The space of the body

Here is yet more powerful empirical evidence that Maurice Merleau-Ponty is extremely right in his theory of the body as an intentional structure, and anti-representationalist accounts of consciousness or existence in general on the right track in exhaustively explaining even the most extreme phenomena. The evidence is an article, to be published in Science, about several experiments that detail how one can experimentally produce "out-of-body" experiences.
The main experiment detailed was conducted at Princeton and essentially proves (primarily spatial) intentionality as someone like Sartre explains it: in standing towards a tree, for example, looking and directing oneself to it, one is not observing the tree from the physical point in Cartesian space that one occupies, but is rather at the tree. Sartre shows that this "at" is not vague in any way, but is in fact highly determinate: one is with the tree, there, where the tree is--not in the sense of its being in space but of its being in a field of intentions, in a field of possible things I may walk towards, act towards, or, in general, be-towards. Instead of using Sartre's "at," we may put it in a Heideggerian way and say that one is"nearest" the tree, that is, nearest in the sense of intention: what being "at" the tree means when we understand it this Heideggerian way is that I am at the tree such that something that interposes itself between me and the tree in Cartesian or empirical space will be "further" away from me than the tree.
Now, the experiment at Princeton set up some virtual goggles such that one's viewpoint when the goggles were on appeared several feet ahead of one's actual viewpoint in physical space. Prodding them with a stick (in what looks like the direction of the virtual viewpoint, though I don't see in the end why it being otherwise would contradict the point I'm about to make) would give them the "out-of-body" experience. Now, isn't it clear that the "out-of-body" experience detailed here would be almost identical with the experience of being "at" or "near" the tree in the distance? One is pushed a little with a stick, and one feels (the experimenters document) the feeling of being "out-there" at the point in physical space where the virtual viewpoint is supposed to be. In other words, what is this but a feeling of what is, insofar as intentionality is supposed by Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, and others to be the way things actually are--what is this but a feeling of what is actually the case? In a sense the experiment just makes you perceive where you are already at.

Note: This example of Sartre's is in his extrordinarily brilliant two-page article entitled "Intentionality: a fundamental idea in Husserl's phenomenonlogy," which everyone who has five minutes of free time should read: witty, concise, and extremely illustrative, it is I think one of Sartre's best pieces of writing--and given his ouvre, that is saying something. Unfortunately it is located in the hard-to-find Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (in its 1970 issue), so I can't give you a link to it (which I would love to be able to do). Recently, however, it has been included in The Phenomenology Reader, edited by Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney, and published by Routledge, which is in most bookstores, so next time you're in Barnes and Noble (or at the library) take five minutes and read it, then put the book back. If you're worried you just stole knowledge, remember that Alain Badiou develops into a pretty coherent philosophical position the notion that knowledge is and should be free, and you'll feel better about it.