This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, ultimately depends (...) on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem. (shrink)

Different sort of people are interested in personal identity. Philosophers frequently ask what it takes to remain oneself. Caregivers imagine their patients’ experience. But both philosophers and caregivers think from the armchair: they can only make assumptions about what it would be like to wake up with massive bodily changes. Patients with a locked-in syndrome suffer a full body paralysis without cognitive impairment. They can tell us what it is like. Forty-four chronic LIS patients and 20 age-matched healthy medical professionals (...) answered a 15-items questionnaire targeting: global evaluation of identity, body representation and experienced meaning in life. In patients, self-reported identity was correlated with B and C. Patients differed with controls in C. These results suggest that the paralyzed body remains a strong component of patients’ experienced identity, that patients can adjust to objectives changes perceived as meaningful and that caregivers fail in predicting patients’ experience. (shrink)

This paper examines the experience of where we end and the rest of the world begins, that is, the sense of boundaries. Since meditators are recognized for their ability to introspect about the bodily level of experience, and in particular about their sense of boundaries, 27 senior meditators were interviewed for this study. The main conclusions of this paper are that the boundaries of the so-called “physical body” are not equivalent to the individual's sense of boundaries; the sense of boundaries (...) depends upon sensory activity; the sense of boundaries should be defined according to its level of flexibility; the sense of body ownership cannot be reduced to the sense of boundaries; nevertheless, the sense of ownership depends on the level of flexibility of the sense of boundaries. (shrink)

Experiences of thought-insertion are a first-rank, diagnostically central symptom of schizophrenia. Schizophrenic patients who undergo such delusional mental states report being first-personally aware of an occurrent conscious thought which is not theirs, but which belongs to an external cognitive agent. Patients seem to be right about what they are thinking but mistaken about who is doing the thinking. It is notoriously difficult to make sense of such delusions. One general approach to explaining the etiology of monothematic delusions has come to (...) be known as the endorsement model. This model claims that the patient holds her delusional belief because she simply trusts her bizarre experience and takes it at face value. The content of the bizarre experience thus plays a central role in the etiology of delusions. Despite being widely discussed with respect to delusions like Capgras and Cotard, an endorsement model of thought-insertion has not yet been formulated. This article seeks to fill this void by fleshing out and defending the endorsement approach to delusions of inserted thoughts. It aims to show that such an approach can be defended against objections that have been raised in the literature. In particular, it will be argued that there is nothing wrong with the idea of being first-personally aware of a thought which is presented in consciousness as being someone else's. The upshot is that with respect to delusions of thought-insertion, the endorsement model turns out to be a viable account of why patients come to believe that someone else is inserting thoughts into their minds. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that self-involvement enhances the memorability of information encountered in the past. The emergence of this effect, however, is dependent on guided evaluative processing and the explicit association of items with self. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether self-memory effects would emerge in task contexts characterized by incidental-encoding and minimal self-involvement. Integrating insights from work on source monitoring and action recognition, we hypothesized that the effects of self-involvement on memory function may be moderated by the extent (...) to which encoding experiences entail volitional processing. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Despite the adoption of an incidental task context and stimulus materials that were inconsequential to participants, the act of selection enhanced the memorability and accessibility of information. The implications of these findings for contemporary treatments of self are considered. (shrink)

The authors examine several issues in teaching phenomenology (1) to advanced researchers who are doing qualitative research using phenomenological interview methods in disciplines such as psychology, nursing, or education, and (2) to advanced researchers in the cognitive neurosciences. In these contexts, the term “teaching” needs to be taken in a general and nondidactic way. In the case of the first group, it involves guiding doctoral students in their conception and design of a qualitative methodology that is properly phenomenological. In the (...) case of the second, it is more concerned with explaining the relevance of phenomenology to an audience of experimental scientists via conference presentations or published papers. In both cases, however, the challenge is to make clear to the relevant audience what phenomenology is and how it can relate to what they are doing. (shrink)

The influence of movement skill on action representations and identification of agency was investigated. Point-light displays were created of highly skilled gestures of thirteen orchestral conductors in visual, auditory, and audiovisual versions and compared to two control conditions . In subsequent experimental sessions, participants indicated whether displays presented them or other conductors, whether the soundtrack contained their or others’ musical interpretations, and rated the quality and emotional content of the gestures. Self-recognition was more accurate in conditions presenting highly skilled conducting (...) movements as compared to other displays. Participants judged the quality of their own movements to be better than those of others, independently of whether or not they recognized movement agency. Emotional content was perceived accurately across conditions both for own and others’ actions. These results point to the influence of dynamical characteristics of motor skill, rather than merely type of movement or emotional content, on action representations and self-other identification. (shrink)

An argument is developed for the conclusion that certain neurological conditions and disorders are directly relevant for understanding the self?'s embodiment and the ownership of conscious experience enjoyed by such an embodied self. Since these neurological conditions and disorders provide evidence that there can be shifts of, and compromises to, ownership, they help identify neural substrates and realizers of such ownership. However, even if recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological nominees for neural substrates of ownership unity are core realizers of ownership, they (...) are not its total realizers. Implications of the distinction between core and total realizers are discussed. (shrink)

I survey some unusual phenomena in which the body seems to be projected into other things. I argue that these phenomena should not be understood as illusions, as erroneous distortions of an objective body, but as indicating that the body is first of all a being absorbed in outside things. The usual questions about perception are thus reversed: the question is not how the outside world is represented in an inside, but how a moving body ecstatically absorbed in things ever (...) breaks out of that absorption. My suggested answer involves movement and has implications for rethinking nature. (shrink)

This article is about how to describe an agent’s awareness of her bodily movements when she is aware of executing an action for a reason. Against current orthodoxy, I want to defend the claim that the agent’s experience of moving has an epistemic place in the agent’s awareness of her own intentional action. In “The problem,” I describe why this should be thought to be problematic. In “Motives for denying epistemic role,” I state some of the main motives for denying (...) that bodily awareness has any epistemic role to play in the content of the agent’s awareness of her own action. In “Kinaesthetic awareness and control,” I sketch how I think the experience of moving and the bodily sense of agency or control are best described. On this background, I move on to present, in “Arguments for epistemic role,” three arguments in favour of the claim that normally the experience of moving is epistemically important to one’s awareness of acting intentionally. In the final “Concluding remarks,” I round off by raising some of the worries that motivated the denial of my claim in the first place. (shrink)

Intentional action involves both a series of neural events in the motor areas of the brain, and also a distinctive conscious experience that ''I'' am the author of the action. This paper investigates some possible ways in which these neural and phenomenal events may be related. Recent models of motor prediction are relevant to the conscious experience of action as well as to its neural control. Such models depend critically on matching the actual consequences of a movement against its internally (...) predicted effects. However, it remains unclear whether our conscious experience of action depends on a precise matching process, or a retrospective inference that ''I'' must have been responsible for a particular event. We report an experiment in which normal subjects judged the perceived time of either intentional actions, involuntary movements, or subsequent effects (auditory tones) of these. We found that the subject's intention to produce the auditory tone produced an intentional binding between the perceived times of the subject's action and the tone. However, if the intention was interrupted by an imposed involuntary movement, followed by the identical tone, no such binding occurred. The phenomenology of intentional action requires an appropriate predictive link between intentions and effects, rather than a retrospective inference that ''I'' caused the effect. (shrink)

This paper proposes that self-deception results from the emotional coherence of beliefs with subjective goals. We apply the HOTCO computational model of emotional coherence to simulate a rich case of self-deception from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.We argue that this model is more psychologically realistic than other available accounts of self-deception, and discuss related issues such as wishful thinking, intention, and the division of the self.

Objects which a human agent controls by efferent activities can be perceived by the agent as belonging to his or her body. This suggests that what an agent counts as “body” is plastic, depending on what she or he controls. Yet there are possible limitations for such momentary plasticity. One of these limitations is that sensations stemming from the body and sensations stemming from objects outside the body are not integrated if they do not sufficiently “match”. What “matches” and what (...) does not is conceivably determined by long–term experience with the perceptual changes that body movements typically produce. Children have accumulated less sensorimotor experience than adults have. Consequently, they express higher flexibility to integrate body-internal and body-external signals, independent of their “match” as suggested by rubber hand illusion studies. However, children’s motor performance in tool use is more affected by mismatching body-internal and body-external action effects than that of adults, possibly because of less developed means to overcome such mismatches. We review research on perception-action interactions, multisensory integration, and developmental psychology to build bridges between these research fields. By doing so, we account for the flexibility of the sense of body ownership for actively controlled events and its development through ontogeny. This gives us the opportunity to validate the suggested mechanisms for generating ownership by investigating their effects in still developing and incomplete stages in children. We suggest testable predictions for future studies investigating both body ownership and motor skills throughout the lifespan. (shrink)

Addiction remains a challenging disorder, both to treat and to conceptualise. While the temporal dimension of addiction has been noted before, here the aim is to ground this understanding in a coherent phenomenological-neuroscience framework. Addiction is partly understood as drawing the subject into a predominantly “now” orientated existence, with the future closed or experienced as extremely distant. Another feature of this temporal structuring is that past experiences, which are crucial in advancing intentionally forward, are experienced in addiction as a void. (...) This has implications for the generation of meaning and forming of self, amongst others. While there are areas of the brain that regulate temporal processing, there is no single location. Recent addiction research has implicated the insula and in turn this area is implicated in temporal and interoceptive awareness. Similarly these areas of disruption may affect self processes. Disruption of interoception and thus of self, may help explain why addiction is complex and involves multiple aspects of subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, I will analyse the relation between a sense of agency and free will. It is often proposed that by investigating the former, we can find a way of judging when an action is voluntary. Haggard seems to be one of the authors believing so. To answer if this assumption is correct, I will: 1) analyse the categories of free will and agency; 2) define the sense of agency; 3) describe ways of investigating the sense of agency; 4) (...) describe models of emergence of the sense of agency; 5) analyse the relation between agency and responsibility. I will end by discussing the actual possibility of using the sense of agency measurements (as described in experimental sciences) as markers of free will. (shrink)

In this paper, I make a consideration about the relationship between phenomenology and empirical sciences about conscious experience. Recently, it has been suggested by proponents of 'naturalized phenomenology' that phenomenology and cognitive sciences should exchange with each other. This proposal prompts us to abandon the 'puristic' conception of phenomenology, according to which phenomenology is independent from empirical sciences. I show that, though abandoning purism and exchanging with cognitive sciences is fruitful for phenomenology, proponents of naturalized phenomenology underemphasize an important feature (...) of phenomenology -- its autonomy of a certain kind. (shrink)

This article will explore the representation of certain mental and somatic phenomena in Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, exploring how his understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis informs his representation of the relationship between mind and body. It will also examine recent phenomenological and philosophical accounts of schizophrenia (Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, Shaun Gallagher) that see the condition as a disorder of selfhood and concentrate in it on the disruption to ipseity, a fundamental and pre-reflective awareness (...) of self that leads to a loss of ‘grip’ (in the term of Merleau-Ponty) on concepts and percepts. Beckett’s writing might, it is argued, make such disruptions more tangible and intelligible. The article will also consider John Campbell’s argument that immunity of the first person to error—Sydney Shoemaker’s foundational philosophical idea that we cannot misspeak the first person pronoun—is revoked in states of psychosis, and relate such states to the moments in Beckett’s writing where this immunity is challenged, and quasi-psychotic experiences represented. (shrink)

PurposeThe paper seeks to explore the interrelation among the phenomena of wandering mind, free-floating self and intuitive dualism. Further, the paper aims at looking at the possibility of revising the self-conception by changing the wandering nature of mind.MethodThe paper proceeds by demonstrating the existence of the wandering mind and the presence of a particular kind of reflexive self-conception and then contends that reflexive self-conception, characterised in terms of free-floating nature of the self, can be understood to be the result of (...) intuitive dualism along with the wandering mind.Result and DiscussionThe relationship between wandering mind and reflexive self-conception brings out the possibility of revising the reflexive self-conception through practices such as mindfulness because it opens ways to reflexively realise embodiment and reduces the wandering nature of mind. This can possibly give rise to a different kind of self-conception that is more holistic in outlook and is less separative or free-floating. (shrink)

We review the use of introspective and phenomenological methods in experimental settings. We distinguish different senses of introspection, and further distinguish phenomenological method from introspectionist approaches. Two ways of using phenomenology in experimental procedures are identified: first, the neurophenomenological method, proposed by Varela, involves the training of experimental subjects. This approach has been directly and productively incorporated into the protocol of experiments on perception. A second approach may have wider application and does not involve training experimental subjects in phenomenological method. (...) It requires front-loading phenomenological insights into experimental design. A number of experiments employing this approach are reviewed. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for both the cognitive sciences and phenomenology. (shrink)

I’ll organize my replies around four topics: mind wandering and phenomenal selfhood, transformation versus enactive emergence, agency versus ownership, and finally the importance of doing philosophy of mind from a cross-cultural perspective.

Theories of cognition and theories of social practices and institutions have often each separately acknowledged the relevance of the other; but seldom have there been consistent and sustained attempts to synthesize these two areas within one explanatory framework. This is precisely what my dissertation aims to remedy. I propose that certain recent developments and themes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, when understood in the right way, can explain the emergence and dynamics of social practices and institutions. Likewise, the (...) view I construct explains how social practices and institutions shape the character of cognition of their constituent agents. Moreover, I explain both cognitive and social agency under the single explanatory framework provided by Dynamic Systems Theory. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, "embodied, "extended", "embedded", "enactive", and "ecological" approaches to cognition, as well as the conceptual resources of Dynamic Systems Theory, I construct a theory of agency that sees cognitive and social agents as far-from-equilibrium, open, recursively self-maintenant dynamic systems. Depending on the specifics of concrete circumstances, such systems, which I call "Dynamic Embodied Agents", may develop and possess emergent capacities for error-detection, flexible learning, normative behavior, representation, self-reflection, various modes of pattern-recognition, a temporal sense of self, and even moral responsibility. Some such systems are also sensitive to perceived social influences ; while reciprocally constituting and causally affecting them. (shrink)

Recent work on diachronic agency has challenged the predominantly structural or synchronic approach to agency that is characteristic of much of the literature in contemporary philosophical moral psychology. However, the embodied dimensions of diachronic agency continue to be neglected in the literature. This article draws on phenomenological perspectives on embodiment and narrative conceptions of the self to argue that diachronic agency and selfhood are anchored in embodiment. In doing so, the article also responds to Diana Meyers' recent work on corporeal (...) selfhood. (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)

We review different analytic approaches to narratives by those with psychopathological conditions, and we suggest that the interpretation of such narratives are complicated by a variety of phenomenological and hermeneutical considerations. We summarize an empirical study of narrative distance in narratives by non-pathological subjects, and discuss how the results can be interpreted in two different ways with regard to the issue of dissociation.

En el marco de un nuevo descubrimiento de la fenomenología, este trabajo ofrece diferentes argumentos para superar la clásica interpretación de Husserl considerándolo un representante prototípico del solipsismo. En primer lugar, se refuta la interpretación mentalista de Dreyfus de la fenomenología husserliana, mostrando que su programa filosófico va más allá de la tradicional dicotomía entre internalismo y externalismo; en segundo lugar, se señalan algunas de las principales contribuciones realizadas por la fenomenología de Husserl al campo de las ciencias cognitivas y (...) a la filosofía analítica de las mentes, destacando la importancia concedida a las síntesis pasivas en la llamada fenomenología genética. In the frame of a new discovery of phenomenology, the present essay offers different arguments to overcome the classical interpretation ofHusserl considering him a prototypical solipsist. First we refute Dreyfus' mentalistic misunderstanding of Husserlian phenomenology, and show that his philosophical program is beyond the traditional dichotomy between internalism and externalism. Second, it is our aim to point out some of the fundamental contributions made by Husserl's phenomenology to the cognitive sciences and analytical philosophy of mind, especially highlighting the importance attributed to passive synthesis in his genetic phenomenology. (shrink)

War captivity is an extreme traumatic experience typically involving exposure to repeated stressors, including torture, isolation, and humiliation. Captives are flung from their previous known world into an unfamiliar reality in which their state of consciousness may undergo significant change. In the present study extensive interviews were conducted with fifteen Israeli former prisoners of war who fell captive during the 1973 Yom Kippur war with the goal of examining the architecture of human thought in subjects lacking a sense of body (...) (disembodiment) as a result of confinement and isolation. Analysis of the interviews revealed that threats to a normal sense of body often lead to a loss of the sense of time as an objective dimension. Evidence suggests that the loss of the sense of body and the loss of the sense of time are in fact connected; that is, they collapse together. This breakdown in turn results in a collapse of the sense of self. (shrink)

Following arguments put forward in my book (Why red doesn’t sound like a bell: understanding the feel of consciousness. Oxford University Press, New York, USA, 2011), this article takes a pragmatic, scientist’s point of view about the concepts of consciousness and “feel”, pinning down what people generally mean when they talk about these concepts, and then investigating to what extent these capacities could be implemented in non-biological machines. Although the question of “feel”, or “phenomenal consciousness” as it is called by (...) some philosophers, is generally considered to be the “hard” problem of consciousness, the article shows that by taking a “sensorimotor” approach, the difficulties can be overcome. What remains to account for are the notions of so-called “access consciousness” and the self. I claim that though they are undoubtedly very difficult, these are not logically impossible to implement in robots. (shrink)