being out there, that is, as located in the so-called peripersonal space, the experiencer’s egocentric space. This space is immediately connected to the experiencer. Unlike objects of imagination, perceptually experienced objects are experienced as available to the experiencer, reachable for a possible interaction. Yet no FOP holds for the corresponding imaginative experience. While having an imaginative experience of something, one is not tempted to reach for it.⁹

In a nutshell, here is my second argument. Their similarity notwithstanding, perceptual and imaginative experiences phenomenally differ; if they so differ, this depends on the fact that FOP characterizes the phenomenal character of the former but not of the latter; hence, FOP characterizes the phenomenal character of the former but not of the latter.

4. Feeling of presence versus presentification

Yet what I just said cannot be the whole story. For one must also explain why imaginative and perceptual experiences differ in their mode because of the aforementioned phenomenal difference. Admittedly, merely stating that, unlike the latter experiences, the former experiences lack FOP provides no such explanation (Kind 2020). So, here is how the story proceeds: while the latter involve FOP towards their objects, the former involve a make-believe neutralizing modification of FOP; as Husserl (2006: ch. 7 §37) originally said, a presentification of their objects.

In §3, I said that the mode of imaginative experiences is a modification of the corresponding modality of perceptual experiences: qua modification, imagining-seeing maps seeing, imagining-hearing maps hearing etc. But why are imaginative experiences such modifications? Because, although they may have the same presentational character as the corresponding perceptual experiences, they involve an adequate modification of FOP, which makes the former different from the latter; namely, presentification. Indeed, not only is presentification a FOP modification, as mirrored by the term itself ‘presentification’. But also, it amounts to a particular way of neutralizing FOP’s phenomenal component: the make-believe way. For presentification can be properly understood as a make-believe neutralizing modification of presence.

We ordinarily use co-predication in order to mean that in the world something has a couple of properties: for example, when we say of something that it is a shining diamond, we mean that it is both shining and a diamond. Yet sometimes this is not the case, for we use a predicate before another predicate to mean a different kind of characteristic in the world: namely, the neutralization of the possession of the property expressed by the second predicate. For example, when we say that something is a fake diamond, we do not mean that it is a diamond and a fake, but that it is not a diamond (typically, something merely resembling one). Unlike ordinary co-predication, adding the first predicate to the second determines a privative nonsubsective adjective, so defined: ‘the fact that x is [Adj-N] entails that x is not N’ (Everett 2013: 61). In this respect, we can mean that different kinds of property neutralizations occur. For example, in saying of something that it is an ex-F, we entail that it is not an F now, meaning that it was so in the past (Everett 2013: 61). Make-believe is another form of property neutralization: saying of something that it is a make-believe F, we entail that it is not F really, meaning that it is F somewhere else, that is, in an unreal space (what this space amounts to is to be further articulated in the specific metaphysical theories of make-believe). So, a toy-duck/a hobbyhorse is a make-believe duck/a make-believe horse, for it is not a duck/a horse really (in fact, it is a plastic/a woody object), but it is a duck/a horse somewhere else. Likewise, a presentification is not a FOP, but a make-believe FOP, for it is not a feeling of presence really, it is a feeling of presence somewhere else.¹⁰

Granted, there are different theories of what make-believe metaphysically amounts to. Yet this difference is presently irrelevant. For whatever theory of make-believe one further endorses, the relevant modification metaphysically remains a make-believe neutralizing modification of something in the above sense. For Walton (1990), make-believe is a social phenomenon rooted in pretence play: for him, something is make-believe, not really, F if it is F in a game of prescribed imagination. Hence, for him something is make-believe FOP if it is FOP in a game of prescribed imagination. For a bunch of people from Leslie (1987) to Voltolini (2021), make-believe is a cognitive phenomenon rooted in meta-representations: for them, something is make-believe, not really, F if it is represented as represented to be F. Hence, for them something is make-believe FOP if it is represented as represented to be FOP.

Thus, in their phenomenally relevant difference, FOP and presentification contribute to the different mode of their experiences; namely, to their being perceptual versus imaginative. In the former, FOP towards their objects contributes to their being seeing, hearing etc. experiences. In the latter, presentification of their objects contributes to their being imagining-seeing, imagining-hearing etc. experiences.

5. Objections and replies

First, as for the similarities between imaginative and perceptual experiences, once we admit that experiences have phenomenal features different from the worldly properties grasped in such experiences, both imaginative and perceptual experiences are clearly presentational, in my sense, for three reasons. First, pace disjunctivists (Fish 2009: 6, Martin 2004: 51), all perceptual experiences are presentational. For presentation in my sense is grounded not only causally. Second, everyone agrees that imaginative experiences have a sensuous phenomenology: in an imaginative experience one imagines something visually, or auditorily etc. Third, imaginative phenomenology is addressed to the outer world just as perceptual phenomenology is. As Sartre (2012: 132-33) intuited, in having an imaginative experience of Pierre, one does not imagine an immanent object, that is, an object intentionally in-existing within the imagining itself à la  Brentano (1995); namely, a mind-dependent object such that necessarily, it would not exist if that imagining did not exist either. Instead, one imagines an intersubjectively available object transcending that imagining. So, in having an imaginative experience of the transcendent Pierre as endowed with certain low-level worldly properties, the sensuous phenomenology of that experience, that is, its presentational character, presents such properties as instantiated by a mind-independent object.

Second, accounting for the phenomenal difference between perception and imaginative experiences in terms of FOP versus its make-believe neutralizing modification is certainly a better move than its actual three competitors. As for the first competitor, provided that they transpire phenomenally, differences in content do not suffice. For such experiences may coincide in content (Matthen 2010, Nanay 2023). As for the second, such differences cannot, as Hume would say, reside in their respective minor versus major vividness. For imaginative experiences can be as vivacious as perceptual ones. As for the third, not even appealing to the voluntariness versus involuntariness of such experiences works. For there may be involuntary imaginative experiences (Kind 2020, Nanay 2023).

Yet one may still doubt that the phenomenal dissimilarity between imaginative and perceptual experiences must be understood in terms of make-believe neutralizing versus having a FOP. One may worry either that perceptual experiences do not necessarily possess FOP, or that FOP is no sufficient condition, for imaginative experiences also possess it. Let me address such worries.

As for the first worry, some perceptual experiences are seemingly such that their objects are not felt as present, given their distance from the experiencers. Consider experiences of stars in which one seemingly sees tiny dots in the sky’s vault. Such experiences are seemingly perceptual experiences, yet no FOP towards stars accompanies them. For stars are not felt as reachable (Matthen 2005: 348).

Yet, as Matthen himself seemingly suggests (2005: 119), seemingly perceptual experiences of faraway objects are not genuine perceptual experiences, but sorts of pictorial experiences of such objects (Vishwanath 2022: 10). A pictorial experience has a two-fold character, since in it not only does one see the picture’s vehicle, the physical object facing the experiencer, but also one seemingly sees the picture’s subject, what the picture presents (Wollheim 1980). Now, FOP characterizes the experience of the vehicle but not that of the subject (Ferretti 2018, Matthen 2005: 315–16). So, experiences of faraway objects are just like pictorial experiences. In them, in seeing a beam of light (e.g. in seeing tiny dots), one seemingly sees the faraway object (e.g. the star).¹¹

As for the second worry, there are experiences that are seemingly forms of imaginative experience but also involve FOP. Three cases of such experiences are particularly discussed: (i) hallucinations and (lucid)¹² dreams; (ii) specific forms of illusions; (iii) hyperphantasia. Yet appearances notwithstanding, either such experiences involve FOP, since they are perceptual experiences, or they do not involve it, hence, they are not perceptual experiences.

As for (i), for Nanay (2016, 2018, 2023: 18) hallucinations and (lucid) dreams are imaginative experiences in which dreamt objects are however also felt to be present. Indeed, the kinds of emotion one feels towards such objects while hallucinating or (lucidly) dreaming are precisely those that one has in having perceptual experiences while being awake.

Yet I reject the idea that hallucinations are imaginative experiences, by sticking with the venerable tradition holding that they are perceptual experiences. For the notion of a perceptual experience is primarily phenomenological: whatever is a perceptual experience, it may be phenomenally indistinguishable from the paradigmatic case of such an experience, a veridical perceptual experience. Now, unlike imaginative experiences, hallucinations are in principle phenomenally indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences (Fish 2010: 4, Lowe 2008). Hence, their being endowed with FOP squares with their being full-fledged perceptual experiences.¹³ Ditto for (lucid) dreams. Granted, in dreams one feels as present the objects one experiences. Yet dreams are not clear-cut cases of imaginative experiences. One must distinguish between the perspective on one’s dreams one has while being awake from the perspective on one’s dreams one has while living such dreams, even lucid. Granted in the former case, one may take one’s dreams as imaginative experiences; one may note their incoherence and their incompleteness. Yet in the latter case, the dreamer lives her dreams as perceptual experiences, as if they gave her immediate information about the environment she faces in the dream (Macpherson 2018, 2024).¹⁴ Consider a possible world in which one has perceptual experiences. Such experiences are not actual perceptual experiences; they are possible such experiences. So, they are perceptual experiences in that world. Ditto for (lucid) dreams. Oneiric perceptual experiences are not real perceptual experiences. Yet, they are oneiric such experiences. So, they are perceptual experiences in the dream’s world.

As for (ii), for Nanay (2018, 2023: 98) there are illusory experiences involving FOP. Consider the double flash illusion: while facing a single flash, one seemingly sees two flashes, since one simultaneously hears two alike beeps. Such flashes are felt as present, yet their experience is not a perceptual, but an imaginative experience.

Granted, such flashes are felt as present. Yet given the aforementioned phenomenological criterion, their experience counts as a perceptual experience, simply a non-veridical one: either a perceptual illusion of a doubled flash or a partial hallucination of two flashes in the scene out there.¹⁵

As for (iii), hyperphantasia amounts to one’s having extremely vivacious and moving imaginative experiences. So, one may say that phenomena of hyperphantasia are clearly cases of imaginative experiences, in which however, given the hyperbolic role of the imagination involved, the objects experienced are felt as present.

For me, however, hyperphantasia does not threaten the phenomenological fact that objects of imagination are not felt as present, but Hume’s (2000: Book 1 Part 1 §1) aforementioned idea that imaginative experiences are less vivid than perceptual ones (see also Monzel et al. 2022: 75). Pace  Matthen (2005: 306), FOP and vividness are different things. Hyperphantastic experiences lie at the opposite extreme with respect to aphantastic experiences in a vividness line, as neurological findings confirm (Milton et al. 2021). Given that vividness, in their presentational character hyperphantastic experiences are just as intense as perceptual experiences are in their presentational character. Yet the objects of such imaginative experiences are not felt as present. For vividness has nothing to do with having objects as available in the space out there. Compare the perception of a hyperrealist painting with that of a corresponding photograph. Although both present their subjects with the same vividness, they are not phenomenally identical, as Walton (1984) stressed: unlike the former, the latter displays intimacy with the subject.

Notwithstanding their phenomenal similarity, perceptual and imaginative experiences differ phenomenally, hence metaphysically. For phenomenologically, the former are presentational character plus FOP; the latter are that character plus FOP’s presentification.¹⁶

References

Footnotes