In this paper, I argue that the conscious awareness one has of oneself as acting, i.e., agentive awareness, is not a type of sensory awareness. After providing some set up in Sect. 1, I move on in Sect. 2 to sketch a profile of sensory agentive experiences as representational states with sensory qualities by which we come to be aware of ourselves as performing actions. In Sect. 3, I critique two leading arguments in favor of positing such sensory experiences: the (...) argument from pathology and the argument from cognitive impenetrability. Since neither of these arguments succeeds, the case for positing SAEs is dealt a significant blow. I proceed in Sect. 4 to advance my positive argument against SAEs. The argument runs as follows: If SAEs exist, then they must exist in some sensory modality or set of sensory modalities. Either the relevant sensory modalities are ones that we already recognize, or they are novel sensory modalities. I will argue that neither of these options is workable, and so we have nowhere to locate SAEs. Agentive awareness is not sensory awareness. (shrink)

We investigated motor resonance in children using a priming paradigm. Participants were asked to judge the weight of an object shortly primed by a hand in an action-related posture or a non action-related one . The hand prime could belong to a child or to an adult. We found faster response times when the object was preceded by a grasp hand posture . More crucially, participants were faster when the prime was a child’s hand, suggesting that it could belong to (...) their body schema, particularly when the child’s hand was followed by a light object . A control experiment helped us to clarify the role of the hand prime. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral evidence of motor simulation and motor resonance in children. Implications of the results for the development of the sense of body ownership and for conceptual development are discussed. (shrink)

This article presents a conceptual discussion on the phenomenon of incorporation of tools and other objects in the light of Maine de Biran’s philosophy of the relation between the body and the motor will. Drawing on Maine de Biran’s view of the body as that portion of the material world which directly obeys one’s motor will, as well as on his view (supported by studies in contemporary cognitive science) of active touch as the perceptual modality that is sensitive to objects (...) as fields of forces resisting the perceiver’s movements, we discuss the phenomena of motor incorporation and haptic incorporation, as well as the relation between them. Motor incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the motor system, i.e. when practice enables one to animate an object as directly, effortlessly and fluently as one is able to animate one’s own body. The subject then has the experience of acting there, where the object is located, not at the body–object interface. In order to better understand the phenomenon of motor incorporation, we highlight the phenomenological difference between directly and indirectly moving something. Haptic incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the haptic system, i.e. when an object is used as an instrument for the haptic perception of other objects. Finally, we seek to shed light on the phenomenon of transparency, understanding the transparency acquired by the incorporated object as both a relational property and a matter of degrees. (shrink)

Philosophical and scientific investigations of the proprietary aspects of self—mineness or mental ownership—often presuppose that searching for unique constituents is a productive strategy. But there seem not to be any unique constituents. Here, it is argued that the “self-specificity” paradigm, which emphasizes subjective perspective, fails. Previously, it was argued that mode of access also fails to explain mineness. Fortunately, these failures, when leavened by other findings (those that exhibit varieties and vagaries of mineness), intimate an approach better suited to searching (...) for an explanation. Having an alternative in hand, one that shows promise of achieving explanatory adequacy, provides an additional reason to suspend the search for unique constituents. In short, a negative and a positive thesis are developed: we should cease looking for unique constituents and should seek to explain mineness in accord with the model developed here. This model rejects attempts to explain the phenomenon in terms of either a narrative or a minimal sense of self; it seeks to explain at a “molecular” level, one that appeals to multiple, interacting dimensions. The molecular-level model allows for the possibility that subjective perspective is distinct from a stark perspective (one that does not imply mineness). It proposes that the confounding of tacit expectations plays an important role in explaining mental ownership and its complement, disownership. But the confounding of tacit expectations is not sufficient. Because we are able to be aware of the existence of mental states that do not belong to self, we require a mechanism for determining degree of self-relatedness. One such mechanism is proposed here, and it is shown how this mechanism can be integrated into a general model of mental ownership. In the spirit of suggesting how this model might be able to help resolve outstanding problems, the question as to whether inserted thoughts belong to the patient who reports them is also considered. (shrink)

Abstract: What grounds the experience of our body as our own? Can we rationally doubt that this is our own body when we feel sensations in it? This article shows how recent empirical evidence can shed light on issues on the body and the self, such as the grounds of the sense of body ownership and the immunity to error through misidentification of bodily self-ascriptions. In particular, it discusses how bodily illusions (e.g., the Rubber Hand Illusion), bodily disruptions (e.g., somatoparaphrenia), (...) and the multimodal nature of bodily self-knowledge challenge a classic view of ownership and immunity that puts bodily sensations at its core. (shrink)

Which is my body and how do I distinguish it from the bodies of others, or from objects in the surrounding environment? The perception of our own body and more particularly our sense of body ownership is taken for granted. Nevertheless experimental findings from body ownership illusions (BOIs), show that under specific multisensory conditions, we can experience artificial body parts or fake bodies as our own body parts or body respectively. The aim of the present paper is to discuss how (...) and why BOIs are induced. We review several experimental findings concerning the spatial, temporal and semantic principles of crossmodal stimuli that have been applied to induce BOIs. On the basis of these principles, we discuss theoretical approaches concerning the underlying mechanism of BOIs. We propose a conceptualization based on Bayesian causal inference for addressing how our nervous system could infer whether an object belongs to our own body, using multisensory, sensorimotor and semantic information, and we discuss how this can account for several experimental findings. Finally, we point to neural network models as an implementational framework within which the computational problem behind BOIs could be addressed in the future. (shrink)

This paper explores and ultimately affirms the surprising claim that artificial intelligence (AI) can become part of the person, in a robust sense, and examines three ethical and legal implications. The argument is based on a rich, legally inspired conception of persons as free and independent rightholders and objects of heightened protection, but it is construed so broadly that it should also apply to mainstream philosophical conceptions of personhood. The claim is exemplified by a specific technology, devices that connect human (...) brains with computers and operate by AI-algorithms. Under philosophically reasonable and empirically realistic conditions, these devices and the AI running them become parts of the person, in the same way as arms, hearts, or mental capacities are. This transformation shall be called empersonification. It has normative and especially legal consequences because people have broader and stronger duties regarding other persons (and parts of them) than regarding things. Three consequences with practical implications are: (i) AI-devices cease to exist as independent legal entities and come to enjoy the special legal protection of persons; (ii) therefore, third parties such as manufacturers or authors of software lose (intellectual) property rights in device and software; (iii) persons become responsible for the outputs of the empersonified AI-devices to the same degree that they are for desires or intentions arising from the depths of their unconscious. More generally, empersonification marks a new step in the long history of human–machine interaction that deserves critical ethical reflection and calls for a stronger value-aligned development of these technologies. (shrink)

Supernumerary robotic limbs are innovative devices in the field of wearable robotics which can provide humans with unprecedented sensorimotor abilities. However, scholars have raised awareness of the ethical issues that would arise from the large adoption of technologies for human augmentation in society. Most negative attitudes towards such technologies seem to rely on an allegedly clear distinction between therapy and enhancement in the use of technological devices. Based on such distinction, people tend to accept technologies when used for therapeutic purposes (...) (e.g., prostheses), but tend to raise issues when similar devices are used for upgrading a physical or cognitive ability (e.g., supernumerary robotics limbs). However, as many scholars have pointed out, the distinction between therapy and enhancement might be theoretically flawed. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to the ethics of supernumerary limbs which is based on two related claims. First, we propose to conceive supernumerary limbs as tools that necessarily modify our psychological and bodily identity. At the same time, we stress that such a modification is not ethically bad in itself; on the contrary, it drives human interaction with the environment. Second, by comparing our view with the extended mind thesis, we claim that the mediation through tools is crucial for the formation of novel meanings and skills that constitute human interaction with the world. We will relate the latter claim to enactivism as a helpful theoretical perspective to frame issues related to artificial limbs and, more in general, to technologies for augmentation. Based on this approach, we finally sketch some suggestions for future directions in the ethics of supernumerary limbs. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the body in the social and psychological study of ageing. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, it argues that the body occupies a halfway house between materiality and subjectivity, unsettling those social psychological and biological frameworks by which age and ageing are traditionally understood. While offering no simple resolution of this ambiguity, the paper highlights the intrinsic nature of this dilemma. After reviewing recent research and writing concerning body awareness, body ownership and body affordance, the (...) thesis is proposed that much of what constitutes bodily ageing can be seen as a series of ‘normal abnormalities’. These result in our experience of bodily ageing pivoting uneasily between an object and a subject position. This dialectic is incapable of synthetic resolution but still, to varying degrees it preoccupies many in later life. It is rarely confronted in its full complexity, however, in ageing studies. The phenomenological tradition provides an under-utilised framework for future investigations in this field. (shrink)

Patient RB has a peculiar memory impairment wherein he experiences his memories in rich contextual detail, but claims to not own them. His memories do not feel as if they happened to him. In this paper, I provide an explanatory model of RB’s phenomenology, the self-attentional model. I draw upon recent work in neuroscience on self-attentional processing and global workspace models of conscious recollection to show that RB has a self-attentional deficit that inhibits self-bias processes in broadcasting the contents of (...) episodic memories to the global workspace. Typically, self-related contents enjoy a higher salience level than other-related contents. Elimination of bias toward self-related contents diminishes the salience of those contents to the level of other-related contents. Because the typical high salience of self-related content is necessary for the feeling of ownership, RB lacks the feeling of ownership. I also discuss potential applications of the self-attentional model to other psychopathological cases. (shrink)

The perception of being located within one’s body is an essential feature of everyday self-experience. However, by manipulating exteroceptive input, healthy participants can easily be induced to perceive themselves as being spatially dislocated from their physical bodies. It has previously been suggested that interoception, i.e., the processing of inner physiological signals, contributes to the stability of body representations; however, this relationship has not previously been tested for different dimensions of interoception and bodily self-location. In the present study, using an advanced (...) automatized setup, we systematically manipulated participants’ perspective of their own body as well as the synchrony of visuotactile stimulation. The malleability of bodily self-location was assessed using a questionnaire targeting in-body and out-of-body experiences. Participants also performed a heartbeat discrimination task to assess their interoceptive accuracy, interoceptive sensibility, and interoceptive awareness. Bodily self-location was significantly influenced by perspective, with third-person perspective being associated with stronger out-of-body experiences compared to first-person perspective. Furthermore, there was a significant perspective × stimulation interaction, with subsequent analyses showing that participants reported out-of-body experiences particularly under third-person perspective combined with synchronous visuotactile stimulation. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that meta-cognitive interoceptive awareness was specifically and negatively related to the exteroceptively mediated malleability of body experiences. These results indicate that the perception of the self being located within one’s body relies on the interaction of exteroceptive input and higher-order interoceptive abilities. This has implications for theoretical considerations about the bodily self in health as well as for the understanding of disturbed bodily self-processing in clinical contexts. (shrink)

Extended cognition brings with it a particular phenomenology. It has been argued that when an artifact is integrated into an agent’s cognitive system, it becomes transparent in use to the cognizing subject. In this paper, I challenge some of the assumptions underlying how the transparency of artifacts is described in extended cognition theory. To this end, I offer two arguments. First, I make room for some forms of conscious thought and attention within extended cognitive routines, and I question the close (...) association drawn between attention and effort. Second, I vindicate the importance of paying careful attention to individual differences and the diverse ways in which bodies and technologies can be experienced. I end by offering some hints toward an alternative, and more accurate, account of the phenomenology of extended cognition. (shrink)

In this paper, I suggest that some tales (or narratives) developed in the literature of embodied and radical embodied cognitive science can contribute to the solution of two longstanding issues in the cognitive neuroscience of perception and action. The two issues are (i) the fundamental problem of perception, or how to bridge the gap between sensations and the environment, and (ii) the fundamental problem of motor control, or how to better characterize the relationship between brain activity and behavior. In both (...) cases, I am going to propose that cognitive neuroscience could incorporate embodied insights—coming from the sensorimotor approach to perception and action, and from ecological psychology—to advance the solution for each issue without the need for abandoning or undergoing a substantial revision of its core assumptions. Namely, cognitive neuroscience could incorporate the forgotten tales of embodiment without undergoing through a complete revolution. In this sense, I am proposing not a call but a farewell to arms. (shrink)

In our everyday life, we have the genuine feeling that when something we use works very well, we forget that we are doing something that is mediated by something else. It happens when we read through our glasses, or when we drive home, or when we play guitar. In all those cases, it can be said that the device becomes an extension of our body, or that we have incorporated it. In this paper I want to discuss the extension/incorporation dichotomy (...) as presented in contemporary cognitive sciences. I will present the state of the art in the debate in order to promote a methodological shift, namely to adopt two concept borrowed from Material Engagement Theory developed by Lambros Malafouris. By advocating the concepts of temporality and metaplasticity, I will argue for two different but related things: 1) extension and incorporation don’t have to be conceived only spatially, but temporally. This shift leads to two distinctive implications: first, the sooner two entities establish a prosthetic contact, the higher the chances to reach incorporation; second, extension temporally precedes incorporation; the former being an early-staged phenomenon of – a condition of possibility for – the latter. 2) Such a temporal perspective is at the base of metaplasticity, which describes, in the context of MET, the constant, co-constitutive loop between humans and things: metaplasticity deflates the privileged role traditionally attributed to the subject in the making of phenomenal experience. Finally, I will discuss extension and incorporation in media theory, relying on the concept of radical mediation. (shrink)

Inducing the rubber hand illusion (RHI) requires that participants look at an imitation hand while it is stroked in synchrony with their occluded biological hand. Previous explanations of the RHI have emphasized multisensory integration, and excluded higher cognitive functions. We investigated the relationship between the RHI and higher cognitive functions by experimentally testing task switch (as measured by switch cost) and mind wandering (as measured by SART score); we also included a questionnaire for attentional control that comprises two subscales, attention-shift (...) and attention-focus. To assess experience of RHI, the Botvinick and Cohen (1998) questionnaire was used and illusion onset time was recorded. Our results indicate that rapidity of onset reliably indicates illusion strength. Regression analysis revealed that participants evincing less switch cost and higher attention-shift scores had faster RHI onset times, and that those with higher attention-shift scores experienced the RHI more vividly. These results suggest that the multi-sensory hypothesis is not sufficient to explain the illusion: higher cognitive functions should be taken into account when explaining variation in the experience of ownership for the rubber hand. (shrink)

Frédérique de Vignemont argues on the basis of several empirical counterexamples that Bain and Klein are wrong about the relationship between pain and bodily care. I argue that the force of the putative counterexamples is weak. Properly understood, the association between pain and care is preserved in a way that is consistent with both de Vignemont's own views and the empirical facts.

One key issue when conceiving the body as a multisensory object is how the cognitive system integrates visible instances of the self and other bodies with one’s own somatosensory processing, to achieve self-recognition and body ownership. Recent research has strongly suggested that shadows cast by our own body have a special status for cognitive processing, directing attention to the body in a fast and highly specific manner. The aim of the present article is to review the most recent scientific contributions (...) addressing how body shadows affect both sensory/perceptual and attentional processes. The review examines three main points: (1) body shadows as a special window to investigate the construction of multisensory body perception; (2) experimental paradigms and related findings; (3) open questions and future trajectories. The reviewed literature suggests that shadows cast by one’s own body promote binding between personal and extrapersonal space and elicit automatic orienting of attention toward the body-part casting the shadow. Future research should address whether the effects exerted by body shadows are similar to those observed when observers are exposed to other visual instances of their body. The results will further clarify the processes underlying the merging of vision and somatosensation when creating body representations. (shrink)

I introduce and defend the notion of a cognitive account of the sense of ownership. A cognitive account of the sense of ownership holds that one experiences something as one's own only if one thinks of something as one's own. By contrast, a phenomenal account of the sense of ownership holds that one can experience something as one's own without thinking about anything as one's own. I argue that we have no reason to favour phenomenal accounts over cognitive accounts, that (...) cognitive accounts are plausible given that much of our mental activity has unnoticed effects on our mental life, and that certain illusory experiences of body ownership sometimes described as thought-independent may be best explained as imaginative perceptual experiences. (shrink)

Muselmannwas a term used in German concentration camps to describe prisoners near death due to exhaustion, starvation, and helplessness. This paper suggests that the inhuman conditions in the concentration camps resulted in the development of a defensive sense of disownership toward the entire body. The body, in such cases, is reduced to a pure object. However, in the case of theMuselmannthis body-as-object is felt to belong to the captors, and as such is therefore identified as a tool to inflict suffering (...) and pain on theMuselmannhimself. In this situation, lacking cognitive resources, theMuselmannmay have no other alternative than to treat his body as an enemy, and then to retreat or disinvest from the body. This response is a form of somatic apathy, an indifference that is tied to a loss of the self/non-self distinction. This may, in turn, lead to suicidal inclinations, even after liberation from the camp. (shrink)

In keeping with recent views of consciousness of self as represented in the body in action, empirical studies are reviewed that demonstrate a bottlenose dolphin’s conscious awareness of its own body and body parts, implying a representational “body image” system. Additional work reviewed demonstrates an advanced capability of dolphins for motor imitation of self-produced behaviors and of behaviors of others, including imitation of human actions, supporting hypotheses that dolphins have a sense of agency and ownership of their actions and may (...) implicitly attribute those levels of self-awareness to others. Possibly, a mirror-neuron system, or its functional equivalent to that described in monkeys and humans, may mediate both self-awareness and awareness of others. (shrink)

Some investigators of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) have suggested that when standard RHI induction procedures are employed, if the rubber hand is experienced by participants as owned, their corresponding biological hands are experienced as disowned. Others have demurred: drawing upon a variety of experimental data and conceptual considerations, they infer that experience of the RHI might include the experience of a supernumerary limb, but that experienced disownership of biological hands does not occur. Indeed, some investigators even categorically deny that (...) any experimental paradigm has been employed or any evidence can be adduced to support the claim that disownership experiences occur during the RHI. It goes without saying that RHI experiences can be elusive, and that there is some evidence to support claims that supernumerary limb experiences can sometimes occur. Here, however, we test the claim that the conscious experience of disownership can occur during the RHI. In order to test this claim, we developed two new online proxies—onset time for the illusion and illusion duration—and combined these with established questionnaires that concern the conscious contents of the RHI, in particular ownership/disownership experiences. Both online proxy data and post hoc questionnaire data converge in supporting the claim that disownership experiences do occur, at least when the left hand is the object of investigation. Our findings that onset time and illusion duration are reliable measures suggest that investigations of the RHI stand to benefit by devoting more attention to data collected while the RHI is being experienced, in particular data concerning temporal dynamics. (shrink)

This paper suggests that during severe and prolonged traumatic experiences such as trauma type II, one may develop disownership toward the entire body. In this situation one’s body becomes a pure object and as such an integral part of the hostile environment. This article applies Merleau-Ponty’s approach to perception in order to improve our understanding of this process.

Sensory substitution devices make use of one substituting modality to get access to environmental information normally accessed through another modality . Based on behavioural and neuroimaging data, some authors have claimed that using a vision-substituting device results in visual perception. Reviewing these data, we contend that this claim is untenable. We argue that the kind of information processed by a SSD is metamodal, so that it can be accessed through any sensory modality and that the phenomenology associated with the use (...) of a SSD is best described in terms of spatial phenomenology, only. (shrink)

This article presents a conceptual discussion on the phenomenon of incorporation of tools and other objects in the light of Maine de Biran’s philosophy of the relation between the body and the motor will. Drawing on Maine de Biran’s view of the body as that portion of the material world which directly obeys one’s motor will, as well as on his view (supported by studies in contemporary cognitive science) of active touch as the perceptual modality that is sensitive to objects (...) as fields of forces resisting the perceiver’s movements, we discuss the phenomena of motor incorporation and haptic incorporation, as well as the relation between them. Motor incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the motor system, i.e. when practice enables one to animate an object as directly, effortlessly and fluently as one is able to animate one’s own body. The subject then has the experience of acting there, where the object is located, not at the body–object interface. In order to better understand the phenomenon of motor incorporation, we highlight the phenomenological difference between directly and indirectly moving something. Haptic incorporation occurs when something is integrated into the haptic system, i.e. when an object is used as an instrument for the haptic perception of other objects. Finally, we seek to shed light on the phenomenon of transparency, understanding the transparency acquired by the incorporated object as both a relational property and a matter of degrees. (shrink)

Under normal circumstances, we experience that our center of awareness is located behind our eyes and inside our own body. To learn more about the perceptual processes that underlie this tight coupling between the spatial dimensions of our consciously perceived self and our physical body, we conducted a series of experiments using an ‘out-of-body illusion’. In this illusion, the conscious sense of self is displaced in the testing room by experimental manipulation of the congruency of visual and tactile information and (...) a change in the visual perspective. We demonstrate that when healthy individuals experience that they are located in a different place from their real body, they disown this body and no longer perceive it as part of themselves. Our findings are important because they reveal a relationship between the representation of self-location in the local environment and the multisensory representation of one’s own body. (shrink)

This paper seeks to describe and analyze the traumatic experience through an examination of the sense of agency—the sense of controlling one’s body, and sense of ownership—the sense that it is my body that undergoes experiences. It appears that there exist two levels of traumatic experience: on the first level one loses the sense of agency but retains the sense of ownership, whilst on the second one loses both of these, with symptoms becoming progressively more severe. A comparison of the (...) traumatic experience with various modulations of the senses of agency and ownership, from cases involving prostheses to tools requiring greater or lesser extents of control, suggests that the harsher the traumatic event, the greater the damage is to the sense of ownership, resulting in the increasing sense of the body as a tool rather than an original organism. Likewise, the long-term ramifications become more severe according to the significance of the damage to the sense of ownership. (shrink)

Therapeutic strategies capable of inducing and enhancing prosthesis embodiment are a key point for better adaptation to and acceptance of prosthetic limbs. In this study, we developed a training protocol using an EMG-based human-machine interface that was applied in the preprosthetic rehabilitation phase of people with amputation. This is a case series with the objective of evaluating the induction and enhancement of the embodiment of a virtual prosthesis. Six men and a woman with unilateral transfemoral traumatic amputation without previous use (...) of prostheses participated in the study. Participants performed a training protocol with the EMG-based HMI, composed of six sessions held twice a week, each lasting 30 mins. This system consisted of myoelectric control of the movements of a virtual prosthesis immersed in a 3D virtual environment. Additionally, vibrotactile stimuli were provided on the participant’s back corresponding to the movements performed. Embodiment was investigated from the following set of measurements: skin conductance response, crossmodal congruency effect, ability to control the virtual prosthesis, and reports before and after the training. The increase in the skin conductance response in conditions where the virtual prosthesis was threatened, recalibration of the peripersonal space perception identified by the crossmodal congruency effect, ability to control the virtual prosthesis, and participant reports consistently showed the induction and enhancement of virtual prosthesis embodiment. Therefore, this protocol using EMG-based HMI was shown to be a viable option to achieve and enhance the embodiment of a virtual prosthetic limb. (shrink)

What makes something a part of my body, for moral purposes? Is the body defined naturalistically: by biological relations, or psychological relations, or some combination of the two? This paper approaches this question by considering a borderline case: the status of prostheses. I argue that extant accounts of the body fail to capture prostheses as genuine body parts. Nor, however, do they provide plausible grounds for excluding prostheses, without excluding some paradigm organic parts in the process. I conclude by suggesting (...) that embodiment is moralized all the way down: to be a body part is to be the sort of thing that ought to be protected, in a certain way, by social practices. (shrink)

Human beings are in the midst of very powerful shifts in our understanding of what it means to be a human. There is a non-trivial chance that sometime in the future humanity will transform itself, leading to an emergence of posthumans with God-like qualities – Homo Deificatio. Such a transformation has great potential for both good and bad. Posthumanism seeks to improve human nature, increase the human life- and health-span, extend its cognitive and physical capacities, and broaden its mastery over (...) the environment. As such, the notion of posthumanism implies a radical breaking off from, and reconceptualisation of, the state of being human. As neuroscientists, we aim to bring a neuroscientific perspective to this debate. Current scientific and technologic developments (related to brain and its augmentation) clearly demonstrate that what was formerly considered to be science fiction is slowly but firmly becoming a scientific reality. (shrink)

The experience of one’s body as one’s own is normally referred to as one’s “bodily sense of ownership” (BSO). Despite its centrality and importance in our lives, BSO is highly elusive and complex. Different psychopathologies demonstrate that a BSO is unnecessary and that it is possible to develop a limited BSO that extends beyond the borders of one’s biological body. Therefore, it is worth asking: what grounds one’s BSO? The purpose of this paper is to sketch a preliminary answer to (...) the ‘grounding question.’ Thus, I begin by briefly presenting some contemporary competing hypotheses concerning the ‘grounding question’ and explain why they seem unsatisfying. Second, I discuss the “dual-aspect” of bodily awareness, which is manifest in every normal tactile experience and consists in a subject-object structure of awareness. I then argue that the “dual-aspect” of bodily awareness has the potential of explaining BSO and can, therefore, be considered its grounds. Taking the “dual-aspect” of bodily awareness as the grounds of BSO manages to escape difficulties faced by contemporary hypotheses concerning BSO, fulfills certain necessary demands upon any account of BSO, and explains relevant empirical findings and psychopathologies. Consequently, I argue that it is a hypothesis worth pursuing. (shrink)

One way to characterize the special relation that one has to one's own body is to say that only one's body appears to one from the inside. Although widely accepted, the nature of this specific experiential mode of presentation of the body is rarely spelled out. Most definitions amount to little more than lists of the various body senses (including senses of posture, movement, heat, pressure, and balance). It is true that body senses provide a kind of informational access to (...) one's own body, which one has to no other bodies, by contrast to external senses like vision, which can take many bodies as their object. But a theory of bodily awareness needs to take into account recent empirical evidence that indicates that bodily awareness is infected by a plague of multisensory effects, regardless of any dichotomy between body senses and external senses. Here I will argue in favour of a multimodal conception of bodily awareness. I will show that the body senses fail to fully account for the content of bodily experiences. I will then propose that vision helps compensate for the insufficiencies of the body senses in people who can see. I will finally argue that the multimodality of bodily experiences does not prevent privileged access to one's body. (shrink)

On the one hand, it is often assumed that the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is constrained by a structural body model so that one cannot implement supernumerary limbs. On the other hand, several recent studies reported illusory duplication of the right hand in subjects exposed to two adjacent rubber hands. The present study tested whether spatial constraints may affect the possibility of inducing the sense of ownership to two rubber hands located side by side to the left of the subject's (...) hand. We found that only the closest rubber hand appeared both objectively (proprioceptive drift) and subjectively (ownership rating) embodied. Crucially, synchronous touch of a second, but farther, rubber hand disrupted the objective measure of the RHI, but not the subjective one. We concluded that, in order to elicit a genuine RHI for multiple rubber hands, the two rubber hands must be at the same distance from the subject's hand/body. (shrink)

An empirically based view of size and distance perceptual content and phenomenology is introduced, in which perceivers measure worldly size and distance against their bodies. Central principles of the formal, representational theory of the measurement of extensive magnitudes are then applied in framing the account in a precise way. The question of whether spatial-perceptual experience is “unit-free” is clarified. The framework is used to assess Dennis Proffitt's proposal that spatial setting is perceived in various “units,” “scales,” or “rulers”, some of (...) them non-spatial—distance in terms of calories burned to traverse and the like. The debate between Proffitt and Firestone about the commensurability of differing measurement scales held by Proffitt to be relied on by perceivers is then clarified and resolved. Finally, the measurement theory framed account of size and distance perception is used to illuminate Gibson’s famous but elusive contrasts between “geometrical optics” and “ecological optics” and between the “physical world” and the “animal environment”. (shrink)