(See Appendix 2)
iii. Self-specificity and mineness.
“...the decisive step in the making of consciousness is not the making of images and creating the basics of mind. The decisive step is making the images ours, making them belong to their right owners...” (Damasio 2010, p. 10)
Part I: Failure of the Self-Specificity Paradigm
1. A concern with mineness—“the respect in which mental states are experienced as my own states”—shared by analytic and continental philosophy, as well as by cognitive neuroscience.
2. Two experimental paradigms dedicated to research on mineness— both concerned to find that which constitutes the experiential self. 3. Self-Relatedness (SR)—focus on processing of stimuli “that are experienced as strongly related to one’s own person,” e.g. how we recognize some faces as our own, others as those of
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famous people (Northoff et al. 2006). But SR seems not to adequately distinguish self from nonself.
4. Self-Specificity (SS):
Part I: Failure of the Self-Specificity Paradigm
A. Legrand and Ruby (2009) call for “paradigm shift.” Replace SR with SS.
B. Focus on what is most basic—self is distinct from nonself. “At the experiential level” self is “specific,” at least in the sense that “we can hardly help distinguishing between the self and everything else.”
C. Concentrate on “subjective perspective”—“the relating of a perceiving subject and a perceived object” (e.g. “my experience of biting a lemon”).
D. “Perspective is fundamentally a self-specifying process in the sense that it
constitutes the self-nonself distinction.”
E. Concern with “being a self,” “minimal self,” “self-as-subject,” and
“pre-reflective self.” No need for any explicit representation of self.
F. Operational definition of SS:
(i) Exclusivity: If a given self S is constituted by a SS component C, then C characterizes S exclusively. C could never characterize non-S.
(ii) Noncontingency: Loss of or change to C would result in loss of that distinction between S and non-S.
Subjective Perspective claimed “to meet both criteria”:
(i) Perspective is exclusive to self: two people can see the same thing, but neither perception can be reduced to the other, for they are had from different perspectives that differ systematically.
(ii) Perspective is noncontingent: any change, changes the self-nonself distinction.
G. Conclusion: “My perceptions, representations, and experiences are anchored in my perspective, and by virtue of this, they are mine rather than someone else’s or nobody’s.”
5. Counterexample to SS: “Double Visions”
A. Patient (DP) reports distress over “double visions” (Zahn et al. 2008). B.
Turns out not to be “double vision”; instead, “he was able to see everything normally, but that he did not immediately recognize that he was the one who perceives and that he needed a second step to become aware that he himself was the one who perceives the object.” C. Symptoms restricted to visual object recognition. D. Apparent cause—hypometabolism in several areas, but “predominantly within right inferior
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temporal and parieto-occipital regions.” E. When DP looks at a new object he satisfies both of SS’s operational conditions:
(i) Exclusivity: the image could not be constitutive of anyone who is not DP. (ii) Noncontingency: change in that image would result in change to that particular distinction between DP and non-DP.
(iii) But from the satisfaction of these two conditions it does not necessarily follow that this is DP’s visual image. F. Similar reports from prodromal psychoses:
e.g. patient who “reported that his feeling of his experiences as his own experiences only appeared a split-second delayed” (Sass and Parnas 2003, p. 438). G. Conclusion:
Although the visual image is anchored in DP’s perspective, there is an important sense in which that perception or that experience is “nobody’s.” The same appears to be the case—pre-reflectively—for some cases of psychoses. Knowledge of the existence of a mental state is one thing; attribution of that mental state to a particular subject is something else.
Part II: The search for that which is uniquely constitutive of mineness is misguided; mineness is realized in multiple ways.
1. Previously shown that access-distinction (to a first approximation, introspection versus observation of the external world) does not account for mineness.
Sometimes introspective access enables us to have a conscious experience only if we represent that experience as belonging to someone else (Lane and Liang 2011).
2. Above it has been shown that subjective perspective cannot secure mineness. 3.
Varieties of Mineness: various phenomena show that mineness or its absence—ownership or disownership—can be realized in distinct ways.
A. Subtraction of sensory experience: disownershipin cortico-limbic disconnection syndrome (e.g. pain asymbolia) results when sensory-discriminative aspects retained while affective-motivational aspects eliminated. Pains “seem to belong to someone else, not to me” (Sierra 2009, p. 150). See Figure 1.
B. Addition of sensory experience: disownershipof actions (e.g. passivity experiences) results when we are “abnormally aware” of proprioceptive feedback and the sensory consequences of movements (Frith 2005, p. 763). See Figure 2
C. Time delay: what seems to occur in the cases of “double visions” and prodromal psychoses is an abnormal time delay between (i) the
introspectively-based knowledge of a mental state’s existence, and
(ii) the attribution of that mental state to a subject. See Figure 3. D. What happens in the case of the rubber hand illusion? See Figure 4.
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4. Aberrant cases of mineness occur when tacit expectations are confounded. The four figures represent paired, but dissociable, mental states. In each case the confounding variable is represented by the vertical axis.
Conclusion:
1. A Negative Thesis: Failed attempts to identify that which is constitutive of mineness, leavened by familiarity with the varieties of mineness (including cases of aberrancy), suggest that there are no unique constituents.
2. A Positive Thesis: It may well be the case, however, that any attempt to construct an adequate explanatory framework of mineness will require inclusion of a Principle of Confounded Expectations (PCE).
iv. Mental ownership and the rubber hand illusion.
(See Appendix 3)
J. Results and Discussion, Part VI: The ethics of suicide research.
i. Media Impact on Individual Suicidality-A proposal for an ethical neuroimaging
study
(See Appendix 4)
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K. Acknowledgments
To D7oÁ, of GÌfl‡0$ä,Eí($:", I owe my greatest debt, a debt that can never be adequately repaid. After I had all but abandoned hope of resurrecting an academic career, through his support and encouragement, I managed to summon the will to make one, last effort. Fortunately, this time, I was able to see a few projects through to their completion. Likewise, I am also deeply indebted to FGà+M HIJ+MKLM+M NIO, and ùPQ and
for their counsel and encouragement, aimed at getting me to restart my professional career, during 2006, at the conclusion of a lengthy series of unfortunate, personal events. As my professional career began to gain some measure of traction,
RST+M USV, and WXY also greatly aided my development through their wise counsel, keen insight, and willingness to collaborate with me, despite my many inadequacies. ToABC, I express gratitude for his willingness to read and comment on portions of four manuscripts. I also thank him for having called an empirical example to my attention and for his assistance with the construction of a footnote. Finally, I will forever be grateful to Carl Hempel and to Julian Jaynes, who jointly encouraged me to pursue a professional career and a series of worthy projects, when I was in my early 20s. It was through no fault of theirs that results worthy of publication, meager though they are, have only recently seen their way into print. I hope that future publications can more adequately compensate them for the time, the guidance, and the inspiration that they so generously provided.
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