Wpływ technologii rzeczywistości wirtualnej i rozszerzonej na obraz i schemat ciała w perspektywie fenomenologicznej

Abstract

The human body plays a significant and even crucial role in cognition. This aspect was emphasised by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his phenomenology. He showed that cognition is possible through the human body. However, it does not have to be limited to the biological body, thus many external objects can be inscribed in corporeality, thanks to which cognition is also possible, consisting in finding a relationship with the physical world. His intuitions presented in Phenomenology of Perception resulted in numerous concepts in the cognitive sciences, such as embodied cognition. Many years later, an analysis of the body’s functionality is presented by Shaun Gallagher, who makes a phenomenological distinction between body schema and body image. The body schema refers to the processes that constantly regulate body posture and the ability to move, i.e. sensory-motor processes, functioning without reflective awareness or the need for perceptual monitoring, while the body image concerns the subject’s perceptual experience of his own body, conceptual understanding of corporeality and the subject’s emotional attitude towards his own body. The division proposed by Gallagher is interesting because it allows us to ask whether, under the impact of various technological solutions, the body schema and image change themselves. In this chapter, an analysis will be shown of how the impact of technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality expands the subject’s sense of corporeality, thus affecting and changing human cognition.