This paper proposes a qualitative study exploring anomalous self and world-experiences in individuals with high levels of depersonalization experiences. Depersonalization (DP) is a condition characterized by distressing feelings of being a detached, neutral and disembodied onlooker of one’s mental and bodily processes. Our findings indicate the presence of a wide range of anomalous experiences traditionally understood to be core features of DP, such as disembodiment and disrupted self-awareness. However, our results also indicate experiential features that are less highlighted in previous (...) work, such as faster time perception and blurriness of the self/other boundaries which may play a key role in altering one’s sense of self and sense of presence in the world. Our qualitative study provides an in-depth examination of self-reported disturbances of one’s relatedness to one’s self and the world, thereby shedding further light on the nature of altered subjective experiences in DP. In doing so, this paper draws attention to key aspects yet overlooked that may prove valuable for shedding further light into the phenomenon of depersonalization. We conclude by highlighting limitations of this study and a number of open questions that further work needs to address in the future. (shrink)

The case of pain asymbolia is a case study that provides evidence of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between bodily experience, affective experience, and self-awareness. On one account pain asymbolia is the result of an affective deficit. Sensory signals of bodily damage are not associated with characteristic negative affect. Cochrane endorses this account as part of his version of a “conceptual act” theory of affective experience. In contrast, I propose an active inference account of affect in general and pain asymbolia (...) in particular. In the active inference framework the self is inferred as the endogenous cause of bodily and affective experience in the process of organismic regulation. This preserves Cochranes ambition to ground affect in bodily regulation but avoids the problem for affective deficit accounts of asymbolia that cannot do justice to the neural correlates. (shrink)

A recent strand in the philosophical literature on addiction emphasizes problems with diachronic self-control. Hanna Pickard, for example, argues that an important aspect of addiction consists in inability to identify with a non-addicted future self. This literature sits alongside another that treats addiction as the product of neural changes that “hijack” mechanisms of reward prediction, habit formation decision making and cognitive control. This hijacking literature originates in accounts that treat the neural changes characteristic of addiction as a brain disease. This (...) paper provides a framework based on predictive processing accounts of self-awareness that integrates the hijacking and diachronic accounts. I discuss a hijacking account proposed to explain disruption of addiction following lesion to the anterior insula cortex. I show how insula activity contributes to the type of identification implicated in diachronic accounts and how deactivation of the anterior insula can disrupt addiction by alienating the subject from her addictive tendencies. This is consistent with neural evidence but also incorporates the personal level features of addiction that are opaque to neural level explanation. (shrink)

The initial cause of Cotard delusion is pervasive dyshomeostasis (dysregulation of basic bodily function).This explanation draws on interoceptive active inference account of self‐representation. In this framework, the self is an hierarchical predictive model made by the brain to facilitate homeostatic regulation. The account I provide is an alternative to two factor accounts of the Cotard delusion that treat depersonalisation experience as the first factor in genesis of the Cotard delusion. I argue that depersonalisation experience and the Cotard delusion are produced (...) by different breakdowns in the process of self‐modelling. (shrink)