Bodily Experience

(Commentary on target article "Core Perception: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving" by Dawei Bai, Alon Hafri, Véronique Izard, Chaz Firestone, & Brent Strickland) -/- The target article makes a compelling case for “core perception”. However, it is striking that this view is supported almost exclusively by visual evidence alone. We question whether visual evidence is sufficient to motivate core perception (as opposed to “core vision”) and speculate about candidate core representations in non-visual modalities, with a special focus on the (...) bodily senses. -/- . (shrink)

This article presents a philosophical and legal analysis of the transformation of the concept of responsibility in the era of cyborgization, defining the methodological foundations for a shift toward understanding the distributed agency of the augmented subject. To this end, the author first reconstructs historically developed notions of will, intention, and responsibility. Further, applying contemporary theories of "extended mind," actor-network theory, and posthumanism, the work demonstrates the possibility and necessity of rethinking the boundaries of the "self." To this end, drawing (...) on empirical cases such as neural interfaces and popular culture, the author identifies specific problematic areas for law and ethics. Methodologically, the work applies a cyborgian eclecticism approach to integrating productive approaches in an interdisciplinary analysis. The author concludes that classical foundations of responsibility lose their practical applicability when cognitive processes begin to be distributed between biological and technical categories. Given these emerging trends, there is a clear need to move from the binary logic of "guilty/not guilty" to a scale/modal model of responsibility, where responsibility is perceived within the context of the actor's contribution within a hybrid system. This article lays the conceptual foundation for practical solutions that will be presented in the second part of the study. // В статье представлен философско-правовой анализ трансформаций понятия ответственности в эпоху киборгизации, определяются методологические основания для перехода к пониманию распределенной агентности дополненного субъекта. Для этого автор, в первую очередь, реконструирует исторически складывавшиеся представления о воле, намерении и ответственности. Далее, с приложением современных теорий «расширенного разума», акторно сетевой теории и постгуманизма, в работе демонстрируется возможность и необходимость переосмыслить границы «Я», для чего, основываясь на эмпирических кейсах, таких как нейроинтерфейсы, и на образах в массовой культуре, автор выделяет конкретные проблемные точки для права и этики. Методологически в работе применяется подход киборгианского эклектизма для объединения продуктивных подходов в междисциплинарном анализе. Автор приходит к выводу, что классические основания ответственности теряют прикладную работоспособность в условиях, когда когнитивные процессы начинают распределяться между категориями биологического и технического. В условиях развития таких тенденций очевидна необходимость перехода от бинарной логики «виновен/не виновен» к шкаловой/модальной модели ответственности, где ответственность воспринимается в рамках вклада актора, существующего в гибридной системе. Данная статья закладывает концептуальный фундамент для практических решений, которые будут представлены во второй части исследования. (shrink)

The word hallucination arrives with unusual authority. It sounds finished, clinical, as though it refers to something isolated, named, and understood. To say that someone is hallucinating feels like saying that a machine has malfunctioned; it is a discrete error occurring inside an otherwise reliable system. However, the moment one pauses over the term, it begins to wobble. What, precisely, is being named? An experience? A perception? A belief? A failure to meet a standard that is rarely examined but always (...) assumed? The apparent solidity of the word conceals its surprising vagueness. It feels concrete, but it collapses under scrutiny, revealing less a thing in the world than a verdict rendered upon certain kinds of experience. This is not because the experiences themselves are unreal, trivial, or invented. People see, hear, feel, and sense things that are intense, meaningful, and sometimes frightening. Any honest inquiry must begin by taking those experiences seriously. The problem lies not in the phenomena of experience, but in the confidence with which we name them. “Hallucination” does not simply describe what someone reports; it quietly judges how that report relates to an external frame of reference. It tells us, without saying so, that the experience has failed to line up with what is collectively recognized as real. In this sense, the term functions less as a neutral description and more as a marker of misalignment. It signals that something has gone out of bounds, not necessarily in the mind, but in the relationship between an individual’s account of reality and the symbolic order that governs shared life. (shrink)

David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) is examined as a philosophical allegory that explores key dimensions of corporeality, identity, and the boundaries of the human. The article focuses on the bodily metamorphosis of the protagonist, Seth Brundle, as a result of a technological experiment that leads to his hybridization with an insect. The author considers how bodily transformation challenges the integrity of the subject and is interpreted through the lens of embodied consciousness, the phenomenology of illness, and posthumanist critique. The study (...) draws upon contemporary scholarship in embodied cognition, philosophy of cinema, and interpretations of body horror as a cultural symptom. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of ‘body betrayal’ and the disruption of established boundaries between the human and the non human. The Fly is read as a tragedy of bodily decomposition, in which visual shock serves as a means of dramatizing the ontological instability of the flesh. The film ultimately reveals the fundamental dependence of subjectivity on the physical shell and questions the stability of human identity in the age of techno- evolution // Фильм Д. Кроненберга «Муха» (1986) исследуется как философская аллегория, раскрывающая ключевые аспекты телесно сти, идентичности и границ человеческого. В центре внимания — метаморфоза тела главного героя Сета Брандла в результате техно логического эксперимента, приведшего к его слиянию с насекомым. В статье рассматривается, как телесная трансформация влияет на целостность субъекта и осмысливается через концепции воплощен ного сознания, феноменологии болезни и постгуманистической критики. Исследование опирается на современные труды в области embodied cognition, философии кино, а также на интерпретации те лесного ужаса (body horror) как культурного симптома. Особое вни мание уделено феномену «предательства тела» и нарушению при вычных границ между человеческим и нечеловеческим. Фильм анализируется как трагедия физического распада, в которой визу альный шок служит средством драматизации онтологической неу стойчивости тела. Подчеркивается, что «Муха» обнажает фундамен тальную зависимость субъективности от физической оболочки и ставит под вопрос устойчивость человеческой идентичности в эпоху техноэволюции. (shrink)

The sense of agency is the experience of predicting, initiating, or controlling actions. In this paper, I provide a novel account of the sense of agency that appears in perceptual consciousness. I follow theorists such as Bayne and Prinz in suggesting that the perceptual sense of agency (PSoA) is underpinned by self-monitoring processes. The self-monitoring mechanism compares sensory predictions, made on the basis of motor commands, with sensory feedback. This comparison process distinguishes self-caused from other-caused perceptual changes. I argue for (...) a view where the PSoA is not explained by certain contents represented in perceptual experience. Rather, my account models the PSoA as a type of intentional mode that perceivers bear to contents. After defending this view, I respond to objections and contrast my account with others in the literature. (shrink)

Imagine you’re apple picking and an apple on the branch in front of you catches your eye. Your visual system forms a representation of the apple, including not only its various properties, such as its color, shape, and texture, but also its location. Its location is specified egocentrically: you represent the apple at some distance and direction relative to yourself. This suggests that you are represented in your visual representation. But that seems strange. Intuitively, you visually represent the objects – (...) not the subject – of perception. What’s more, it is not clear what it would mean for you to be represented in your visual representation. Does your visual representation, like the thought ‘An apple is in front of me’, include the concept of self? -/- This case raises two questions about the relation between perception and the self. One asks whether the self is represented in perception. The other concerns how the self is represented in perception. This dissertation addresses both. -/- I answer the first question in the affirmative. I argue that perception involves the use of first-personal contents that are represented in perceptual systems that map complex spatial relations. This suggests that nearly all perceiving creatures self-represent in perception and challenges the traditional view according to which self-representation is confined to language and thought. -/- However, how the self is represented in perception differs from its representation in language and thought. Perception involves the use of egocentric reference frames – frameworks for specifying spatial relations relative to the perceiver – that, I argue, carry first-personal contents. I draw on work in neuroscience and perceptual psychology to offer a representational trajectory that traces how these reference frames, and thus their contents, move from being encoded in the functional architecture of our perceptual systems to explicitly represented. Each step along this path moves closer to conceptual self-representation, suggesting that our capacities for self-representation in language and thought may have their origins in perception. (shrink)

The paper argues for a reconceptualization of the background of intentionality and consciousness as nonconceptual yet intentional and conscious, contrasting it with John Searle's views. It posits that background know-how manifests in conscious and intentional episodes, challenging the notion of an unconscious, nonrepresentational background. By examining Searle's connection principle, the author highlights a tension in Searle's treatment of the background, advocating for a perspective that aligns more closely with the principles of intentional and conscious capacities.

While it is commonly observed that visual experiences have an egocentric character, it is less clear how to properly characterize it. This manuscript presents a new argument in favor of a thesis that (a) visual experiences represent a subject-element, i.e., an element to which the perceived objects stand in egocentric relations, and (b) the subject-element is represented as a complex bodily structure. More specifically, it is argued that there are two plausible interpretations of directional perceptual qualities such as ‘being to (...) the left’: (a) representing directional qualities consists in representing objects as having intrinsic properties, or (b) representing directional qualities consists in representing objects as related to parts of the bodily structure. Relying on this observation, it is shown that only the second option can explain the role of directional qualities in action selection based on visual experiences. Consequently, the most plausible interpretation of directional qualities is that, in representing objects as being to the left or right, visual experiences represent objects as being related to parts of the bodily structure. (shrink)

Over the last decades, trans and non-binary experience has inspired a rich philosophical literature. 1,2 Also as a reaction to gender critical feminism and going along with queer theory following Judith Butler’s work,3 trans studies by for instance Sandy Stone4 or more recently Susan Stryker,5–7 as well as trans philosophy following amongst others Talia Bettcher8 have provided important insights into this multi-faceted topic. In her book 'Assuming a body', Gayle Salamon is able to give a powerful account of general human (...) experience, as well as specifically TNBE, that can capture not only insights about biological sex and socially constructed gender, but also ‘sexual self’, i.e. bodily phenomenological experiences concerning one’s own sex. In my following brief comment on Salamon, I would like to elaborate on how such a phenomenological approach touches on a number of open questions in the philosophy of mind, which I have discussed in a recent book.12. (shrink)

Through an ethnographic and ethnobotanical investigation of Amazonian Shuar gardening practices, I aim to (1) unravel the basic and more complex relationships exhibited by Shuar gardening activities, which involve humans, tubers, and mythical originators and mediators of ecological and biological processes; (2) compare Shuar horticultural practices with those of other Indigenous tropical horticulturalists; and (3) unveil how and to what extent concepts of plant agency shape traditional cultivation systems. My study reveals that the rapid growth and high yield of tubers (...) significantly depend on women’s sophisticated cognitive skills, manifested through specific nurturing methods for cultivated plants and gardening rituals to engage with cosmic and mythical forces. Beyond the embodied practices of tending tubers and the ritual behaviors displayed by women, the agential qualities of plants play a crucial role in shaping the ritual and mytho-cosmological structure underlying gardening activities. Ultimately, biosocial, mythical, cosmic, and ontological connections between biological kingdoms inform growth patterns, fertility, and reproduction within the garden domain. (shrink)

[COMMENTARY on Walter Veit's "A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness"] The framework Veit introduces for animal consciousness turns on finding and articulating its evolutionary origins. Veit argues that consciousness first evolved as affective experience in the Cambrian period. His argument centers around the plausible need of organisms in the Cambrian for a common currency of subjective valuation. I argue that such an adaptive pressure is unlikely to result in affective experience. I review other processes that instantiate common currencies (...) of subjective valuation: unconscious (non-experiential) affect and the reward learning system and argue that each is likely to have evolved prior to affective experience. (shrink)

Illness and injury are often accompanied by experiences of bodily objectification. Medical treatments intended to restore the structure or function of the body may amplify these experiences of objectification by recasting the patient’s body as a biomedical object—something to be examined, measured, and manipulated. In this article, we contribute to the phenomenology of embodiment in illness and medicine by reexamining the results of a qualitative study of the experiences of nurses and patients isolated in an intensive care unit during the (...) first wave of COVID-19. Drawing upon the phenomenological concept of embodiment—as developed in the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Emmanuel Levinas—we reconsider how bodily objectification manifests in complex clinical encounters. We show that, in these settings, objectification is not simply the unilateral act of a clinician objectifying a patient. Rather, both clinicians and patients reported a variety of objectifying experiences influenced by their interactions, the immediate context of the intensive care milieu, and the broader atmosphere of a global pandemic. In light of these findings, we argue that bodily objectification in illness and medicine can often be more complicated than typically presented in the phenomenological literature. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz untersucht, inwiefern der Sprache in der Phänomenologie die Rolle zukommt, das Individuum deiktisch in den Situationen seiner Existenz zu orientieren, indem sie kategorial auf Gegebenheiten seiner Erfahrung zeigt. Phänomenologisches Philosophieren geht in dieser Hinsicht über das bloße, innertheoretische Geben und Nehmen von Gründen sowie die Absicherung objektiver Wissensbestände (zu denen es gleichfalls nicht in Opposition tritt) hinaus, und zielt dabei evokativ auf orientierende Erkenntniseffekte im Subjekt. Statt als innersprachliche "Deskriptionen" oder Bezeichnungen von Phänomenen fungieren phänomenologische Begriffe und Beschreibungen (...) als verbale Zeigegesten, die dem Individuum im erfolgreichen Fall die bezeigten (und in diesem Sinne "be-deuteten") Phänomene selbst vor Augen führen. (shrink)

The article explores embodied critical thinking (ECT) for engaging with the enfleshed and trans-corporeal self on an affectual and experiential level. By discussing three exemplifying affectual instances that expose the experiential level of processuality, emergence, and intercarnality, the article shows the methodological use of ECT as a fruitful approach to developing embodied ontologies and a toolkit for the experiential reflection of one's en-fleshment, as tuning into the body-environment.

Touch is standardly taken to be a proximal sense, principally constituted by capacities to detect proximal pressure and thermal stimulation, and contrasted with the distal senses of vision and audition. It has, however, recently been argued that the scope of touch extends beyond proximal perception; touch can connect us to distal objects. Hence touch generally should be thought of as a connection sense. In this paper, I argue that whereas pressure perception is a connection sense, thermal perception is not. Thermal (...) perception is a proximal sense distinct from touch. One significant consequence of this is that it motivates an alternative explanation of how we detect the thermal properties of the things we touch and what they are. (shrink)

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Experiences of urges, impulses, or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This article develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. The article motivates a tripartite framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges, and exercises of capacities that agents have to control their urges. The article elaborates the elements of the tripartite framework, in particular, the phenomenological contribution of motor imagery. It argues that experiences of urges and exercises of control over (...) urges play coordinate roles in enabling an agent’s awareness of their impulses. (shrink)

Modern empirical psychology, as a reductionist, materialist, and positivist science, has to a great extent replaced philosophical psychology – or more precisely philosophical anthropology– in our contemporary world, and this has caused modern psychology to lose sight of what was most interesting in pre-modern psychology, namely the attempt to situate the human person in his experience of reality in the lifeworld (lebenswelt). This has resulted in the practice of psychology becoming detached from the realities of lived experience as its view (...) of human nature becomes increasingly narrow, rigid and scientistic. This is evidenced by the current “replication crisis” in modern psychology, which has severely impacted the credibility of modern psychology as a field of enquiry. This crisis arose with an increasing methodological standardisation that is being pursued at the expense of interrogating the scientistic presuppositions that ground the study of modern psychology. (shrink)

It is common to characterize pain with touch-related terms, like ‘cutting’, ‘pressing’, ‘sharp’, and ‘pulsing’, or temperature-related terms, like ‘hot’ or ‘burning’. This suggests that many pains are phenomenally multimodal because they are experienced as having some tactile-like or thermal-like character. The goal of this chapter is to investigate the structure of phenomenally multimodal pain experiences. It is argued that the usual accounts of multimodal structure proposed in investigations regarding exteroceptive experiences cannot be plausibly applied to multimodal experiences of pain. (...) Instead, an alternative framework is proposed which characterizes the structure of tactile-like and thermal-like pains by referring to the notion of crossmodal correspondences. (shrink)

This goal of this thesis in the philosophy of nature is to move us closer towards a true biological science of consciousness in which the evolutionary origin, function, and phylogenetic diversity of consciousness are moved from the field’s periphery of investigations to its very centre. Rather than applying theories of consciousness built top-down on the human case to other animals, I argue that we require an evolutionary bottomup approach that begins with the very origins of subjective experience in order to (...) make sense of the place of mind in nature. To achieve this goal, I introduce and defend the pathological complexity thesis as both a framework for the scientific investigation of consciousness and as a lifemind continuity thesis about the origins and function of consciousness. (shrink)

The usual visual experiences possess a perspectival phenomenology as they seem to present objects from a certain perspective. Nevertheless, it is not obvious how to characterise experiential content determining such phenomenology. In particular, while there are many works investigating perspectival properties of experienced objects, a question regarding how subject is represented in visual perspectival experiences attracted less attention. In order to address this problem, I consider four popular phenomenal intuitions regarding perspectival experiences and argue that the major theories of perspectival (...) experiences do not account for all of them. Relying on these observations, I show how a theory which accommodates all these intuitions can be developed by (a) recognising that visual perspectival experiences are, in fact, multimodal visuo-bodily experiences and (b) distinguishing between egocentric and structural contents. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a general phenomenological framework for the study of digital experiences as technological praxis. This approach is built through a synthesis of the categories proper to different currents of thought such as Merleau-Ponty's bodily phenomenology, the postphenomenology of Don Ihde and his school, hermeneutics and information theories. These notes develop a progressive analysis of the phenomenal dimensions that take place in the user-device interaction, from the stimulus base to virtual recreations. Through the intersubjective relationship with the (...) machine, integrated to the user, the user produces and consumes the informative material that will become successive digital representations of himself and of reality as a whole. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a basic understanding of the phenomenon of embarrassment by connecting two general questions. Starting with two illustrative examples, it first examines how the phenomenon could be described and what different aspects can be identified. Apart from having an obvious affective or emotional aspect and being embodied in various forms of expression, embarrassment can be considered as having a social aspect because of its close connection to the social setting of a situation. Furthermore, (...) it seems to have an atmospheric quality in that it is experienced not only by the embarrassed person but also by all those present. Secondly the role that embarrassment plays in the context of a person’s life is addressed. Though it is experienced as unpleasant, it can be understood as a form of adequately responding to certain social situations structured by ambiguity. (shrink)

In current philosophy of mind, there is lively debate over whether emotions, moods, and other affects can extend to comprise elements beyond one’s organismic boundaries. At the same time, there has been growing interest in the nature and significance of so-called existential feelings, which, as the term suggests, are feelings of one’s overall being in the world. In this article, I bring these two strands of investigation together to ask: Can the material underpinnings of existential feelings extend beyond one’s skull (...) and skin? To begin, I introduce and adopt a componential-systemic view of extended affectivity. In doing so, I specify the vehicle externalist criteria for extension employed in my analysis. I then define what existential feelings are and pinpoint several key issues in their potential extension. More specifically, I identify sensorimotor ‘know-how’ as a possibly extending component of existential feeling and posit it as the fulcrum of my argument. Finally, I move on to consider the extension of existential feeling via sensory substitution, especially through so-called Tactile Visual Sensory Substitution (TVSS) devices. Informed by both philosophical and empirical studies, I argue that, under certain conditions, (a) the agent’s implicit sensorimotor processing and a TVSS device can become coupled into a new systemic whole, which in turn (b) reconfigures the material underpinnings of the agent’s pre-intentional world-experience. This, I conclude, counts as a cogent case for extended existential feeling. (shrink)

Book review of Esa Kirkkopelto, Logomimesis: tutkielma esiintyvästä ruumiista (Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 2020).

Listening is not an incorporeal experience; we do not listen with our non-extended minds. We listen with all our body, and music can change completely our personal structure. It is through sound experience that we change and asset ourselves. Studies in the doctrine of affects often use sonorous metaphors and concepts such as Stimmung, resonance, consonance, that refer to sound experience. In this paper, I try first of all to show how listening is rooted in body experience. Then, I argue (...) for a new consideration of the notion of person that takes into account the fundamental sonorous basis – psycho-acoustic – of its constitution. Thanks to sounds we can reach a new conceptualization of emotional relations between persons which we attain through the person’s ordo amoris. Additionally, with the analysis of sounds we grasp some aspects of emotional experience related to the singular person (intra-personal). So, if sounds are profoundly related to corporeal experience, so strongly involving affects as to modify our personal structure and form a person’s constitution, and affects can really do that, their relationship need to be inquired where both sound experience and affection are rooted: corporeity. (shrink)

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has threatened ethnographic inquiry, undermining its quintessential characteristic. Participant observation, then, has been thoroughly dismembered by the radical measures implemented to prevent the spread of the virus. This phenomenon, in short, has dragged anthropologists to a liminal state within which ethnography is paradoxically caught in an onto-epistemological unstable vortex. The question of being here and not there, during the pandemic, is epitomised in the instability of different spatio-temporal contexts that overlap through technological mediations. Reflecting on previous (...) fieldwork experiences and current virtual inquiries with the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon unfolds how COVID-19 has thoroughly reshaped how the author approaches subjects' socio-ecological settings. Against this background, the article argues that corporeal immersion remains a necessary condition for the anthropological scrutiny of multispecies relationalities amidst the challenging times of the Anthropocene. The article nevertheless demonstrates that the intellectual efforts to grasp the different material temporalities of virtual spaces embrace the ethical principles concerning the renunciation of fieldwork with vulnerable communities. Furthermore, a reflective and speculative stance is proposed to actualise the snapshots of faraway physicalities linking them to past embodied and multi-sensory experiences. It is ultimately theorised how these mnemonic devices operate as creative forms of inquiry that overcome the pandemic consequences, extra-stimulating our cognitive capabilities to reflect on prior and possible socio-material interactions. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

- First book to describe what pain means in vulnerable or special groups of people - Clinical applications described in each chapter - Provides insight into the nature of pain experience across the lifespan -/- This book, the third and final volume in the Meaning of Pain series, describes what pain means to people with pain in “vulnerable” groups, and how meaning changes pain – and them – over time. -/- Immediate pain warns of harm or injury to the person (...) with pain. If pain persists over time, more complex meanings can become interwoven with this primitive meaning of threat. These cognitive meanings include thoughts and anxiety about the adverse consequences of pain. Such meanings can nourish existential sufferings, which are more about the person than the pain, such as loss, loneliness, or despair. -/- Although chronic pain can affect anyone, there are some groups of people for whom particular clinical support and understanding is urgently needed. This applies to “vulnerable” or “special” groups of people, and to the question of what pain means to them. These groups include children, women, older adults, veterans, addicts, people with mental health problems, homeless people, or people in rural or indigenous communities. Several chapters in the book focus on the lived experience of pain in vulnerable adults, including black older adults in the US, rural Nigerians, US veterans, and adults with acquired brain injury. The question of what pain experience could mean in the defenceless fetus, neonate, pre-term baby, and child, is examined in depth across three contributions. -/- This book series aspires to create a vocabulary on the “meanings of pain” and a clinical framework with which to use it. It is hoped that the series stimulates self-reflection about the role of meaning in optimal pain management. -/- Meanings of Pain is intended for people with pain, family members or caregivers of people with pain, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. Volume I was published in 2016; Volume II in 2019. (shrink)

F. Brencio (2021) [in Italian and English] (ed.), Dal corpo oggetto alla mente incarnata - From the object body to the embodied mind, in “InCircolo – Rivista di Filosofia e Culture”, 11, ISSN 2531-4092.

Susceptibility to the rubber hand illusion (RHI) varies. To date, however, there is no consensus explanation of this variability. Previous studies, focused on the role of multisensory integration, have searched for neural correlates of the illusion. But those studies have failed to identify a sufficient set of functionally specific neural correlates. Because some evidence suggests that frontal α power is one means of tracking neural instantiations of self, we hypothesized that the higher the frontal α power during the eyes-closed resting (...) state, the more stable the self. As a corollary, we infer that the more stable the self, the less susceptible are participants to a blurring of boundaries—to feeling that the rubber hand belongs to them. Indeed, we found that frontal α amplitude oscillations negatively correlate with susceptibility. Moreover, since lower frequencies often modulate higher frequencies, we explored the possibility that this might be the case for the RHI. Indeed, some evidence suggests that high frontal α power observed in low-RHI participants is modulated by δ frequency oscillations. We conclude that while neural correlates of multisensory integration might be necessary for the RHI, sufficient explanation involves variable intrinsic neural activity that modulates how the brain responds to incompatible sensory stimuli. (shrink)

Metamorphosis as it is represented by some pre-historical artists seems problematic for our occidental point of view. In fact, it seems to be strongly against identity and law of non-contradiction. Becoming in general is also viewed as an error or exception by our classic point of view. This very claim can conduct to theories of non-classical logic. Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental work had tried to offer enormous contributions in order to comprehend the becoming phenomenon. Through a pre-historical representations (...) analysis, with also an intrusion in contemporary art's field, I want to confront with possible metamorphosis representations remain theoretically founded in the deleuzian proposal in dialogue with phenomenological inquiry. New principle of individuation and analysis of expression provide new looks to arisen problems with classical logic and metamorphosis representations, which will be acceptable and comprehensible as art shows. (shrink)

The Life Worth Living phenomenologically investigates the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. -/- Table of Contents: Introduction: The Ableist Conflation. Part I: Pain. 1. Theories of Pain. 2. A Phenomenology of Chronic Pain. Part II: Disability. 3. Theories of Disability. 4. A Phenomenology of Multiple Sclerosis. Part III: Ability. 5. Theories of Ability. 6. A Phenomenology of Ability. Conclusion: An Anti-Ableist Future.

Two ideas of Jean-Luc Nancy stand out: the subject as a plurality of possibilities open to the world in a constant event and the importance of the body in understanding the subject’s situation in the world. These ideas are drawn from the works of Jean-Luc Nancy A subject? And Corpus. First, the main ideas of A Subject? And secondly, those of Corpus. In a final section, the main conclusions of these two ideas are drawn, among which stand out the importance (...) of understanding the subject as a plurality open to the becoming of the world and the importance of the body as the entity that experiences, thinks, and lives reality without intermediaries. (shrink)

The paper aims to define the concept of “felt sense”, introduced in psychology and psychotherapy by E. T. Gendlin, in order to clarify its relation to bodily sensations and its difference from emotions. Gendlin’s own definition, according to which the felt sense is a conceptually vague bodily feeling with implicit meaning, is too general for this task. Gendlin’s definition is specified by pointing out, first, the different layers of awareness of bodily feelings and, second, the difference between bodily readiness for (...) action and motivation for action. According to the more precise definition, the felt sense is the awareness of readiness to act carried by the configuration of bodily sensations. The felt sense differs from emotions because it is not able to motivate the action for which it makes us ready. The article also discusses the intuition that led to the founding of Gendlin’s psychotherapeutic technique and compares it with the psychoanalytic concept of working through resistance during therapy. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s attitude to psychoanalysis was ambiguous. On the one hand, he realized that the phenomena psychoanalysis deals with require to go beyond the area of ​​act intentionality, and that, from a different angle, psychoanalysis addresses the same problem as Gestalt psychology, which played the central role in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project. On the other hand, he explicitly rejected the terms used by Freud for conveying his discoveries. Merleau-Ponty replaced unconscious mental contents, which act on conscious behavior, by ambiguous consciousness. In the (...) Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, he used the terms “habit,” “bad faith,” “bodily expression,” “affective intentionality,” and “body schema” to specify his notion of experiential “ambiguity.” This paper aims to present the key concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s early interpretation of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. A partial task is to show how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of bad faith differs from that of Sartre, and to distinguish existential ambiguity from the psychoanalytic concept of overdetermination. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss some lesser-known aspects of Husserl’s concept of the phenomenological reduction in relation to his use of the notion of reflection, and indicate how these topics connect to concerns in contemporary philosophy after the analytic-continental divide. Empathy, collective intentionality, non-representationalism, non-cognitivism, and the focus on the lived body as a source of sense-making and knowing-how are all domains in which Husserl’s conception of the reduction anticipates recent philosophical trends after the analytic-continental divide. They are also interconnected (...) parts of a unified conception of philosophy that arises from the phenomenological reduction when we reflect radically on experience in its full breadth as an embodied phenomenon that is both historical and communal. (shrink)

In his celebrated 1974 essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel stages a human-bat encounter to illustrate and support his claim that “subjective experience” is irreducible to “objective fact”: because Nagel cannot experience the world as a bat does, he will never know what it is like to be one. In Nagel’s account, heterogeneity is figured negatively—as a failure or lack of resemblance—and functions to constrain his knowledge of bats. Today, as white-nose syndrome threatens bat populations (...) across North America, might figuring heterogeneity positively, as a condition of creativity, open up new modes of receptivity and responsiveness to species extinctions? This essay turns to philosophies of becoming and to recent research in the biological sciences to explore this possibility. I suggest that attending to the heterogeneity of experience alerts us to more public dimensions of our being and may thereby work against the tendency to understand and experience ourselves as self-contained and closed off from one another and the world we share in common. This may in turn enhance our sense of entanglement with the events, bodies, and forces on the “outside” of experience, including bats and the white-nose syndrome with which they are afflicted today. Such an affirmation of heterogeneity as a condition of creativity holds the greatest promise for multispecies ethics today, I propose, when it is joined to an affirmation of incompatibilities within and between things as a real force of suffering and destruction in a heterogeneous world. (shrink)

Sensorimotor expectations concern how visual experience covaries with bodily movement. Sensorimotor theorists argue from such expectations to the conclusion that the phenomenology of vision is constitutively embodied: objects within the visual field are experienced as 3-D because sensorimotor expectations partially constitute our experience of such objects. Critics argue that there are two ways to block the above inference: to explain how we visually experience objects as 3-D, one may appeal to such non-bodily factors as expectations about movements of objects, not (...) the perceiver, or to the role of mental imagery in visual experience. But instead of using sensorimotor expectations to explain how objects are experienced within the visual field, we can instead use them to explain our experience of the visual field itself and, in particular, our experience of its limits; that is, our ever-present visual sense of there being more to see, beyond what’s currently within the visual field. Crucially, this inference from sensorimotor expectations to the constitutive embodiment of visual phenomenology is not threatened by the above two challenges. I thus present here a sensorimotor theory of the phenomenology of the visual field, that is, our experience of our visual fields as such. (shrink)

Malebranche holds that sensory experience represents the world from the body’s point of view. I argue that Malebranche gives a systematic analysis of this bodily perspective in terms of the claim that the five familiar external senses and bodily awareness represent nothing but relations to the body.

This article explores the relationship between the bodily presence of other humans in the lived urban world and the experience of everyday architecture. We suggest, from the perspectives of phenomenology and architecture, that being in the company of others changes the way the built environment appears to subjects, and that this enables us to perform simple daily tasks while still attending to the built environment. Our analysis shows that in mundane urban settings attending to the environment involves a unique attentional (...) mode, which does not rely on concentrating on, or appreciating the architectural objects, but rather on social attention and on the subject’s kinesthesis in relation to the built environment. (shrink)

Although Descartes and Malebranche argue that we are immaterial thinking things, they also maintain that each of us stands in a unique experiential relation to a single human body, such that we feel as though this body belongs to us and is part of ourselves. This paper examines Descartes’s and Malebranche’s accounts of this feeling. They hold that our experience of being embodied is grounded in affective bodily sensations that feel good or bad: namely, sensations of pleasure and pain, hunger (...) and thirst, and so on. These bodily sensations ground our experiential identification with the body because they represent the body’s needs and interests as though they were own, such that we experience an important aspect of our well-being as consisting in the preservation of the body. According to these Cartesians, then, we feel embodied in part because we experience ourselves as having a bodily good. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two kinds of ordinary multisensory experience that go beyond mere co-consciousness of features (e.g., the experience that results from concurrently hearing a sound in the hallway and seeing the cup on the table). In one case, a sensory experience in one modality creates a perceptual demonstrative to whose referent qualities are attributed in another sensory modality. For example, when you hear someone speak, auditory experience attributes audible qualities to a seen event, a person’s speaking motions. The (...) second kind of multisensory experience attributes features experienced in several sensory modalities to one and the same object via a process of amodal perceptual integration, i.e., integration that occurs separately from processing within the individual sensory modalities. Multisensory experiences arising from holding and seeing a tomato or from seeing the Indian curry boil and smelling it are examples of the second kind of multisensory experience. At the end of the chapter we look at synesthesia, a kind of atypical multisensory experience, and argue that one version of this phenomenon may be able to shed light on the neural mechanism underlying amodally integrated multisensory experience. (shrink)

The psychology of consciousness as explained by Vygotsky is the ability of one to focus on the inner state of being. Vygotsky’s proposition of external tools redistributing mental and external processes into internalized acts lacks the concept of embodied mediational tools existing in the current world as computational artifacts extending or augmenting human capabilities. This paper proposes sociocultural embodied augmentation theory (SEAT) as a means to explain the impact of augmenting technologies on Vygotsky’s original notion of “psychological tool,” therefore initiating (...) an inevitable transformation of the sociocultural mind. Hence, a new social mind is posited as an evolving symbiosis between human life and artificial life that extends consciousness: a symbiont consciousness. (shrink)

Proprioception, a sense of bodily position and movement, is rarely the focus of conscious experience. If we are ordinarily conscious of proprioception, we seem only peripherally so. Thus, evidence that proprioception is present in the periphery of at least some conscious experiences seems to be good evidence that conscious experience is fairly rich. Anosognosia for paralysis is a denial of paralysis of one's limbs, usually in the wake of brain damage from stroke. Because anosognosic patients overlook their paralysis, anosognosia seems (...) be a counter-example to the claim that proprioception exists in the periphery of conscious experience. However, careful consideration of the data shows that anosognosia makes a poor counterexample to a rich theory of consciousness. Thus, we retain reason to believe that proprioception exists in the periphery of conscious experience, and so to conclude that conscious experience is relatively rich. (shrink)

In dance, there is a practice called ‘marking’. When dancers mark, they execute a dance phrase in a simplified, schematic or abstracted form. Based on our interviews with professional dancers in the classical, modern, and contemporary traditions, it is fair to assume that most dancers mark in the normal course of rehearsal and practice. When marking, dancers use their body-in-motion to represent some aspect of the full-out phrase they are thinking about. Their stated reason for marking is that it saves (...) energy, avoids strenuous movement such as jumps, and sometimes it facilitates review of specific aspects of a phrase, such as tempo, movement sequence, or intention, all without the mental and physical complexity involved in creating a phrase full-out. It facilitates real-time reflection. (shrink)

When witnessing someone else's action people often take advantage of the same motor cognition that is crucial to successfully perform that action themselves. But how deeply is motor cognition involved in understanding another's action? Can it be selectively modulated by either the agent's or the witness's being actually in the position to act? If this is the case, what does such modulation imply for one's making sense of others? The paper aims to tackle these issues by introducing and discussing a (...) series of experimental studies showing how body and space may constrain one's own motor cognition reuse in understanding another's action. These findings, I shall argue, may shed new light on the mechanisms underlying the primary ways of identifying ourselves with other people and of being connected to them. (shrink)