Means remote presence
One example is the telephone line, a thin, narrow bandwidth of aural telepresence. The far end is Dennet’s experiment which leaves the brain and body joined and intact, but wrap the body in a kind of additional sensory cocoon
If this is achievable, would seemingly require a high-bandwidth multi-sensory bath of information with local sensory stimulation
“But as soon as a distant camera responds to your controls, and especially if the mode of control is either ‘natural’ (the helmet rig) or highly practiced (a video-gamer with a joystick), you begin to feel relocated, as if you are in the distant scene”
One example is the upside-down world. We can put people inside headgear that inverts their vision. It turns out that people can readapt to upside-down world after a period of sustained use. However, if it is passive (wheeled around in a wheelchair), the adaption does not occur
The notion that our perceptual experience is determined by the passive receipt of information is misleading. The whole point of seeing and perceiving our world is so that we can intervene and act upon it
See also: agency, telerobotics
On telerobotics
In principle, telerobotics systems need not feel more alien than teleoperated systems to the conscious users, however this is not the case in practice. Closely coupled teleoperated systems seem to much better induce the feeling of actual telepresense more effectively
What seems to be important is the presense of some kind of local, circular feedback loop in which neural commands, motor actions, and sensory feedback are closely and continuously correlated. Temporal disruptions (like lag) may break this ‘illusion’
The brain uses a special piece of neural circuitry known as a motor emulator. This is a little circuit that takes a copy of the motor signal to the hand (say) and feeds it into a neural system which has learned about the typical responses from the bodily peripheries which are likely to ensue. The emulator is thus like a little local scale model of the real circuit. It rapidly outputs a prediction of the signals that should soon be arriving from the bodily peripheries, and these are then used instead of the real thing. This emulator-based feedback is then used for ongoing error-connection and smoothing