Abstract
Disagreements among phenomenologists about the notions of self and self-consciousness have been present from the very beginning. Some, including Husserl, defend egoic conceptions of consciousness; others like Gurwitsch and Sartre defend non-egoic conceptions. Merleau-Ponty and later phenomenologists provide for a notion of the embodied self. One general consensus, however, pertains to the notion of prereflective self-awareness and what is sometimes called the ‘minimal self’. The idea that prereflective self-awareness is a stable anchor for our experiences can be explained in terms of a Wittgensteinian concept which comes to be known as ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (IEM). This chapter includes a review of some debates about IEM and looks at a variety of experiments and psychopathologies to understand whether this concept holds up to phenomenological scrutiny.
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Notes
- 1.
The logic of involuntary movement suggests that SA, in a minimal sense concerned simply with control of bodily movement, may correlate with efferent brain signals (motor commands), since both SA and efferent signals are missing in the case of involuntary movement. SO, on the other hand, may be generated in part by sensory feedback, especially proprioceptive/kinaesthetic reafference generated in the movement itself, or the integration of sensory feedback from different modalities (Tsakiris & Haggard, <CitationRef CitationID="CR69" >2005</Citation Ref>).
- 2.
Not everyone does. See, e.g., Billon (<CitationRef CitationID="CR2" >2011</Citation Ref>) and Bortolotti and Broome (<CitationRef CitationID="CR5" >2009</Citation Ref>).
- 3.
Fotopoulou, personal communication. A similar phenomenon of mirror correction has been found to cause immediate recovery from anosognosia for hemiplegia (Fotopoulou et al., <CitationRef CitationID="CR22" >2009</Citation Ref>).
- 4.
Farrer et al. (<CitationRef CitationID="CR19" >2003</Citation Ref>) showed differential activation in the inferior part of the parietal lobe, specifically on the right side, for perceived self-movement of limbs in non-canonical positions and in the insula for perception of self-movement in canonical positions in non-pathological subjects. Saxe, Jamal, and Powell (<CitationRef CitationID="CR61" >2006</Citation Ref>) found activation in the right extrastriate body area in response to images of body parts presented from a non-canonical perspective. Corradi-Dell’acqua et al. (<CitationRef CitationID="CR14" >2008</Citation Ref>) have shown activation of the right parieto-temporal-occipital junction during perception of the self as an external object (as in the mirror, or in a video game).
- 5.
Mike Martin (<CitationRef CitationID="CR49" >1995</Citation Ref>) proposed that SO is bound to the somatosensory body boundaries—but it seems that the RHI and other phenomena (phantom limb, personal neglect) go against that suggestion. Martin’s proposal ignores the effect of vision. As in out-of-body experiences, the ‘[i]ntegration of proprioception, tactile, and visual information of one’s body fails due to discrepant central representations by the different sensory systems. This may lead to the experience of seeing one’s body in a position that does not coincide with the felt position of one’s body” (Blanke & Arzy, <CitationRef CitationID="CR3" >2005</Citation Ref>).
- 6.
The previously discussed experiments (RHI and whole-body displacement) can also be reinterpreted in this way. For an experiment that, like the NASA robot experience, also involves SA, see Tsakiris and Haggard (<CitationRef CitationID="CR69" >2005</Citation Ref>).
- 7.
Cassam (<CitationRef CitationID="CR11" >1997</Citation Ref>) suggests that IEM is based on one’s awareness of oneself (or one’s body, e.g., via proprioception) as perspectival origin. Bodily self-awareness is ‘as subject’ only if (1) it is an awareness of oneself as perspectival origin (e.g., proprioception) and (2) it is the basis for first-person statements that are IEM. But as we’ve seen, this sort of awareness is not entirely reliable, in which case IEM could only be de facto. In contrast, the claim I’m making is not about my awareness of myself as perspectival origin—it’s about being the perspectival origin of my awareness. Evans (<CitationRef CitationID="CR18" >1982</Citation Ref>, e.g., 222) also hints at this more than once, but nonetheless maintains that IEM depends on the mode of access or ‘ways of gaining knowledge’ (proprioception in the case of bodily awareness). According to the L-theory one should give up the idea that IEM depends on dedicated modes of access—it’s not that we have IEM by gaining information or having knowledge about ourselves.
- 8.
In what may be a similar experience (albeit with a different diagnosis), Sass and Parnas (<CitationRef CitationID="CR60" >2003</Citation Ref>) report on a patient (prodromal schizoprenia) who feels ownership for his experiences lagging behind the initial awareness of those states: ‘One patient reported that his feeling of his experience as his own experience only “appeared a split-second delayed.”’ (p. 438).
- 9.
The idea of a free-floating, positionless vision makes no sense (for humans, animals, machines) since even if one is free-floating one is seeing from whatever position one is floating at. A positionless perception would be a bodyless perception, something of which gods and angels may be capable. I will limit my considerations to the particular cases of embodied perception, however.
- 10.
In this regard, one should not think that linking A’s visual system to B’s visual system will get us even as far as Evan’s thought experiment.
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Gallagher, S. (2022). Self and First-Person Perspective. In: Phenomenology. Palgrave Philosophy Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11586-8_7
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