Abstract
Contemporary theories of self-consciousness typically begin by dividing experiences of the self into types, each requiring separate explanation. The stereotypical case of an out of body experience (OBE) may be seen to suggest a distinction between the sense of oneself as an experiencing subject, a mental entity, and a sense of oneself as an embodied person, a bodily entity. Point of view, in the sense of the place from which the subject seems to experience the world, in this case is tied to the sense of oneself as a mental entity and seems to be the ‘real’ self. Closer reading of reports, however, suggests a substantially more complicated picture. For example, the ‘real’ self that is experienced as separate from the body in an OBE is not necessarily experienced as disembodied. Subjects may experience themselves as having two bodies. In cases classed as heautoscopy there is considerable confusion regarding the apparent location of the experiencing subject; is it the ‘real mind’ in the body I seem to be looking out from, or is it in the body that I see? This suggests that visual point of view can dissociate from the experience of one’s own “real mind” or experience of self-identification. I provide a tripartite distinction between the sense of ownership, the sense of embodiment and the sense of subjectivity to better describe these experiences. The phenomenology of OBEs suggests that there are three distinct forms of self-consciousness which need to be explained.
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Notes
I suspect but will not here attempt to prove that the idea that the self as a mental entity is the ‘real’ self is highly culturally dependent. Despite the occasional assertion that the real self universally seems to be the thinking thing residing in the body—à la common sense dualism (and somewhat reminiscent of Descartes res cogitans) (Blanke 2012, p. 556; Metzinger 2005), some field work which suggests that those raised in cultures not heavily influenced by West Asian Monotheism identify less strongly with the subject and more strongly with the body seen e.g. Roseman (1990) and Rosaldo (1984). Here I focus on the simpler argument that a necessary link between identity and mind does not allow for an adequate description of heautoscopy.
My thanks go to an anonymous referee for this phrasing.
This ‘sense of ownership’ is not to be confused with Gallagher’s (2000) ‘sense of ownership’ which represents the self as a thing which is undergoing a movement.
As in footnote 2, I suspect that there will be cultural variation in this experience, but that does not make the experience any less real for those who have it.
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Acknowledgments
This research was funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021) http://www.ccd.edu.au. My thanks go to Laura May Ruggles (Bottrill), Regina Fabry and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions and to the members of the Body Representation reading group at Macquarie for their discussion on these issues.
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Carruthers, G. Who am I in out of body experiences? Implications from OBEs for the explanandum of a theory of self-consciousness. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 183–197 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9332-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9332-0