Orthodoxy assumes that the first-person thoughts of an individual are anchored to a stable object. I challenge this assumption by arguing that “I” is polysemous. The perspectival anchor of a first-person thought could be the bearer of the thought, the agent, the bearer of perception, or a body, to name just a few options. These different possible anchors do not form a unity. So, a unified or minimal self cannot, without argument, be posited as the stable anchor of on individual’s (...) first-person thoughts. I show how the polysemy of “I” can be analyzed in terms of polysemous mental files. (shrink)

Many authors claim that being conscious constitutively involves being self-conscious, or conscious of oneself. This claim appears to be threatened by reports of `selfless' episodes, or conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness, recently described in a number of pathological and nonpathological conditions. However, the credibility of these reports has in turn been challenged on the following grounds: remembering and reporting a past conscious episode as an episode that one went through is only possible if one was conscious of oneself while undergoing it. (...) Call this the Memory Challenge. This paper argues that the Memory Challenge fails to undermine the credibility to reports of selfless episodes, because it rests on problematic assumptions about episodic memory. The paper further argues that we should distinguish between several kinds of self-representation that may be involved in the process of episodic remembering, and that once we do so, it is no longer mysterious how one could accurately remember and report a selfless episode as an episode that one went through. Thus, we should take reports of this kind seriously, and view them as credible counter-examples to the claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness. (shrink)

Here is a question as intriguing as it is brief: what are we? The animalist’s answer is equal in brevity: we are animals. This stark formulation of the animalist slogan distances it from nearby claims—that we are essentially animals, for example, or that we have purely biological criteria of identity over time. Is the animalist slogan—unburdened by modal or criterial commitments—still interesting, though? Or has it lost its bite? In this article we address such questions by presenting a positive case (...) for the importance of animalism and applying that case to recent critiques. (shrink)

There are a number of conflicting accounts of thought insertion, the delusion that the thoughts of another are inserted into one’s own mind. These accounts share the common assumption of realism: that the subject of thought insertion has a thought corresponding to the description of her thought insertion episode. I challenge the assumption by arguing for an anti-realist treatment of first-person reports of thought insertion. I then offer an alternative account, simulationism, according to which sufferers merely simulate having a thought (...) inserted into their heads. By rejecting realism, the paper undermines a widespread explanatory framework that unites otherwise competing cognitive models of thought insertion. (shrink)

Subjects experiencing thought insertion disown thoughts they are introspectively aware of. According to what I call “the rationality hypothesis”, thought-insertion reports are not merely intelligible, but also express, or potentially express, fully rational judgments in the light of highly disruptive experience. I argue that the hypothesis is ethically and theoretically motivated, and provides two insights into the philosophical significance of reports by subjects with schizophrenia. First, the reports can be seen as evidence that rational judgments of ownership of a thought (...) prioritize agency awareness over introspective awareness of it. This point fits with an integrative account of thought insertion at the personal and mechanistic levels. Second, rational and competent uses of the first person purely based on introspection do not necessarily involve a full-fledged first-person perspective over one’s thoughts. This suggests that agency awareness, and not introspection as such, is primarily involved in determining the reference of the first person featuring in the judgments. (shrink)

Kant’s conception of the centrality of intellectual self-consciousness, or “pure apperception”, for scientific knowledge of nature is well known, if still obscure. Here I argue that, for Kant, at least one central role for such self-consciousness lies in the acquisition of the content of concepts central to metaphysical theorizing. I focus on one important concept, that of <substance>. I argue that, for Kant, the representational content of the concept <substance> depends not just on the capacity for apperception, but on the (...) actual intellectual awareness of oneself in such apperception. I then defend this interpretation from a variety of objections. (shrink)

Many authors claim that being conscious constitutively involves being self-conscious, or conscious of oneself. This claim appears to be threatened by reports of ‘selfless’ episodes, or conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness, recently described in a number of pathological and nonpathological conditions. However, the credibility of these reports has in turn been challenged on the following grounds: remembering and reporting a past conscious episode as an episode that one went through is only possible if one was conscious of oneself while undergoing it. (...) Call this the Memory Challenge. This paper argues that the Memory Challenge fails to undermine the credibility to reports of selfless episodes, because it rests on problematic assumptions about episodic memory. The paper further argues that we should distinguish between several kinds of self-representation that may be involved in the process of episodic remembering, and that once we do so, it is no longer mysterious how one could accurately remember and report a selfless episode as an episode that one went through. Thus, we should take reports of this kind seriously, and view them as credible counter-examples to the claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy of mind and psychiatry, schizophrenic thought insertion is often used as a validating or invalidating counterexample in various theories about how we experience ourselves. Recent work has taken cases of thought insertion to provide an invalidating counterexample to the Humean denial of self-experience, arguing that deficiencies of agency in thought insertion suggest that we normally experience ourselves as the agent of our thoughts. In this paper, I argue that appealing to a breakdown in the sense of agency (...) to explain thought insertion is problematic, and that rather than following the prevailing binary approach which holds that certain features of consciousness go missing while others remain wholly intact, a better explanation involves construing thought insertion as a disturbing or disrupting of the subjectivity (for-me-ness) of experience. The result is that experiencing ourselves as the subject of our thoughts is where future research should be directed, given the robust persistence of this form of self-experience across psychopathological and non-psychopathological cases alike. (shrink)

In their target article, Kammerer and Frankish (K&F) wonder what forms introspection could take in non-human animals, enhanced humans, artificial intelligences, and aliens. In this short note, I focus on disordered or neurodiverse minds. More specifically, I assess a claim that has often been made more or less implicitly to the effect that, in virtue of their conditions, people with schizophrenia or depersonalization disorder have superior introspective abilities that allow them to discern some important but normally hidden characteristics of our (...) experiences — call this the superintrospectionitis thesis. In the course of my argumentation, I introduce distinctions and questions concerning the nature of the architecture and the function of introspection that might enrich K&F's framework. (shrink)

When it comes to personal identity, two approaches have long ruled the roost. The first is the psychological approach, which has it that our persistence through time consists in the continuance of certain of our psychological traits, such as our memories, beliefs, desires, or personality. The second is the biological approach, according to which personal persistence consists in continuity in our physical or biological makeup. Amid the bipartite reign of these approaches, a third contender has emerged: the phenomenal approach. On (...) this approach, personal persistence consists in continuity in phenomenal consciousness or the capacity for phenomenal consciousness. In this paper I will introduce and defend a new argument for the phenomenal approach. In the process, I will argue against the psychological and biological approaches. I will also address some lingering questions and outline further ways to develop the phenomenal approach. (shrink)

The thesis of self-elusiveness says, roughly, that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest from the first-person perspective. This thesis has a long history. Yet many who endorse it do so only in a very specific sense. They say that the self fails to be phenomenally manifest as an object from the first-person perspective; they say that self-experience is not a species of ‘object-consciousness’. Yet if consciousness outstrips object-consciousness, then we are left with the possibility that there is another sense (...) in which the self is phenomenally manifest. Alas, efforts to articulate just what this form of self-experience comes to—often a holy grail of sorts for those in, and influenced by, the phenomenological tradition—have remained stubbornly obscure. This essay attempts a partial remedy. Taking a cue from Bernard Lonergan, I suggest that self-experience, while not a species of object-consciousness, is nonetheless partially grounded in it. The result is a view that is compatible with self-experience being representational and relational, contra tradition. (shrink)

Various psychopathologies of self-awareness, such as somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion in schizophrenia, might seem to threaten the viability of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness since it requires a HOT about one’s own mental state to accompany every conscious state. The HOT theory of consciousness says that what makes a mental state a conscious mental state is that there is a HOT to the effect that “I am in mental state M.” I have argued in previous work that a (...) HOT theorist can adequately respond to this concern with respect to somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion. There is also Cotard syndrome which is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In this paper, I argue that HOT theory has nothing to fear from it either and can consistently account for what happens in such unusual cases. I analyze Cotard syndrome in light of my previous discussion of somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion, and argue that HOT theory can provide a somewhat analogous account without the worry of inconsistency. It is crucial to recognize that there are multiple “self-concepts” and levels of HOTs which can help to provide a more nuanced explanation. With regard to the connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, it is proposed that Cotard patients are indeed capable of having some “I-thoughts” about their bodies and mental states. (shrink)

The claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness has a long philosophical history, and has received renewed support in recent years. My aim in this paper is to argue that this surprisingly enduring idea is misleading at best, and insufficiently supported at worst. I start by offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish two notions of self-consciousness: consciousness of oneself and consciousness of one’s experience. While “self-consciousness” is (...) often taken to refer to the former notion, the most common variant of the constitutive claim, on which I focus here, targets the latter. This claim can be further interpreted in two ways: on a deflationary reading, it falls within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on an inflationary reading, it points to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary reading of the constitutive claim is plausible, but should be formulated without using a term as polysemous and suggestive as “self-consciousness”; by contrast, the inflationary reading is not adequately supported, and ultimately rests on contentious intuitions about phenomenology. I conclude that we should abandon the idea that self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness. (shrink)

Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’—first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se—have a distinctive character that traditional views of contents cannot characterize. Drawing on Anscombe, Annalisa Coliva has argued that a feature she calls Real Guarantee marks apart de se thoughts—as opposed to others including Immunity to Error through Misidentification that have been proposed for that role. I'll argue that, while her work points to a truly distinguishing feature of (...) the de se, we need an account of the notion other than hers and Echeverri's recent development of it. I'll offer an alternative, drawing on Léa Salje's work. Finally, I'll briefly outline how, thus understood, the Real Guarantee feature could be adequately explained by theories of de se thoughts like the one I favour, even if it is an open option to just explain it away. (shrink)

Are we acquainted with the self in experience? It may seem so. After all, we tend to be confident in our own existence. A natural explanation for this confidence is that the self somehow shows up in experience. Yet philosophers in both the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions have been sceptical of self-acquaintance. Despite centuries of debate, the matter remains controversial. But the persistence of this dispute is puzzling. Why can we not simply settle this question by introspection? Here, many (...) philosophers hold that the self is elusive. Hence, to address this question we need to use a more indirect method. To this end, philosophers have turned to pathologies of self-awareness such as depersonalization and thought insertion to argue for self-acquaintance, a strategy I label the Pathology Argument. In this paper, I criticize the Pathology Argument on the grounds that we can better explain the symptoms of these disorders without appeal to self-acquaintance. (shrink)

Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these? This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon which the (...) discourse on Q is built. Different inputs to Q produce different answers. After consideration of the many ways “attention” and “consciousness” have been defined, I settle upon phenomenal consciousness and Executive Attention (defined as a suite of strategies for structuring cognition for further processing implemented by the executive of working memory) as the most interesting inputs to Q, and the ones on which Part II focuses. Attention without consciousness seems relatively easy to establish empirically, but consciousness without attention is much harder. The putative candidates all seem to have major problems, but I build a strong abductive case for the hitherto ignored case of foveal phenomenal overflow. We consciously see far more detail in our foveal fields than we can Executively Attend, although there is a serious obstacle to our ever confirming that empirically—identifying conscious content relies on Executive Attentional report. Triangulating the capacity limitations of attention, consciousness, and working memory strengthens this case for consciousness without attention, and suggests that cognition must work something like my “Witches’ Hat Model,” on which content can become conscious outside of Executive Attention or working memory. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my arguments for the discourse on Q, and for other discourses such as the ontologies of attention and consciousness, theories of consciousness, some other cognitive concepts, and ethical considerations in humans, animals, and machines. A conclusive answer to Q continues to elude us. It may perhaps be an ultimately insoluble conundrum. But it is the very essence of humanity to seek an answer, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of our own nature: “The proper study of mankind is man.”1. (shrink)

Patients suffering from delusions of thought insertion (TI) report that external agents of different nature have placed thoughts into their minds. The symptom involves distressing feelings of intromission and exposition, loss of mental privacy, diminished ego boundaries, and a – often neglected – peculiar “physicality”. A dominant approach within cognitive sciences characterizes TI as involving alterations in the experience of being the author of certain thoughts. For the advocates of this so-called Standard Approach to TI, the absence of a sense (...) of agency for certain thoughts would lead to their externalization, this explaining the general structure of the clinical reports. In this paper, I problematize the phenomenological picture of everyday thoughts that the standard approach adopts when trying to make sense of TI. I claim that the standard approach neglects two more fundamental aspects of TI, namely the multimodal nature of thinking in psychosis and the deeply social dimension of the phenomenology of delusions in schizophrenia. After this, a broader descriptive phenomenological characterization of TI is provided. Finally, I establish some connections between the characterization of TI developed here and current research in social perception and clinical practice. (shrink)

Critical notice of Béatrice Longuenesse's book *I, Me, Mine*.

The horizon of clinical memory modification, long the domain of science fiction, is rapidly approaching; it is therefore imperative that we understand the ethical implications of such neuromodificatory technologies. We might begin such inquiry with the public’s worries about these technologies, namely that modifying memory will concomitantly modify the self. Yet, before discerning the reasonableness of this worry, we must understand the meaning of “the self” in relation to memory. Distilling this conception of the self is the principal aim of (...) this thesis. I argue that many popular self-conceptions cannot capture our worries about neuromodification. Hence, I distill a novel such conception, which I call the Proustian Self—marshaling, to that end, not only neuroscientific evidence and metaphysical arguments but also literary-phenomenological analysis. I ultimately argue that this conception should be the target of further neuroethical inquiry regarding the prospect memory modification and its effects on putative patients. (shrink)