The mark of bodily ownership

Do bodily sensations include a distinctive experience of the body as of one's own? I am aware that this hand is mine. But is the sense of ownership of my hand manifested to me in a more primitive form than beliefs or judgements? Bermudez (2011) and Martin (1995) have recently argued in favour of a deflationary account of the sense of ownership, according to which there is nothing it feels like to experience one's body as of one's own, no felt 'myness' that goes over and above the mere experience of one's bodily properties. Here I present a series of counter-arguments against the deflationary conception of ownership. First, I will argue that there are belief-independent illusions of ownership. Secondly, I will show that one can have bodily sensations with no sense of ownership. I will then conclude that the notion of 'experience of ownership' is a good explanatory tool to account for these borderline situation

Habeas Corpus: The Sense of Ownership of One ' s Own Body

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

Le cerveau

Où avez-vous mal ? demande le médecin. Vous répondez naïvement souffrir du dos. Mais votre douleur se trouve-t-elle véritablement dans votre colonne vertébrale ? Ne serait-il pas plus exact de la situer dans le cerveau ? En effet, la douleur, comme toute autre sensation corporelle, est un événement mental dont la réalisation physique se situe dans le cerveau. Cette représentation cérébrale du corps est de même nécessaire pour agir ou pour reconnaître autrui. Nous verrons en détail les différents types de représentation du cerveau, leurs propriétés et leurs pathologies

Habeas Corpus: poczucie własności swojego ciała

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

A multimodal conception of bodily awareness

One way to characterize the special relation that one has to one's own body is to say that only one's body appears to one from the inside. Although widely accepted, the nature of this specific experiential mode of presentation of the body is rarely spelled out. Most definitions amount to little more than lists of the various body senses (including senses of posture, movement, heat, pressure, and balance). It is true that body senses provide a kind of informational access to one's own body, which one has to no other bodies, by contrast to external senses like vision, which can take many bodies as their object. But a theory of bodily awareness needs to take into account recent empirical evidence that indicates that bodily awareness is infected by a plague of multisensory effects, regardless of any dichotomy between body senses and external senses. Here I will argue in favour of a multimodal conception of bodily awareness. I will show that the body senses fail to fully account for the content of bodily experiences. I will then propose that vision helps compensate for the insufficiencies of the body senses in people who can see. I will finally argue that the multimodality of bodily experiences does not prevent privileged access to one's body

Hysteria: the reverse of anosognosia

Hysteria has been the subject of controversy for many years, with theorists arguing about whether it is best explained by a hidden organic cause or by malingering and deception. However, it has been shown that hysterical paralysis cannot be explained in any of these terms. With the recent development of cognitive psychiatry, one may understand psychiatric and organic delusions within the same conceptual framework. Here I contrast hysterical conversion with anosognosia. They are indeed remarkably similar, though the content of their respective delusions is the opposite. In hysterical paralysis, patients are not aware of their preserved ability, whereas in anosognosia for hemiplegia, patients are not aware of their disability. Four main explanations have been provided to account for anosognosia: metacognitive, attentional, motor, and motivational views. I will apply each of these accounts to hysterical paralysis and show that, at each level, hysterical conversion is the reverse of anosognosia. I will suggest that hysterical paralysis results from the interaction between attentional somatosensory amplification and affective inhibition of action

Action observation and execution: What is shared?

Performing an action and observing it activate the same internal representations of action. The representations are therefore shared between self and other (shared representations of action, SRA). But what exactly is shared? At what level within the hierarchical structure of the motor system do SRA occur? Understanding the content of SRA is important in order to decide what theoretical work SRA can perform. In this paper, we provide some conceptual clarification by raising three main questions: (i) are SRA semantic or pragmatic representations of action?; (ii) are SRA sensory or motor representations?; (iii) are SRA representations of the action as a global unit or as a set of elementary motor components? After outlining a model of the motor hierarchy, we conclude that the best candidate for SRA is intentions in action, defined as the motor plans of the dynamic sequence of movements. We shed new light on SRA by highlighting the causal efficacy of intentions in action. This in turn explains phenomena such as inhibition of imitation

The marginal body

According to Gurwitsch, the body is at least at the margin of consciousness. If all components of the field of consciousness were experienced as equally salient, we would indeed not be able to think and behave appropriately. Though the body may become the focus of our conscious field when we are introspectively aware of it, it remains most of the time only at the background of consciousness. However, we may wonder if bodily states do really need to be conscious, even at the margin, or cannot be simply non-conscious. Action control requires permanent proprioceptive and visual feedback about the state and the position of our body parts. Experimental data show that action monitoring operates at a nonconscious level and we may similarly suggest that we have a continuous unconscious access to bodily information. In this chapter, I thus intend to describe the various levels of body representations with the help of Gurwitsch's distinction. I will investigate the properties and the function of each of these levels

Autism, Morality and Empathy

The golden rule of most religions assumes that the cognitive abilities of perspective-taking and empathy are the basis of morality. One would therefore predict that people that display difficulties in those abilities, such as people with psychopathy and autism, are impaired in morality. But then why do autistics have a sense of morality while psychopaths do not, given that they both display a deficit of empathy? We would like here to refine some of the views on autism and morality. In order to do so, we will investigate whether autism really challenges a Humean view of morality. We will then provide a new conceptual framework based on the distinction between egocentric and allocentric stances, which may help us to make some predictions about the autistic sense of morality

Drawing the boundary between low-level and high-level mindreading

In order to bring together the cognitive neuroscientific discovery of mirror system and the philosophical account of pretense within a unique theoretical framework of mental simulation, Goldman distinguishes two types of mindreading, respectively, based on low-level and high-level simulation. Yet, in what sense are they really two distinct processes? Here, I will confine myself largely to spelling out a series of points that take issue with the distinction between low-level and high-level mindreading