Details:
The definitions under this heading can
involve technology or not involve technology;
the phenomenon is a
subjective property of an individual person; the source
of the stimuli in the experience is external and/ or internal;
there is either an accurate perceptioon
that there is no technology involved in the experience or an inaccurate
perception that technology is not involved when it is;
and the aspect of the phenonenon that is of primary interest is related
to social entitites (human, electronic and otherwise), specifically
their perceived physical presence in one’s environment
when they are not, and could not logically be, present.
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Sample
defintion(s):
Conant (1993, 1996):
"Widows' ongoing attachments to their deceased husbands and a sense
of their presence"
Persinger (2003):
"The sense of 'a presence' or of a sentient being" as "during
partial sensory deprivation and exposure to very weak, complex magnetic fields
across the cerebral hemispheres"
Cook & Persinger (1997):
"[T]he sense of a presence, which may be the common phenomenological base
from which experiences of gods, spirits, angels, and other entities are
derived, is a right hemispheric homologue of the left hemispheric sense of
self."
Burgger (n/d):
“The phantom double which is only
felt, but not seen, is the autoscopic phenomenon most similar to the
phantom limb (which is also only represented in the somesthetic modaility).
As a phantom limb, also the "felt" being can be localized very
precisely in near extrapersonal space. The phenomenon is commonly labelled “feeling
of a presence” (Brugger et al., 1996), but is also known as "Anwesenheit" (Thompson,
1982), "concrete awareness" ("leibhafte Bewusstheit",
Jaspers, 1913) and "false proximate awareness" (Koehler and
Sauer, 1984). ... [E]xhausted mountaineers frequently overcome hopeless
situations by caring for ‘the other’ who climbs with them,
and whose presence is felt compellingly enough to be offered food (e.g.,
Smythe, 1934). These observations suggest that the feeling of a presence
rests on postural and kinesthetic representations of one's own body that
are falsely localized in extrapersonal space.” (The somesthetic
phantom double)
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