- Title
- Virtual reality for non-ordinary consciousness
- Creator
- Montes, Gabriel Axel
- Relation
- Frontiers in Robotics and AI Vol. 5, Issue 7
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00007
- Publisher
- Frontiers Research Foundation
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Virtual reality (VR) technology is currently seeing a surge of interest in industry, academia, and the public. Myriad developments are already underway, aiming to bring the technology directly to users in ways that offer access to rich virtual multisensory experiences. The immersivity that VR offers is enabled by the brain’s constraints on processing bodily self-consciousness (BSC), which anchors self-identity and -location to the physical body. Current developments are focused on leveraging the face-value constraints of BSC to craft immersive VR experiences that are plausible to the human user; i.e., most VR applications today take advantage of BSC as a “trick” or illusion that the body plays on the mind. However, the malleability of BSC can be more powerfully approached as an asset for enhancing the repertoire of body representations and plasticity available to everyday human experience. By manipulating the boundaries of self-local experience, VR can be used as a tool for the cultivation of non-ordinary consciousness (NOC). Such an approach would have the potential to equip society with novel pathways for studying the farther reaches of consciousness and providing opportunities for access to enhanced conscious experiences in everyday life, with far-reaching philosophical and ethical implications.
- Subject
- consciousness; virtual reality; meditation; neurological disorders; religion and science; yoga; shamanism; embodied cognition
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1403013
- Identifier
- uon:35091
- Identifier
- ISSN:2296-9144
- Rights
- Copyright © 2018 Montes. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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