Immersing oneself into one’s past: Subjective presence can be part of the experience of episodic remembering
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences February 19, 2024 Denis Perrin, Michael Barkasi 1 citation
A common view holds that episodic remembering allows us to relive many features of a past perceptual experience, but not its sense of presence. This paper challenges that view by distinguishing two kinds of presence in perception: temporal presence and locative presence, the latter having objective and subjective sides. While temporal and objective locative presence cannot be relived in remembering, the authors argue that subjective locative presence—the feeling of being immersed in a scene—can be. They identify self-projection, imaginative pretence, and attentional focus as mechanisms underlying subjective locative presence in quasi-perceptual imagination, and note that these same mechanisms underpin episodic remembering. They conclude that episodic remembering can indeed relive subjective locative presence, a position they call 'mnemonic immersivism,' with implications for understanding memory, imagination, and the phenomenology of remembering.