Abstract Zuzanna Rucinska

Enactive imagining in the VR

Zuzanna Rucińska

Extended abstract (with the core of the argument)


Two claims will be argued for in the presentation:



1. Following the framework of radical embodied and enactive cognition and ecological psychology, perception is of affordances. This means that an animal always perceives the environment as affording possibilities for action that are relevant to them at a given time. A tree is perceived by a cat as climbable when the cat is running away from a dog. A chair is perceived by humans as sittable when they are tired. Analogously, the virtual environment will afford virtual interactions to us, in relation to the capacities we have in the game, or the capacities of our avatar. A dragon is perceived as ‘flyable’, a block is seen as ‘smashable’, and a zombie is seen as ‘killable’ (or something from which we needs to hide) – all depending on the possibilities the game affords, and what is relevant for the player to do in the game. 

Thus, perception in the VR is of virtual affordances, or possibilities for virtual engagements. Virtual affordances are simply affordances for virtual action, or action possibilities determined by the space of the game. This follows from the enactivist take to reality in general. Enactivists will propose that in VR we are neither dealing with fictions in the traditional sense of the term, nor with just a digital reality. Instead, virtual reality is just another kind of environment we find ourselves in, that we actively make sense of. Following this model, the virtual pictures or images are not just ‘received’ in perception, or represented in imagination; they are enacted. This means that virtual pictures are perceived as persistent and rich sources of affordances one can skilfully engage with.

2. To explain how perception of virtual affordances is possible, the enactivist can refer to a specific notion of imagination. I propose that imagination does play a role for perception in VR, but it is a different role than typically attributed to imagination. Let us first take a look at those roles. The two dominant proposals on the role of imagination in the VR are that:



The former (as defended by fictionalists) argues that if the virtual objects are fictions that do not really exist, then they must be imagined before they can be interacted with, as imagination enables engagement with fictions (Walton 1990; Robson and Meskin 2016, van de Mosselaer 2020). Imagination is here seen as a representational capacity at the root of all fictional (including virtual) engagements, because it allows us to bring to mind absent/unreal objects or persons. The latter (as defended by some realists) deny the need for imagining in virtual engagements (Aarseth 2007; Chalmers 2017), on the grounds that in VR, one engages not with fictional objects, but with real, computer-generated or digital objects. Virtual objects are also said to be directly perceived and given in the VR, and so, need not be imagined (Gooskens 2014). For example, being presented with a virtual room suggests that one need not engage in imagining the said room, because one can perceive the given representation. 

I put a third option on the table, which is that:



This is a role that follows enactive account of imagination, which proposes that imaginative processes are grounded in neural and motor processes and are shaped by ongoing participation with one's environment. I introduce the notion of ongoing embodied imagination (OEI) to explain that imagination substantially involves the body in three ways, across different timescales: diachronic, perceptual-motor processes that re-enact and rehearse the past; synchronic motor activation of movement-related motor systems to account for the present, and predictive processes to anticipate the future. 

Applied to VR context, OEI proposes that to perceive a (virtual) affordance, is to anticipate something as happening. As the future anticipated possibility for action is not yet there, the anticipation is an imaginative act: it deals with a future state of affairs, of what is yet to come. Although classical ecological accounts of perception say that we directly perceive affordances, enactivism is rooted in phenomenology (Varela et al. 1991), according to which the perceptual and the imaginative capacities are not opposed to one other (O'Shiel 2019), and imagination and perception are strongly linked together. Imagination cashed out through enactivism thus suggests that imagination understood as an embodied  capacity for anticipating actions plays an important role in perceiving virtual affordances.

How does it work? In short, when we imagine, our bodies are involved in a direct way: imagining a movement involves activation of sensorimotor processes that would be involved if we were actually moving. For example, to imagine playing football is to imagine how one would move around the football field and interact with players; it is not having a static mental image of it. Our sensory modalities and kinesthetic sensations are triggered, and there is a bodily state of readiness to act in anticipation of the next movements. The same will happen when playing, e.g., virtual football. Our embodied action-readiness shapes what possibilities for action open up to us, also in a virtual reality. Assuming that we are not ‘brains in a vat’ that play a virtual game, we remain to be embodied sensorimotor beings when we are engaging in a VR, and our embodiment and history of bodily interactions will shape the fact that we see possibilities for action unfolding in the VR as well.