Roberto Di Letizia

Immersion is a type of experience characterizing the gameplay of computer games. I propose a phenomenological model that defines the essential features of such experience. I start from the notion of immersion as a graded experience composed by three phases: engagement, engrossment, and total immersion or presence. Then, I put in relation these three grades with a phenomenological framework in which I explain how the immersion is experienced by the player. In the first phase of gameplay (engagement), players discover and learn how the game works, as well as its commands. When she has assimilated sensorimotor skills demanded by game mechanics in her body schema, the computer game as interactive medium becomes experientially transparent. The player is not longer aware of the computer game as an interactive medium, but she is experiencing a virtual environment that appears rich of affordances and obstacles for goal-directed actions. In the second phase (engrossment), the avatar turns into a prosthetic extension whose function is to extend the physical body of the player in the virtual world so to realize her intentions and plans. The experience of computer games is rooted in the prosthetic extension: through the magic of real-time control, it is like if the player is reaching directly the world of the game by means of a prosthesis, an extended arm. In the third phase (total immersion), the player feels like an embodied presence who is “there”, in the game world. I suggest that presence arises only when the player can interact with 3-D game space, and when the avatar is a navigable point of view provided by camera device. Also, the presence occurs when the player represents the game environment as an egocentric space whose point of origin is her own body, and this is possible because of body schema's plasticity. I conclude arguing the our embodied experience can be modified, reshaped, by interacting with interactive media. More specifically, the body is a nest of potentialities that can be discovered and actualized by media, whereas the physical body is only one of its shapes.

Classic ontological issue is the problem of relation between objective world and the representations. Representationalist
assumption is that what we perceive of the world is a pattern that “stands for” something in the outside world. So, the
problem of the skeptic is as follows: the subject knows features of the outside world only through internal mental
representations, so that he may not have an a priori certainty that these represent something that actually exist in the
outside world, for which the global error, theorized by Descartes, is always lurking. In representationalism, we can
distinguish two conflicting approaches: the realism and anti-realism. On the one hand, the anti-realism claims that does
not exist outside world but only representations. The anti-realism is weak because of the problem of relativism and the
miracle argument (e.g. Putnam). On the other hand, realism argues ontologically that a subject-indipendent world exists,
and epistemologically that some representation, in particular those of mature science, can be aligned, approximately,
with the properties of the world. Current versions of realism acknowledge that there is not a neutral datum, but
perception is theory-ladness, and that representations are not fully independent of the subject, but have the function to
indicate external states of affairs and to prescribe certain actions, for which they are action-oriented. The argument
proposed by new realism is separable in two ways. The first refers to the argument of miracle, or explicationist defence:
some mental representations have more successful predictive than others, so they are approximately true more than
others. The second is, instead, refers to a well known evolutionary argument: natural selection acts as a training
procedure that enables neural patterns to make the descent of the gradient. The argument of explicationist defence has
been criticized on two fronts: historical and philosophical. On historical front, it was noted that, in the history of
science, the success of a scientific theory does not mean that it is approximately truer than others (e.g. Laudan). On the
philosophical side, they were proposed arguments which weaken significantly explicationist defence (e.g. Fine). The
evolutionary argument is, however, been criticized because there is no a priori reasons to believe that what has been
selected by evolution, as perceptual systems which generate representations about outside world, is approximately truer
than what, instead, was eliminated (e.g. Kitcher, Stich). The Embodied Realism (ER) could be an ambitious alternative
to realism and anti-realism. There are two differing approaches on what we mean for ER. We can distinguish between,
in fact, a Representational Embodied Realism (RpER) and a Radical Embodied Realism (RER). The RpER argues that
there is an animal-indipendent world. For this, it postulates internal representations that extract information about this
world: objective features of reality are represented by internal representations. This position is not like the classical
realism because internal representations are not neutral and disembodied, but embodied and embedded. Unfortunately,
the RpER is still based on the explicationist defence which implies tautological and nondemonstrable assumptions.
Moreover, RpER is inconsistent with the realism because the essential action-oriented representations does not
represent an animal-independent world, as the disembodied representationalism does, but they guide behavior providing
affordances which are dependent on animal's specific needs and sensomotory skills (i.e. Chemero). This means that
there is a multiplicity of different sensomotory systems, each of which appropriate to guide the adaptive animals'
behavior of which they are systems. Thus, the embodied cognition is intended to be anti-realist? We propose a Radical
Embodied Realism (RER). The RER, proposed initially by Varela, Thompson and Rosch, does not dicotomically
separate subject and object because there is no organism which can be isolated from the world nor an organismindependent
world. The organism and the world are coupled through embodied interactions in which there is a
reciprocal and mutual specification; therefore, there is not a pre-given world “out-there”, with extrinsic and animalindependent
properties, but world and organism mutally specify through reciprocal relationships. Unlike the idealism,
the RER does not think that the world is dependent on the subject, and, in despite of realism, the RER does not think
that the world is subject-independet. What offers the RER is, instead, a middle way in which world and subject are
interdependent. This means that the ER radical must explain the adaptivity of the cognitive systems' behaviour and
preserve realism i) without an organism-independent world, and i) without falling into a ruinous relativism/idealism of
sensomotory systems. If perception is sensomotory-dependent, then consists in perceived affordances. The affordances
depend on animal's sensomotory skills which, in turn, depend on its experience and body structure. The affordance are
neither subjective or objective, however they are real and meaningful because implemented by embodied animal actions
which are body-dependent and immediately perceived without the mediation of internal processes that occur between
sensation and perception. Only if the agents have some battery of sensory, motor and cognitive skills and some body
structure, can implement certain relations with the environment and, therefore, to access certain affordances (e.g. Noë).
If we are looking for forms of realism consistent with the RER, certainly these are the Ian Hacking's realism of the
entities and the Arthur Fine's natural ontological attitude (NOA). Our conclusion is that we can design a embodied
realism without necessarily embracing the representationalism, rather the properties of the world are relational, they are
real patterns that emerge from the dynamical and embodied agent-environment interaction and that, for this reason, are
manipulated by the embodied embedded agent for their own purposes.

How do we read the other minds? Philosophers answered this question by two different theories: theory-theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST). These theories are deeply different but they move from a joint assumption: cognitive processes consist in algorithmic computations performed on mental representations. On the contrary, I propose an embodied embedded approach according to which humans can perform social behavior without internal representations and algorithmic
computations. This proposal move from two principles. (a) The principle of coupling: embodied agent and environment are continously, mutually, simulaneously, and causally interconnected in order to be a whole coupled system. (b) The principle of exploitation: an embodied agent exploits
the spontaneuous intrinsic dynamics from the interaction between morphological and material properties of its body's structure, the neural system and the environment in order to produce an adaptive, robust and cheap behavior without centralized alghoritms.
How can these principles explain mindreading? First, in nature physical, biological, and social systems show coordinated behaviors which emerge from spontaneous synchronization (i.e. systems are oscillators each of whose individual behavior is altered by nearest neighbor interaction) according to the general principles of self-organization and nonlinear coupling. Second,
spontaneous synchronization is enacted by humans in social coordination phenomena. Social coordination is a synchronization of individuals behavior in order to produce a coherent, collective, and social behavior. In fact, humans show both intentional and spontaneous syncronization with
external events and with other subjects. Third, transition from uncoordinated to spontaneous coordination observed at the behavior level is accompanied by similar events at the brain level.
Fourth, once the coupling is removed, there could be a persistent and consistent influence of the social interaction on subsequent rhythmic behavior, despite the absence of information exchange between the pair. This is a social memory that occurs as the social coupling between individuals has altered the intrinsic parameters of each one. Social memory is the first step towards the social behavioral learning and understanding. Finally, I would draw attention to two conclusions. First, in order to understand others mind we
don't need internal representation other's minds, but coupling. What agents need is exploring and exploiting body's intrinsic dynamics, by changing intentionally or spontaneously the system's parameters in order to produce social coordination. Second, we don't need algorithms, but morphological computation. Mindreading does not mean knowing what ordinary people think, or
do, but rather how to change some parameters in order to unfold one specific intrinsic dynamics: mindreading is a know-how sensorimotor capacity.

La filosofia è la scienza del sapere, che prova a rispondere agli interrogativi che da sempre l'uomo si pone: chi siamo, da dove veniamo,perchè esistiamo? Quando le categorie filosofie vengono applicato a un oggetto multiforme e significativo come il videogioco, ci rendiamo conto di come quest'ultimo sia uno strumento indispensabile per comprendere meglio come funziona la nostra realtà, la nostra mente e come queste interagiscano. L'autore indaga la natura piùprofonda del medium interattivo, accompagnando chi legge in un percorso che lo porterà a comprendere appieno ciò che gioca. Un'occasione per vedere da una prospettiva diversa un oggetto che fa parte della nostra vita, ma anche per scoprire qualcosa di più su noi stessi.