The Missing Pieces in the Scientific Study of Bodily Awareness (original) (raw)
Related papers
Bodily awareness and self-consciousness
Oxford Companion to the Self (edited by Shaun Gallagher), 2011
We are embodied, and we are aware of our bodies ‘from the inside’ through different forms of bodily awareness. But what is the relation between these two facts? Are these forms of bodily awareness types of self-consciousness, on a par, say, with introspection? In this paper I argue that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness, through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. The first two sections clarify the nature of bodily awareness. We are aware of our bodies in many different ways. Some are conscious; others non-conscious. Some are conceptual; others nonconceptual. Some are first-personal; others third personal. The first section of this paper taxonomizes these different types of bodily awareness. Some philosophers have claimed that we have a “sense of ownership” of our own bodies. In section II I evaluate, and ultimately reject, a strong reading of this claim, on which the sense of ownership is a distinct and phenomenologically salient dimension of bodily awareness. In sections III to V I explore how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness. Section III discusses the significance of certain forms of bodily awareness sharing an important epistemological property with canonical forms of self-consciousness such as introspection. This is the property of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun. I explain why having the immunity property qualifies those types of bodily awareness as forms of self-consciousness (subject to two further requirements that I spell out). In section IV I consider, and remain unconvinced by, an argument to the effect that bodily awareness cannot have first person content (and hence cannot count as a form of self-consciousness). Finally, section V sketches out an account of the spatial content of bodily awareness and explores the particular type of awareness of the bodily self that it provides.
Body Awareness in Theory and Practice
Journal article by Bruce I. Kodish; ETC.: A Review of …, 2004
At such times, our experience may seem like something that happens to us, not som ething that we have an opportunity to shape as we like. ,.
Forthcoming in Mind 1 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.
Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, edited by David Woodruff Smith and Amie L.Thomasson (OUP, 2005)
This paper explores the dialectic between discussions of bodily awareness in the phenomenological tradition and in contemporary philosophy of mind and scientific psychology. It shows, with particular reference to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, how phenomenological insights into bodily awareness and its role in agency can be developed and illuminated by research into somatic proprioception and motor control. The paper presents a taxonomy of different types and levels of bodily awareness and presents a model of the spatiality of bodily awareness that explains some of the fundamental differences that Merleau-Ponty identified between our experience of our bodies and our experience of non-bodily objects. The key to these differences is that bodily locations are given on a non-Cartesian frame of reference. The final section shows how this way of thinking about the phenomenology of bodily awareness has interesting and fruitful connections with current thinking about motor control.
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.
Synthese, 2019
In bodily awareness body parts are felt to occupy locations relative to the rest of the body. Bodily sensations are felt to be, in Brian O'Shaughnessy's terms 'in-a-certainbody-part-at-a-position-in-body-relative-physical-space'. In this paper I put forward a dispositional account of the structure of the spatial content of bodily awareness, which takes inspiration from Gareth Evans's account of egocentric spatial content presented in The Varieties of Reference (1982). On the Dispositional View, bodily awareness experiences have spatial content in virtue of a set of connections having been established between somatosensory and proprioceptive inputs on the one hand, and motor outputs on the other hand.
The Phenomenology of Bodily Awareness *
Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind, 2005
* This paper has been greatly improved by comments from David Smith, Amie Thomasson, and an anonymous reviewer for OUP. A much shorter version of the central sections was published as Bermúdez 2004. 1 For a very useful introduction see Part 3 of Roberts 2002.
Awareness of the Body "From the Inside": Identification, Ownership, and Error
Introspective self-awareness seems direct and immediate in a way that precludes the possibility of misidentifying whether oneself is in the states introspected. Traditionally, this immunity condition applies only to self-ascriptions of psychological states that one is aware of via introspection and not to states and properties of the body. In this paper, following Gareth Evans I consider extending the immunity condition to certain bodily self-ascriptions based upon forms of bodily self-awareness “from the inside,” or those such as proprioception that appear to provide direct and immediate access to the state of one’s body. Apart from theoretical difficulties of Evans’s particular view, a range of empirical data, including various rubber-hand-illusion and out-of-body experience results, suggests awareness of one’s body from the inside is in fact mediated, albeit nonconsciously, by identification information. Accordingly, such awareness does not preclude mistakes in limb identification even in nonpathological cases, and however compelling one’s sense of ownership toward a body one consciously experiences “from the inside,” immunity to error through misidentification does not apply.
Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 2003
In this paper I argue that proprioceptive awareness (including both somatic and ecological proprioception) is primarily a form of non-perceptual awareness. This turns out to be philosophically significant in regard to what Shoemaker calls 'immunity to error through misidentification'. Although it is possible to make a mistake in identifying one's body via sense-perceptual modalities such as vision, some philosophers argue that one is immune to error through misidentification in regard to knowing one's own body by means of proprioception. If proprioception were a form of perception then it would be possible for one to proprioceptively misidentify oneself in referring to one's body. In arguing that proprioception is not a form of perception I am defending the immunity principle in this regard.
Embodiment and Body Awareness in Meditators
Mindfulness, 2016
Mindfulness practice consists of focusing attention in an intentional way on the experience of the present moment, including bodily sensations, thoughts or feelings, and the environment, with an attitude of acceptance and without judging. The body and, especially, body awareness are key elements in mindfulness. Embodiment or the feeling of being located within one's physical body is a related concept, and it is composed of the sense of ownership, location, and agency of the body. The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is an experimental paradigm that has been used to understand the mechanisms of embodiment, and evidence shows that body awareness modulates this illusion. To our knowledge, no studies have analyzed embodiment processes in meditators. The aim of this study is to use the RHI to analyze the mechanisms of embodiment and its relationship with body awareness and mindfulness in meditators and non-meditators. The sample was composed of long-term meditators (n = 15) and non-meditators (n = 15). Objective and self-report measures for embodiment with the RHI and self-report questionnaires of body awareness and mindfulness were administered. One-way ANOVA 30 revealed significant differences between groups in sense of 31 agency in the rubber hand. Meditators experienced less sense 32 of agency in the rubber hand than non-meditators. Pearson's 33 correlations showed that this lower sense of agency in the 34 rubber hand was associated with higher body awareness and 35 mindfulness. Results highlight the role of body awareness and 36 mindfulness in embodiment mechanisms. This study has clin-37 ical implications, especially in psychopathological disorders 38 that can be influenced by disturbances in these processes.