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No-Self and the Phenomenology of Ownership
Abstract
The Abhidharma Buddhist revisionary metaphysics aims to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world that lacks a self. The first part of the paper claims that the Abhidharma ‘no-self’ view can be plausibly interpreted as a no-ownership view, according to which there is no locus or subject of experience and thus no owner of mental or bodily awarenesses. On this interpretation of the no-self view, the Abhidharma Buddhist metaphysicians are committed to denying the ownership of experiences, and thereby apparently obliged to explain our purported experience of ownership. My experiences seemingly come with the sense that I am the one who is undergoing this experience. But is there a really an experience of ownership—namely, an experience of being a subject that underlies our sense of ownership? I argue that there is nothing that it is like to be an owner of experiences, in the sense that there is no experiential phenomenology associated with the ownership of experience. The second part of the paper argues that, since there is no experience of ownership, there is no onus on the Abhidharma philosopher to give an explanation of the sense of ownership.
... 6) by highlighting this virtue. As I will point out, the idea that in somatosensation we experience the body as a sensory field can shed light on what, it has been acknowledged, might be a phenomenal commonality accross somatosensory states: that we have a sense of ownership for the body that we experience in this way (Chadha, 2018;Vignemont 2018;Bradley, 2021;Bermúdez, 2020). 5 5 As an anonymous reviewer has pointed out to me, talk about the body as a sensory field might evoke the way classical phenomenologists have addressed bodily awareness, specially Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (PP; 2012) and The Visible and the Invisible (VI; 1968); and also his predecessor, Edmund Husserl, mostly in Ideas II (1989). ...
... These quotes also articulate an intuition of subjectivity, now relative to somatosensation. Somatosensory perception of the body has been said to involve a sense of bodily ownership (Chadha, 2018;Vignemont, 2018;Bradley, 2021;Bermúdez, 2020): bodily properties, as they are perceived in somatosensation, seem to be properties of me in a specially compelling way. It seems indeed that, if I perceive a body somatosensorily, I will necessarily self-attribute it. ...
... It seems indeed that, if I perceive a body somatosensorily, I will necessarily self-attribute it. 19 The discussion is then whether self-attributions of this sort are grounded, strictly speaking, on bodily experiences themselves: whether it makes sense to say that there is something it is like to feel the body as one's own Martin, 1995;Dokic, 2003;Alsmith, 2015;Peacocke, 2017;Gallagher, 2017;Vignemont, 2018;Chadha 2018;Bradley, 2021). Interestingly, if this were the case -if there is a phenomenology of bodily ownership in somatosensation -, then there is a phenomenal invariance accross somatosensory states despite their phenomenal richness. ...
Philosophers of perception have been readier to postulate the existence of a visual field than to acknowledge sensory fields in other modalities. In this paper, I argue that the set of phenomenal features that philosophers have relied on when positing a visual field aptly characterise, mutatis mutandis, bodily sensation. I argue, in particular, that in localised bodily sensations we experience the body as a sensory field. I first motivate this claim for the case of haptic touch, and then generalise it to other kinds of bodily sensation. I demonstrate the theoretical fruitfulness of this notion of a bodily field for the debate on the phenomenology of bodily ownership.
... In neural terms, there is a phenomenon of habituation for repeated stimuli, which become suppressed over time, and if there is one thing that is repeated, it is our own body. It has even been argued that by default, there is no phenomenology of ownership; there would be only a phenomenology of disownership (Chadha, 2018). ...
... However, in the last few decades there has been a growing interest in what might be a phenomenal commonality between them 2 : a so-called sense of bodily ownership (henceforth SBO; e.g. Martin 1995;Dokic 2003;Bermúdez 2018a;Chadha 2018;Vignemont 2018;Bradley 2021) in virtue of which somatosensations appear not to be anchored in some body or other, but particularly in one's own body. This paper introduces a novel account of the SBO. ...
Experientialism about the sense of bodily ownership is the view that there is something it is like to feel a body as one’s own. In this paper I argue for a particular experientialist thesis. I first present a puzzle about the relation between bodily awareness and self-consciousness, and introduce a somewhat underappreciated view on the sense of bodily ownership, Implicit Reflexivity, that points us in the right direction as to how to address this puzzle. I argue that Implicit Reflexivity, however, does not provide a full solution to the puzzle. I then introduce a novel view on the sense of bodily ownership that inherits a central tenet, Reflexivity, from the above view, without having its flaws. According to Reflexivity, the sense of bodily ownership consists in the reflexive character of bodily sensations, namely in the fact that bodily sensations have experience-dependent properties as part of their content. Cashed out this way, Reflexivity is an attractive way of explicating the notion that bodily sensations are experiences of the body as subject. Reflexivity also highlights a central, but so far neglected, connection between the sense of bodily ownership and the sense of experience ownership.
... It is important to note that we do often shift quickly back and forth between first-order and introspective states which may lead some to believe that one or more of the above is always present. It is also worth mentioning that those sympathetic with a Buddhist "no-self" view, or perhaps even Hume for that matter, may also reject at least one or two of the above three phenomena as present at all in first-order conscious states in the sense that there is no experiential phenomenology associated with ownership of experience (Chadha 2018). ...
I believe that there is a ubiquitous pre-reflective self-awareness accompanying first-order conscious states. However, I do not think that such self-awareness is itself typically conscious. On my view, conscious self-awareness enters the picture during what is sometimes called “introspection” which is a more sophisticated form of self-consciousness. I argue that there is a very close connection between consciousness and self-consciousness and, more specifically, between the structure of all conscious states and self-consciousness partly based on the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness. A plausible notion of self-consciousness is, I think, simply having any degree of higher-order or meta-psychological thought. I argue that the connection between conscious states and self-consciousness is representational but also critically evaluate several different options. I then critique the alternative “acquaintance” theory of self-awareness and address a couple of recent criticisms of HOT theory. There is the potential danger of misrepresentation between self-awareness and conscious states which I also briefly address.
... A sense of separated-ness from others, from the world and from nature is not only a misinterpretation, it also leads inevitably to tension, conflict and suffering. Accordingly, the Australian philosopher Chadha (2018) says that the view of interdependence associated here with non-duality (the absence of existence of an independent self/subject) is not only a logical conclusion to analysis, it is the preferred ethical stance: 'The Abhidharma Buddhist revisionary metaphysics aims to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world that lacks a self' (2018, 1). Although Chadha here writes specifically about the Abhidharma view, her statement about the self applies to most schools of Buddhist thought. ...
All of us agree that a civilian population is inevitably and profoundly affected by a war, regardless of where this population stands in the scheme of things. A civilian population is hostage to the forces at work, not only physically, economically and socially, but also intimately, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. In fact, everyone involved in a conflict has to deal with the chaos in his or her own mind and in his or her own environment. The formulation of international humanitarian law (IHL) was influenced by a socially oriented intellectual culture that has often failed to address the inner workings of the individual consciousness. Buddhism’s contribution here may be just that: its insistence on the process of cognition as the ground for both the creation of and the liberation from suffering. More specifically, this paper focuses on the Dharmadharmatāvibhāga (DDV), an ancient North Indian Buddhist text. The premise is that many such ancient texts have something important to contribute to our contemporary world, by offering some insight into ‘universal principles’ in the workings of the mind and in human interactions. The question then is: how can these ideas contribute to the development of individual willingness to care and embody ethical conduct even during armed conflicts?
... Furthermore, there is at least one major world religion-Buddhism-which is known to favour the view that there is no self in the sense traditionally conceived by Western individualist thought [16], and which sees the denial of the self as a pathway to Enlightenment. Although there are different interpretations of exactly what the 'No Self' doctrine means, Monima Chadha argues that one leading version of it (the Abhidharma tradition) rejects both the idea of an extended narrative self and a self with any degree of agency and ownership over its actions [20,21]. All of these examples suggest that humans are not welded to an individualistic ethos, and so we should be at least open to the possibility of axiological alternatives to individualism. ...
The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening-something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim-the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument-and then defend it against three major objections. "We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
... 10 See also Alter 2009Alter , 2016 It is debatable whether there are some common, universally shared phenomenal features, such as some phenomenal subjectivity or 'for-me-ness', among the variety of 'what-is-it-likeness' (see, e.g. Block 1995;Kriegel 2007; but see Liang 2015;Chadha 2018). However, my argument still proceeds as long as there are some distinctive phenomenal features to be found in each kind of quale. ...
Russellian monism—an influential doctrine proposed by as reported by Russell (The analysis of matter, Routledge, London, 1927/1992)—is roughly the view that the natural sciences can only ever tell us about the causal, dispositional, and structural properties of physical entities and not about their categorical properties, and, moreover, that our qualia are constituted by categorical properties. Recently, Stoljar (Philos Phenomenol Res 62:253–281, 2001a), Stoljar (Philos Perspect 15:393–413, 2001b), as reported by Strawson (Real materialism: and other essays, Oxford, New York, 2008), Montero (J Conscious Stud 17:70–83, 2010), as reported by Montero (in: Alter and Nagasawa (eds) Consciousness in the physical world: perspectives on Russellian monism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015), Alter and Nagasawa (J Conscious Stud 19:67–95, 2012), and as reported by Chalmers (in: Alter and Nagasawa (eds) Consciousness in the physical world: perspectives on Russellian monism, Oxford University Press, New York, 2015) have attempted to develop this doctrine into a version of physicalism. Russellian monism faces the so-called combination problem, according to which it is difficult to see how categorical properties could collectively constitute qualia. In this paper, I suggest that there is an insufficiently discussed aspect of the combination problem which I call the difference-maker problem. Taking the difference-maker problem into account, I argue that the combination problem—whether or not it can be solved—results in a dilemma for the project of developing Russellian physicalism. That is, Russellian monism is either physicalistically unacceptable or it is implausible; hence, Russellian monism and physicalism are incompatible.
... 16 It is difficult to find authors who argue that there is a sense of mental ownership and explicitly refer to it as a distinctive feeling (in addition, as it were, to the phenomenal character of the mental state to which it supposedly applies). 17 Secondly, a number of objections have been raised against the very idea that there is a sense of mental ownership (see Chadha, 2018;McClelland, forthcoming). Thirdly, even those who think that there is a phenomenology of mental ownership generally agree that it is not ubiquitous. ...
Many authors argue that conscious experience involves a sense of self or self-consciousness. According to the strongest version of this claim, there can be no selfless states of consciousness, namely states of consciousness that lack self-consciousness altogether. Disagreements about this claim are likely to remain merely verbal as long as the target notion of self-consciousness is not adequately specified. After distinguishing six notions of self-consciousness commonly discussed in the literature, I argue that none of the corresponding features is necessary for consciousness, because there are states of consciousness in which each of them is plausibly missing. Such states can be said to be at least partially selfless, since they lack at least one of the ways in which one could be self-conscious. Furthermore, I argue that there is also preliminary empirical evidence that some states of consciousness lack all of these six putative forms of self-consciousness. Such states might be totally selfless, insofar as they lack all the ways in which one could be self-conscious. I conclude by addressing four objections to the possibility and reportability of totally selfless states of consciousness.
... Although we cannot discuss this proposal at length within the scope of this article, it is worth underlining that it rests on a controversial picture of ordinary experience. Indeed, the idea that consciousness is normally infused with a special sense of phenomenal mineness or awareness of oneself as the owner of one's experiences is far from obvious and has been met with a number of objections (see Howell and Thompson, 2017;O'Conaill, 2017;Chadha, 2018;McClelland, forthcoming;Wu, forthcoming). ...
In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of altered states of consciousness induced by classical psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, whose effects are mainly mediated by agonism of serotonin receptors. Few attempts have been made at bridging these two domains of inquiry, despite intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states. In particular, many contemplative traditions explicitly aim at dissolving the sense of self by eliciting altered states of consciousness through meditation, while classical psychedelics are known to produce significant disruptions of self-consciousness, a phenomenon known as drug-induced ego dissolution. In this article, we discuss available evidence regarding convergences and differences between phenomenological and neurophysiological data on meditation practice and psychedelic drug-induced states, with a particular emphasis on alterations of self-experience. While both meditation and psychedelics may disrupt self-consciousness and underlying neural processes, we emphasize that neither meditation nor psychedelic states can be conceived as simple, uniform categories. Moreover, we suggest that there are important phenomenological differences even between conscious states described as experiences of self-loss. As a result, we propose that self-consciousness may be best construed as a multidimensional construct, and that “self-loss,” far from being an unequivocal phenomenon, can take several forms. Indeed, various aspects of self-consciousness, including narrative aspects linked to autobiographical memory, self-related thoughts and mental time travel, and embodied aspects rooted in multisensory processes, may be differently affected by psychedelics and meditation practices. Finally, we consider long-term outcomes of experiences of self-loss induced by meditation and psychedelics on individual traits and prosocial behavior. We call for caution regarding the problematic conflation of temporary states of self-loss with “selflessness” as a behavioral or social trait, although there is preliminary evidence that correlations between short-term experiences of self-loss and long-term trait alterations may exist.
A ‘no‐ownership’ or ‘no‐self theory’ holds that there is no proper subject of experience; the ownership of experience can only be accounted for by invoking a sub‐personal entity. In the recent self‐versus‐no‐self debate, it is widely assumed that the no‐ referent view of ‘I’, which is closely associated with Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, implies a no‐ownership theory of experience. I spell out this assumption with regard to both non‐reflective and reflective consciousness and show that it is false. If the so‐called ‘self’ is an individual, the person, nothing more is required for the ownership of sensations than the non‐reflective experiencing, undergoing, or suffering of them, whereas the sense of ‘ownership’ of reflective consciousness varies according to the type of ‘I’‐thought in question. Ownership of ‘I’‐thoughts about one’s own actions, for one thing, is a matter of being able to fit future actions to them or answer questions as to why one is doing what one does.
For many centuries, scholars and philosophers from wisdom traditions in different cultures have reported and discussed non-self states of consciousness. These states can be both short-term (state, transitory) and long-term (trait, lasting) conditions. However, in psychology, the importance of a healthy self is usually emphasized, and some theorists have dismissed the idea of “selfless” modes of functioning. This disagreement hinders further empirical progress in the study of self and the way it might be affected by meditation. This paper addresses this issue by providing an interdisciplinary conceptual discussion, grounded in the pattern theory of self (PTS). According to PTS, what we call “self” is a complex pattern of dynamically related constituent processes, which include embodied, experiential (prereflective), affective, psychological/cognitive, reflective, narrative, intersubjective, ecological, and normative processes. We propose that Buddhist and secular meditative practices induce a reorganization of the self-pattern, allowing individuals to experience a “selfless” state, both temporarily and persistently. We then put forward a heuristic model, the pattern theory of selflessness (PTSL), possibly experienced through meditation practices. The proposed PTSL model consists of six transformations that contribute to self-pattern reorganization in a nonlinear and iterative manner: consolidating and integrating the self-pattern; cultivating concentration and present-moment awareness; cultivating mindful awareness; self-deconstruction (non-self) states; self-flexibility; and self-liberation as a trait. This conceptual analysis and integrative view contributes to the growing field of consciousness and contemplative research by advancing the contemporary understanding of non-self experience and its relation to Buddhist and secular meditation. The proposed model serves as a basis for interdisciplinary efforts to guide empirical research in this area.
Some contemporary Western theories of consciousness, such as the higher-order thought (HOT) theory and self-representationalism, hold that there is an implicit (pre-reflective) “self-awareness” that accompanies each conscious mental state. Important twentieth-century historical figures, such as Sartre and Brentano, have also embraced a similar position. This view, or something very close to it, can also be found centuries earlier in some Indian philosophy (such as in Dignāga) where conscious experience is thought of as “inherently reflexive” and cognition is understood to have a “dual-aspect.” In this chapter, I lay out some of the similarities and differences among these views and explain why I prefer the way that HOT theory accounts for such self-awareness as compared to the others, including HOT theory’s ability to avoid the much-discussed infinite regress threat and its more plausible explanation of introspection. I also explain how HOT theory, like many Buddhist accounts, is not logically committed to the existence of an enduring substantial “self.”
Most accounts of bodily self-awareness focus on its sensory and agentive dimensions, tracking the origins of our special relationship with our own body in the way we gain information about it and in the way we act with it. However, they often neglect a fundamental dimension of our subjective bodily life, namely, its affective dimension. This Element will discuss bodily self-awareness through the filter of its affective significance. It is organized around four core themes: (i) the relationship between bodily awareness and action in instrumental and protective contexts, (ii) the motivational role of pain and interoception, (iii) the sense of bodily ownership and its relation to the value of the body for survival, and (iv) bodily anchoring in peripersonal and egocentric awareness. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Abhidharma Buddhist philosophy presents a version of what is now often called “panprotopsychism.” The most pressing group of problems for the Abhidharma panprotopsychism, like all other panpsychist views, is what Seager calls “the combination problem.” There are at least three versions of the problem: the subject-combination problem; the quality-combination problem; and the structure-combination problem. I begin with the Abhidharma Buddhist version of panprotopsychism and its account of conscious experience. The main focus of this paper is to show that Abhidharma panprotopsychist account of conscious experience solves the quality-combination problem. In the last and closing Section, I look at other versions of the combination problem, primarily the subject-combination problem and the structural problem and provide a sketch of the Abhidharma Buddhist response to these.
Sāṃkhya philosophy on evolution have very profound and compact theory, compared to any other metaphysical concepts. The system advocates an ontological dualism of Prakṛti and Puruṣa [individual souls]. It believes in the evolution of the cosmos including matter, life and mind out of the eternal Prakṛti to serve the ends of an infinite number of individual souls. However, metaphysical exposition on inactive agent producing conscious things has become controversial issue. This paper presents the metaphysical concepts in Sāṃkhyakārikā
The Buddhist no-self and no-person revisionary metaphysics aims to produce a better structure that is motivated by the normative goal of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering. The revised structure, in turn, entails a major reconsideration of our ordinary everyday person-related concerns and practices and interpersonal attitudes, such as moral responsibility, praise and blame, compensation, and social treatment. This essay explores the extent to which we must alter and perhaps discard some of our practical commitments in light of the Buddhist revisionism. I do not argue here that we should change our ordinary practices, concerns, and attitudes, or that the Buddhist metaphysics does succeed in presenting a better structure. Rather, I offer it as an alternative structure that should be considered seriously.
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” (Rosenthal D. Consciousness and mind. New York: Oxford University Press; 2005, Gennaro R. The consciousness paradox: consciousness, concepts, and higher-order thoughts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 2012. p. 127–9.). In a previous publication (Gennaro R. Somatoparaphrenia, anosognosia, and higher-order thoughts. In: Gennaro R, editor. Disturbed consciousness: new essays on psychopathology and theories of consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 2015. p. 57–8), I argued that a HOT theorist can adequately respond to this concern with respect to somatoparaphrenia. Somatoparaphrenia is a “depersonalization disorder” which is characterized by the sense of alienation from parts of one’s body. It is a bizarre type of body delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one’s body. My focus in the chapter, however, is on “inserted thoughts” which is a common symptom of schizophrenia, although it will also be useful to contrast it with somatoparaphrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder which most commonly manifests itself through auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking. Thought insertion is the delusion that some thoughts are not “one’s own” in some sense or are somehow being inserted into one’s mind by someone else. Graham and Stephens (When self-consciousness breaks: alien voices and inserted thoughts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press; 2000), for example, have suggested that thought insertion should be understood as alienated self-consciousness or meta-representation. I argue that HOT theory has nothing to fear from this phenomenon either and can consistently explain what happens in this admittedly unusual case.
Why does God allow evil? One hypothesis is that God desires the existence and activity of free creatures but He was unable to create a world with such creatures and such activity without also allowing evil. If Molinism is true, what probability should be assigned to this hypothesis? Some philosophers claim that a low probability should be assigned because there are an infinite number of possible people and because we have no reason to suppose that such creatures will choose one way rather than another. Arguments like this depend on the principle of indifference. But that principle is rejected by most philosophers of probability. Some philosophers claim that a low probability should be assigned because doing otherwise violates intuitions about freewill. But such arguments can be addressed through strategies commonly employed to defend theories with counterintuitive results across ethics and metaphysics.
In a 1962 article, ‘On Sensations of Position’, G. E. M. Anscombe claimed that we do not feel our legs crossed; we simply know that they are that way. What about the sense of bodily ownership? Do we directly know that this body is our own, or do we know it because we feel this body that way? One may claim, for instance, that we are we aware that this is our own body thanks to our bodily experiences that ascribe the property of myness to the body that they represent. Here I approach this issue from the perspective of the debate on the admissible content of perception, appealing to the method of phenomenal contrast. After rejecting the myness hypothesis, I criticize alternative accounts of the contrast in somatosensory, cognitive, and agentive terms. I conclude that the phenomenology of ownership consists in the affective awareness of the unique significance of the body for survival.
In certain startling neurological and psychiatric conditions, what is ordinarily most intimate and familiar to us—our own body—can feel alien. For instance, in cases of somatoparaphrenia subjects misattribute their body parts to others, while in cases of depersonalization subjects feel estranged from their bodies. These ownership disorders thus appear to consist in a loss of any feeling of bodily ownership, the felt sense we have of our bodies as our own. Against this interpretation of ownership disorders, I defend Sufficiency, the thesis that every experience of bodily awareness suffices for a feeling of bodily ownership. Since Sufficiency conflicts with a face‐value interpretation of these ownership disorders, the burden is on me to explain away the apparent tension. To do so, I identify and correct what I believe to be the fundamental mistake in the extant literature on the feeling of bodily ownership, namely the tendency to treat the notion of a feeling of bodily ownership as a single psychological construct. Instead, I distinguish the feeling of minimal ownership, the first‐personal character of bodily awareness, from the feeling of affective ownership, the distinctive type of felt concern we have for our bodies. I motivate this distinction by raising the disownership puzzle, the fact that subjects suffering from ownership disorders display an ambiguous set of symptoms, arguing the distinction I draw between minimal and affective ownership is just what is required to resolve the puzzle.
Phenomenal consciousness, what it is like for each particular subject, seems to be at the heart of subjectivity and the primary home of the self. But is there in fact a role for the self in phenomenal consciousness? According to the phenomenal no‐self challenge, reflection on the character of phenomenal consciousness reveals no self and no subjectivity. I articulate an argument for this challenge based on the transparency of conscious experience. I then respond to this argument and show that there is an aspect of phenomenal consciousness that the challengers miss. This aspect is active attention. In active attention, in particular in the ability to actively resist distractions, consciousness reveals an agential self: the experiencer is phenomenally manifest as an active power. I further show that the subject’s active role in experience is plausibly present in every form of experience.
The paper evaluates a well‐known argument for a self from episodic memories—that remembering that I did something or thought something involves experiencing the identity of my present self with the past doer or thinker. Shaun Nichols argues that although it phenomenologically appears to be the case that we are identical with the past self, no metaphysical conclusion can be drawn from the phenomenology. I draw on literature from contemporary psychology and Buddhist resources to arrive at a more radical conclusion: that there is no phenomenological sense of identity with a past self; the sense of self in episodic memory depends on narrative construction of the self.
Several recently developed philosophical approaches to the self promise to enhance
the exchange of ideas between the philosophy of the mind and the other cognitive
sciences. This review examines two important concepts of self: the ‘minimal self’, a self
devoid of temporal extension, and the ‘narrative self’, which involves personal identity
and continuity across time. The notion of a minimal self is first clarified by drawing a
distinction between the sense of self-agency and the sense of self-ownership for actions.
This distinction is then explored within the neurological domain with specific reference
to schizophrenia, in which the sense of self-agency may be disrupted. The convergence
between the philosophical debate and empirical study is extended in a discussion of
more primitive aspects of self and how these relate to neonatal experience and robotics.
The second concept of self, the narrative self, is discussed in the light of Gazzaniga’s
left-hemisphere ‘interpreter’ and episodic memory. Extensions of the idea of a narrative
self that are consistent with neurological models are then considered. The review
illustrates how the philosophical approach can inform cognitive science and suggests
that a two-way collaboration may lead to a more fully developed account of the self.
This chapter argues for the counter-intuitive thesis that consciousness does not require a self. Granted, a central feature of conscious states is that their mode of appearance exhibits an irreducibly first-personal nature, and this 'how' of consciousness is what secures its phenomenal character. It seems natural to assume that this 'how' points back to a 'who'. This chapter argues, however, that just because the subjective character of consciousness gives rise to a sense of self-that is, the felt sense of being a stable who, or owner of conscious episodes-it does not follow that this who really exists. It examines the notion of a 'minimal self' developed by Zahavi and others, as well as a Buddhist conception of selfless subjectivity, and then argues that the phenomenal character of consciousness, which the minimal self-model is supposed to capture, does not require the existence of a stable, permanent, or unconditioned self.
In a recent paper, Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership (de Vignemont 2013, The mark of bodily ownership. Analysis 73: 643–51, see also 2007, Habeas corpus: the sense of ownership of one’s own body. Mind and Language 22: 427–49). She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of
myness and takes issue with my defense in Bermúdez (2011, Bodily awareness and self-consciousness. Oxford Handbook of the Self, ed. S. Gallagher. 157–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) of a deflationary approach to bodily ownership. That paper proposed
an argument deriving from Elizabeth Anscombe’s various discussions of what she terms knowledge without observation (Anscombe 1957, Intention. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962, On sensations of position. Analysis 22: 55–58.). De Vignemont is not convinced and appeals to the Rubber Hand Illusion to undercut my appeal to Anscombe. Section
1 of this article restates the case against the putative quale of ownership. Section 2 explains why de Vignemonts’ objections
miss the mark. Section 3 discusses in more detail how to draw a principled distinction between bodily awareness and ordinary
perceptual awareness.
I am aware that this hand is my own. But is the sense of ownership of my hand manifested to me in a more primitive form than
judgements? On the deflationary view recently defended by Martin and Bermúdez in their works, the sense of bodily ownership
has no counterpart at the experiential level. Here I present a series of cases that the deflationary account cannot easily
accommodate, including belief-independent illusions of ownership and experiences of disownership despite the presence of bodily
sensations. I conclude that there is some kind of non-conceptual intuitive awareness of ownership.
Disturbances of the minimal self, characterized by abnormal sense of the body, body ownership and agency have been proposed as the phenomenological phenotype of schizophrenia. However, self-disturbances have not been extensively investigated, in part, due to the subjective nature of such processes, and the associated difficulty of studying these phenomena using empirical methodology. Of 115 potential studies on self-awareness in schizophrenia, a total of 25 studies met the inclusion criteria for the meta-analysis comprising 690 patients with schizophrenia and 979 healthy controls. We calculated Hedge's g to obtain a better estimate for the standardized mean difference in small samples. We identified significant basic self-disturbance in schizophrenia, as compared with healthy controls (25 studies, effect size=0.51). Additional comparison of three sub-categories of the sense of body ownership (4 studies, effect size=0.91), the sense of agency (15 studies, effect size=0.49), and self-reported subjective experiences (6 studies, effect size=0.57) also confirmed group differences. The complete set of 25 studies, and the studies in the sub-categories showed the statistical homogeneity of the characteristics. After a correction for potential publication bias using the trim-and-fill method, the main findings for all studies combined remained significant. Overall, patients with schizophrenia showed deficits in the sense of the minimal self, driven by abnormal sense of body ownership and sense of agency. Interestingly, the disturbed sense of agency in schizophrenia suggests an exaggerated self-consciousness rather than a diminished sense of self. Further research that utilizes sophisticated study designs is needed to examine the nature of self-disturbances in schizophrenia.
This book contributes to the idea that to have an understanding of the mind, consciousness, or cognition, a detailed scientific and phenomenological understanding of the body is essential. There is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. This book helps to formulate this common vocabulary by developing a conceptual framework that avoids both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and the inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Through discussions of neonate imitation, the Molyneux problem, gesture, self-awareness, free will, social cognition and intersubjectivity, as well as pathologies such as deafferentation, unilateral neglect, phantom limb, autism and schizophrenia, the book proposes to remap the conceptual landscape by revitalizing the concepts of body image and body schema, proprioception, ecological experience, intermodal perception, and enactive concepts of ownership and agency for action. Informed by both philosophical theory and scientific evidence, it addresses two basic sets of questions that concern the structure of embodied experience. First, questions about the phenomenal aspects of that structure, specifically the relatively regular and constant phenomenal features found in the content of experience. Second, questions about aspects of the structure of consciousness that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before one knows it, and do not normally enter into the phenomenal content of experience in an explicit way.
We describe the clinical manifestations and the lesion patterns of five patients with somatoparaphrenia, the denial of ownership for a paralyzed limb, who showed the rare dissociation from anosognosia for hemiplegia. Similar cases have been only occasionally cited in the literature with scanty descriptions of their symptoms and no detailed anatomical assessment. All patients had extrapersonal and at least mild personal neglect. The lesions pattern was mainly subcortical, with a significant involvement of the right thalamus, the basal ganglia and the internal capsule. A formal comparison between the anatomical pattern previously associated with anosognosia in a study performed in 2005 by Berti and colleagues, and the lesion distribution of each patient clearly shows that our pure somatoparaphrenic patients had a sparing of most of the regions associated with anosognosia for hemiplegia. The behavioral dissociation between SP and anosognosia for hemiplegia, together with this new anatomical evidence, suggests that motor awareness is not sufficient to build up a sense of ownership and therefore these two cognitive abilities are at least in part functionally independent and qualitatively different.
Background:
A weakened sense of self may contribute to psychotic experiences. Body ownership, one component of self-awareness, can be studied with the rubber hand illusion (RHI). Watching a rubber hand being stroked while one's unseen hand is stroked synchronously can lead to a sense of ownership over the rubber hand, a shift in perceived position of the real hand, and a limb-specific drop in stimulated hand temperature. We aimed to assess the RHI in schizophrenia using quantifiable measures: proprioceptive drift and stimulation-dependent changes in hand temperature.
Methods:
The RHI was elicited in 24 schizophrenia patients and 21 matched controls by placing their unseen hand adjacent to a visible rubber hand and brushing real and rubber hands synchronously or asynchronously. Perceived finger location was measured before and after stimulation. Hand temperature was taken before and during stimulation. Subjective strength of the illusion was assessed by a questionnaire.
Results:
Across groups, the RHI was stronger during synchronous stimulation, indicated by self-report and proprioceptive drift. Patients reported a stronger RHI than controls. Self-reported strength of RHI was associated with schizotypy in controls Proprioceptive drift was larger in patients, but only following synchronous stimulation. Further, we observed stimulation-dependent changes in skin temperature. During right hand stimulation, temperature dropped in the stimulated hand and rose in the unstimulated hand. Interestingly, induction of RHI led to an out-of-body experience in one patient, linking body disownership and psychotic experiences.
Conclusions:
The RHI is quantitatively and qualitatively stronger in schizophrenia. These findings suggest that patients have a more flexible body representation and weakened sense of self, and potentially indicate abnormalities in temporo-parietal networks implicated in body ownership. Further, results suggest that these body ownership disturbances might be at the heart of a subset of the pathognomonic delusions of passivity.
Several recently developed philosophical approaches to the self promise to enhance the exchange of ideas between the philosophy of the mind and the other cognitive sciences. This review examines two important concepts of self: the 'minimal self', a self devoid of temporal extension, and the 'narrative self', which involves personal identity and continuity across time. The notion of a minimal self is first clarified by drawing a distinction between the sense of self-agency and the sense of self-ownership for actions. This distinction is then explored within the neurological domain with specific reference to schizophrenia, in which the sense of self-agency may be disrupted. The convergence between the philosophical debate and empirical study is extended in a discussion of more primitive aspects of self and how these relate to neonatal experience and robotics. The second concept of self, the narrative self, is discussed in the light of Gazzaniga's left-hemisphere 'interpreter' and episodic memory. Extensions of the idea of a narrative self that are consistent with neurological models are then considered. The review illustrates how the philosophical approach can inform cognitive science and suggests that a two-way collaboration may lead to a more fully developed account of the self.
Depersonalisation disorder is a poorly understood and underresearched syndrome.
To carry out a large and comprehensive clinical and psychopathological survey of a series of patients who made contact with a research clinic.
A total of 204 consecutive eligible referrals were included: 124 had a full psychiatric examination using items of the Present State Examination to define depersonalisation/derealisation and 80 had either a telephone interview (n=22) or filled out a number of self-report questionnaires. Cases assessed were diagnosed according to DSM-IV criteria.
The mean age of onset was 22.8 years; early onset was associated with greater severity. There was a slight male preponderance. The disorder tended to be chronic and persistent. Seventy-one per cent met DSM-IV criteria for primary depersonalisation disorder. Depersonalisation symptom scores correlated with both anxiety and depression and a past history of these disorders was commonly reported. 'Dissociative amnesia' was not prominent.
Depersonalisation disorder is a recognisable clinical entity but appears to have significant comorbidity with anxiety and depression. Research into its aetiology and treatment is warranted.
The Integration Challenge is the task of reconciling a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements of a given kind with a credible account of how we can know those statements, when we do know them. In any domain for which the challenge is difficult, we may revise either our conception of the epistemology of that domain, or our conception of its metaphysics, or both. Successfully meeting the Integration Challenge involves the development of a theory of understanding with both metaphysical and epistemological dimensions. Understanding involves an integrated grasp both of truth conditions, and, via a theory of possession conditions, and of circumstances in which one can come to know that certain of those conditions obtain. Two different models for meeting the Integration Challenge can be developed: the model of constitutive causal sensitivity and the model of implicitly known principles. A model of the first kind is developed for a realistic account of our understanding of past‐tense contents. A model of the second kind is developed for our understanding of contents involving metaphysical necessity; an account that treats modal statements as not mind‐dependent, but not as involving Lewisian modal realism. The Integration Challenge is also addressed for various classical and recent problems of philosophy: the nature of one's knowledge of the contents of one's own mental states; the distinctive nature of first‐person knowledge; and the classical problem of the freedom of the will.
This article argues that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. It clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, categorises the different types of body-relative information, and rejects the claim that we can have a sense of ownership of our own bodies. It explores how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and highlights the importance of certain forms of bodily awareness that share an important epistemological property with canonical forms of selfconsciousness such as introspection.
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.
The nature of perception has long been a central question in philosophy. It is of crucial importance not just in the philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science. The essays in this 1992 volume not only offer fresh answers to some of the traditional problems of perception, but also examine the subject in light of contemporary research on mental content. A substantial introduction locates the essays within the recent history of the subject, and demonstrates the links between them. The Contents of Experience brings together some prominent philosophers in the field, and offers a major statement on a problem central to current philosophical thinking. Notable contributors include Christopher Peacocke, Brian O'Shaughnessy and Michael Tye.
How should one go about understanding the relation between time and self? In the following I will compare and contrast two philosophical conceptions of self that both stress the close connection between selfhood and temporality. Despite this shared conviction they happen to emphasize quite different aspects of self, however, partly because they operate with quite different notions of time. In the first case, the focus is on narrated time and on the link between selfhood and narration, in the second case, it is on the temporal structure of the stream of consciousness.
Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical anticipations in Kant and Frege, brings four classic contributions together in one place, and offers five new studies. (Series A)
Since its publication in 1959, Individuals has become a modern philosophical classic. Bold in scope and ambition, it continues to influence debates in metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, and epistemology. Peter Strawson's most famous work, it sets out to describe nothing less than the basic subject matter of our thought. It contains Strawson's now famous argument for descriptive metaphysics and his repudiation of revisionary metaphysics, in which reality is something beyond the world of appearances. Throughout, Individuals advances some highly influential and controversial ideas, such as 'non-solipsistic consciousness' and the concept of a person a 'primitive concept'
This chapter examines Indian views of the mind and consciousness, with particular focus on the Indian Buddhist tradition. To contextualize Buddhist views of the mind, we first provide a brief presentation of some of the most important Hindu views, particu- larly those of the Sam . khya school. Whereas this school assumes the existence of a real transcendent self, the Buddhist view is that mental activity and consciousness function on their own without such a self. We focus on the phenomenological and epistemological aspects of this no-self view of the mind. We first discuss the Buddhist Abhidharma and its analysis of the mind in terms of awareness and mental factors. The Abidharma is mainly phenomenological; it does not present an epistemological analysis of the structure of mental states and the way they relate to their objects. To cover this topic we turn to Dhar- mak¯irti, one of the main Buddhist epistemol- ogists, who offers a comprehensive view of the types of cognition and their relation to their objects.
Psychosis and psychosis-proneness are associated with abnormalities in subjective experience of the self, including distortions in bodily experience that are difficult to study experimentally due to lack of structured methods. In 55 healthy adults, we assessed the relationship between self-reported psychosis-like characteristics and susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion of body ownership. In this illusion, a participant sees a rubber hand being stroked by a brush at the same time that they feel a brush stroking their own hand. In some individuals, this creates the bodily sense that the rubber hand is their own hand. Individual differences in positive (but not negative) psychosis-like characteristics predicted differences in susceptibility to experiencing the rubber hand illusion. This relationship was specific to the subjective experience of rubber hand ownership, and not other unusual experiences or sensations, and absent when a small delay was introduced between seeing and feeling the brush stroke. This indicates that individual differences in susceptibility are related to visual-tactile integration and cannot be explained by differences in the tendency to endorse unusual experiences. Our findings suggest that susceptibility to body representation distortion by sensory information may be related or contribute to the development of psychosis and positive psychosis-like characteristics.
What grounds my experience of my body as my own? The body that one experiences is always one’s own, but it does not follow that one always experiences it as one’s own. One might even feel that a body part does not belong to oneself despite feeling sensations in it, like in asomatognosia. The article aims at understanding the link between bodily sensations and the sense of ownership by investigating the role played by the body schema.
The phenomenon of a phantom limb is a common experience after a limb has been amputated or its sensory roots have been destroyed. A complete break of the spinal cord also often leads to a phantom body below the level of the break. Furthermore, a phantom of the breast, the penis, or of other innervated body parts is reported after surgical removal of the structure. A substantial number of children who are born without a limb feel a phantom of the missing part, suggesting that the neural network, or 'neuromatrix', that subserves body sensation has a genetically determined substrate that is modified by sensory experience.
The effects of vestibular stimulation on somatoparaphrenic delusion were investigated in a patient suffering from a fronto-temporo-parietal infarction located in the right hemisphere. Transitory remission of the patient's delusional belief was consistently observed during unilateral vestibular activation obtained by means of cold-water irrigation of the left (contralesional) ear.
Cerebral damage may induce a delusional belief so that patients claim that their limbs contralateral to the side of the lesion belong to someone else (somatoparaphrenia). This disorder, which is not due to a general delirium, is frequently accompanied by the inability to feel tactile sensations in the 'non-belonging' part of the body. We report the unique case of a patient with somatoparaphrenia in whom dense tactile imperception in the left hand dramatically recovered when she was instructed to report touches delivered to her niece's hand, rather than to her own hand. We suggest that, through this verbal instruction, the mismatch between the patient's belief about the ownership of her left hand and her ability to perceive touch on it was transiently recomposed. This is evidence that apparently elementary deficits, such as hemianesthesia, and selective delusional behavior, such as somatoparaphrenia, may both originate from an impairment of the body image.
There has been an increase in the study of insight in schizophrenia in the last 20 years. Insight is operationally defined according to five dimensions which include: the patient's awareness of mental disorder, awareness of the social consequences of disorder, awareness of the need for treatment, awareness of symptoms and attribution of symptoms to disorder. Despite the development of psychometrically sound measurement tools, the results from previous studies have been inconclusive regarding the nature of the relationship between insight and symptomatology. A meta-analysis of 40 published English-language studies was conducted to determine the magnitude and direction of the relationship, or effect size, between insight and symptom domains in schizophrenia and to determine moderator variables that were associated with the variations in effect sizes across studies. Results indicated that there was a small negative relationship between insight and global, positive and negative symptoms. There was also a small positive relationship between insight and depressive symptoms in schizophrenia. Acute patient status and mean age of onset of the disorder moderated the relationship between insight and symptom clusters. The possible reasons for the effect sizes being modest, the examination of the role of moderator variables and directions for future research are provided.
Disorders of self-experience were emphasized in classic literature and in phenomenological psychiatry as essential clinical features of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders, but are neglected in the contemporary psychopathology due to epistemologically motivated distrust of studying anomalies of subjectivity. Based on our own and other empirical studies, we present here detailed clinical phenomenological descriptions of nonpsychotic anomalies of self-experience that may be observable in the prodromal phases of schizophrenia and in the schizotypal disorders. Anomalies of self-experience are grouped according the experiential domain that appears to be affected and are illustrated by short vignettes or verbatim quotes from the patients. It is suggested that disorders of the self deserve further systematic empirical investigations, also from an etiological perspective. Self-disorders may turn out to be potentially useful as a psychopathological organizer of the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Psychopathological emphasis on these disorders may also help to integrate the search for the neurodevelopmental mechanisms in schizophrenia with developmental-psychological research on the ontogenesis of the self.
The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown. In the present review, we consider the methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of agency and body-ownership, and we then present a series of experiments that study the interplay between motor and sensory information. In particular, we focus on how multisensory signals interact with body representations to generate the sense of body-ownership, and how the sense of agency modulates the sense of body-ownership. Finally, we consider the respective roles of efferent and afferent signals for the experience of one's own body and actions, in relation to self-recognition and the recognition of other people's actions. We suggest that the coherent experience of the body depends on the integration of efferent information with afferent information in action contexts. Overall, whereas afferent signals provide the distinctive content of one's own body experience, efferent signals seem to structure the experience of one's own body in an integrative and coherent way.
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Minimal Self and Narrative Self: A Distinction in Need of Refinement
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For-Me-Ness: What It Is and What It Is Not
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