CONSCIOUSNESS

6. Culture and the Humanities 209
field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for Hominids), the
Nebula (which he won for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial
Award (which he won for Mindscan). In addition, he has won the top SF awards in Canada,
China, France, Japan, and Spain. He’s previously given talks at the headquarters of Google,
at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Penn, and at the Library of Congress, and he’s
been published in both Science (guest editorial) and Nature (fiction). His website is SFwriter.
com. PL11
6.2 Art and aesthetics
319 Exploring the Relationship Between Consciousness and Virtual Reality
Brian Betz, Gregory Little; Dena Eber (Psychology, Kent State
University/Stark Campus, Canton, OHIO)
To understand the relationship between consciousness and virtual reality researchers have
focused on the degree to which participants feel a sense of psychological presence in simulated
environments. There are a variety of definitions for presence, however, most who research
virtual environments characterize it as involving a sense of “being in” a virtual world
(Schumie et al., 2001). Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted exploring
the relationship between virtual environments and psychological presence, very little
has been done to specifically investigate psychological presence in virtual environments that
are works of art. We refer to computer based virtual environments designed specifically for
artistic purposes as Artistic Virtual Environments (AVE). In addition to presence another manner
to investigate consciousness experience in AVEs is to examine the nature of the aesthetic
experience in such virtual environments. Just like presence, there are a number of ways to
describe the aesthetic experience, which is somewhat subjective. Walsh-Piper (1994) stated
that the aesthetic experience is an instant in which a person may feel “...A combination of
interest and pleasure and curiosity...The moment is one of heightened attention to perception,
which is what makes it both meaningful and memorable” (p. 105). Others have noted that the
aesthetic experience is complex and multifaceted. In addition, the aesthetic experience may be
characterized by a finely tuned state of consciousness, or an experience in which the person is
in awe, intensely focused, and in pure enjoyment (Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson, 1990). Our
most current research has focused the effects of cognitive factors on psychological presence
and the aesthetic experience. One way we have approached this issue is to manipulate subjects’
cognitive set, which is defined as specific mental predisposition one uses in approaching
a situation. Another approach we have used is examining the knowledge base which subjects
have to interpret their experience of an AVE. For example, we have found that knowledge of
the visual arts plays a critical role in psychological presence. A2
320 Transcendental Realism: An Introduction to the Nondual, Aperspectival
Geometric Art of Adi Da Samraj Gary Coates (Architecture, Kansas
State University, Manhattan, KS)
For more than forty years, artist, scholar and spiritual teacher Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008)
was involved in the production of a diverse, unique and voluminous body of visual art including:
Zen-like black and white ink brush paintings; color paintings; black and white and color
photography; videographic suites with synchronized music, and; abstract geometric images
generated by digital technology. Adi Da’s purpose in all of this work was to create images
which would enable the fully participatory viewer to experience at least a taste of the inherently
blissful state of nondual awareness that he asserts always already exists prior to the
presumption of being a separate ‘subjective’ self perceiving a separate ‘objective’ reality.
To make this experience of ‘aesthetic ecstasy’ possible he created each image to be a ‘Self-
Portrait of ‘Reality Itself’, which he describes as being inherently ‘Non-separate,One and
Indivisible’ and ‘always already the case’, prior to space-time and every separate and separative
‘point of view’. Adi Da’s exploration of the art of ‘Reality-Itself’ culminated in many
thousands of abstract geometric images which he describes as being ‘aperspectival, anegoic
and aniconic.’ These monumentally scaled images were specifically aimed at undermining