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Bodily Self-Awareness and the Will: Reply to Power Discussion Exchange JOSÉ LUIS BERMÚDEZ Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland; E-mail: [email protected] Nicholas Power’s thoughtful and generous review of The Paradox of Self-Con- sciousness (Bermúdez, 1998) raises interesting and important issues about bodily self-awareness that he takes to threaten one of the central claims in the book. In this brief reply I try to address these issues in a way that shows how they are not as threatening as he takes them to be. As Power notes, the overall project of the book is showing how full-fledged self- consciousness, as manifested in conceptual first-person thoughts and comprehend- ing use of the first person pronoun, can be built up from more primitive cognitive and affective capacities. I took ‘primitive’ in two different ways and corresponding to these there are two different ‘constructive projects’. One capacity can be more primitive than another in ontogenetic terms. That is to say, the more primitive a capacity is the earlier it is acquired in the normal course of human development. Corresponding to this understanding of ‘primitive’ there is the constructive project of showing how full-fledged self-consciousness emerges ontogenetically from the foundations provided by forms of self-consciousness that are present from the be- ginning of life. On the second understanding of ‘primitive’, one capacity is more primitive than another if and only if the first is logically prior to the second. To say that one capacity is logically prior to another is to say that the second can be analysed in terms of the first, but not vice versa. When primitiveness is taken in these terms, the constructive project becomes the project of showing how full- fledged self-consciousness can be analysed in terms of forms of self-consciousness that do not involve concept possession and mastery of the first-person pronoun. Whether taken logically or ontogenetically, the constructive project requires finding forms of self-consciousness that can serve a foundational role. The most basic ‘building blocks’ of self-consciousness are, first, the self-specifying informa- tion available in visual perception and, second, the information about the embodied self derived from the various mechanisms of somatic proprioception. The question that Power raises concerns the second of these. I argued in the book that there are three dimensions in which somatic proprioception qualifies as a form of self- consciousness. Most simply, it counts as a form of self-consciousness in virtue of providing information about the embodied self. Secondly, it provides a way, perhaps the most primitive way, of registering the boundary between the self and Minds and Machines 11: 139–142, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Page 1: Bodily Self-Awareness and the Will: Reply to Power

Bodily Self-Awareness and the Will: Reply toPowerDiscussion Exchange

JOSÉ LUIS BERMÚDEZDepartment of Philosophy, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland; E-mail:[email protected]

Nicholas Power’s thoughtful and generous review ofThe Paradox of Self-Con-sciousness(Bermúdez, 1998) raises interesting and important issues about bodilyself-awareness that he takes to threaten one of the central claims in the book. Inthis brief reply I try to address these issues in a way that shows how they are not asthreatening as he takes them to be.

As Power notes, the overall project of the book is showing how full-fledged self-consciousness, as manifested in conceptual first-person thoughts and comprehend-ing use of the first person pronoun, can be built up from more primitive cognitiveand affective capacities. I took ‘primitive’ in two different ways and correspondingto these there are two different ‘constructive projects’. One capacity can be moreprimitive than another in ontogenetic terms. That is to say, the more primitive acapacity is the earlier it is acquired in the normal course of human development.Corresponding to this understanding of ‘primitive’ there is the constructive projectof showing how full-fledged self-consciousness emerges ontogenetically from thefoundations provided by forms of self-consciousness that are present from the be-ginning of life. On the second understanding of ‘primitive’, one capacity is moreprimitive than another if and only if the first is logically prior to the second. Tosay that one capacity is logically prior to another is to say that the second canbe analysed in terms of the first, but not vice versa. When primitiveness is takenin these terms, the constructive project becomes the project of showing how full-fledged self-consciousness can be analysed in terms of forms of self-consciousnessthat do not involve concept possession and mastery of the first-person pronoun.

Whether taken logically or ontogenetically, the constructive project requiresfinding forms of self-consciousness that can serve a foundational role. The mostbasic ‘building blocks’ of self-consciousness are, first, the self-specifying informa-tion available in visual perception and, second, the information about the embodiedself derived from the various mechanisms of somatic proprioception. The questionthat Power raises concerns the second of these. I argued in the book that thereare three dimensions in which somatic proprioception qualifies as a form of self-consciousness. Most simply, it counts as a form of self-consciousness in virtueof providing information about the embodied self. Secondly, it provides a way,perhaps the most primitive way, of registering the boundary between the self and

Minds and Machines11: 139–142, 2001.© 2001Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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the non-self (what developmental psychologists call self-world dualism). Thirdly,through feedback from kinesthesia, joint-position sense and the vestibular systemwe become aware of the body as an object responsive to the will. Somatic proprio-ception gives us a sense, not just of the embodied self as spatially extended andbounded, but also as a potentiality for action.

Power finds a potential difficulty in the third of these dimensions. The prob-lem is one of potential circularity in appealing to the notion of will to ground aform of self-consciousness. The ground-up constructive strategy prohibits appealto capacities that themselves require self-consciousness. Yet surely what I becomeaware of in somatic proprioception is that the body is responsive tomywill – andhence a developed form of self-consciousness seems already built into experientialawareness of the body. Quoting in full Power’s complaint is the following:

What Bermúdez seems to mean by ‘responsiveness to one’s will, is some feed-back routine, within proprioception, which provides information about the suc-cesses and failures of a motor command routine to which it is reliably linked.He fails to define ‘will’ for us, so I am forced to speculate on this. If this iscorrect, then I think Bermúdez has a problem. In the (non-pathological) case,the ‘data’ available in experience to a potentially self-conscious organism is of astring of events or ‘particular perceptions’ (as of a body-part being in a positionp or moving, and (perhaps) of the mental act of deciding to move a part of thebody here or there). What is thus not directly experienced is the reliability ofthe connection between these events. We are made aware of this and come tograsp this causal generalization and even its counterfactual implications onlyover time. But how are these series of events collated to form a unity? A merestorage facility or database doesn’t provide the unity at stake here. What isrequired is, in so many words, a sense of self, of ownership. For the (perhapsnonconceptual) experience of issuing a motor command to be seen as causallyconnected to a subsequent experience of a bodily response requires some sortof executive routine to monitor both sub-systems at issue. But this executivemonitoring system is just the sort of capacity implied by the presence of self-consciousness; in fact, without this capacity, an organism would not qualify asself-conscious, so ‘becoming aware that the body is responsive to one’s will’ isa capacity that requires self-consciousness in the first place, and hence shouldnot be relied upon in a functional analysis of the latter. (Power, 2001, p. 136)

There seems to be some equivocation here about where exactly self-consciousnesscomes into the picture. Is it that the motor intention and the experience of a bodilyresponse must each be experienced asmine? Or is it that I must have a conceptionof myself as a thing that persists over time andhas the motor intention and theexperience of a bodily response. But if things are as Power suggests they are thenit seems clear that there is a circularity of some sort.

The first point I would want to make in response to Power is to take issue withhis description of the phenomenology of bodily awareness. He is offering an ex-treme form of what might be termedvolitional atomism, on which the act of willing

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is a purely psychological event, completely independent of the bodily movementsto which it gives rise. On this view the self is in the body in much the same way asthe pilot is in a ship, to borrow Descartes’s famous metaphor. A decision to act isfollowed by a series of bodily movements, just as the pilot’s turning of the wheel isfollowed by a movement of his ship. If this was indeed the situation then one mightindeed be justified in posing the question that Power poses: how are these eventscollated to form a unity? And one might well come to the answer that he does,namely, that we need to postulate a form of self-consciousness to explain why theagent experiences them as a unity at all.

But volitional atomism is not at all plausible. The phenomenology of agency isquite otherwise. The act of willing cannot be divorced from the bodily movementsin which it issues. Although the inception of the act of willing is often purelypsychological, there is no discrete mental event of willing that comes to an endto be followed, either simultaneously or after a brief interval, by a set of physicalmovements that need to be interpreted in the light of the preceding volitional act.The physical movements are experienced as goal-directed and the content of thevolitional act includes the bodily movements by which it will come to fruition.There is no question of the agent having to collate two separate and discrete events– the mental act of willing and the physical act of striving to achieve the relevantintention. Rather, the agent is aware of an goal-directed extended process that hasboth physical and psychological aspects. Schopenhauer puts the point strikinglywhen he writes: “Only in reflection are willing and acting different; in reality theyare one. Every true, genuine, immediate act of the will is also at once and directlya manifest act of the body. My body is theobjectivityof my will”. 1

Once we appreciate the phenomenology of bodily awareness it becomes ap-parent how to respond to Power’s worry. The mental act of volition is indeedexperienced as unified with the physical movements in which it issues and aboutwhich somatic proprioception provides feedback. But this unity is not asyntheticunity – it is not a unity that results from the exercise of any cognitive capacity(whether one that presupposes self-consciousness or not). Rather, it is a brute factabout the content of agency, no less available to the youngest infants than to matureadults.

This is a danger of being misled by neglect of the distinction between personaland subpersonal levels of explanation.2 There is no doubt that this personal-levelphenomenon of a unified awareness of agency is underpinned and explained by theoperation at the subpersonal level of some sort of ‘executive monitoring system’, touse Power’s own phrase. The multiplicity of different somatic information sourcesneeds to be integrated with feedforward information about motor intentions derivedfrom efference copy, both for awareness of action to be possible and for the on-linecontrol and fine-tuning of the action.3 But this does not entail that any comparableprocess is going on at the personal level of explanation, the level at which it isappropriate to appeal to the content of acts of volitional acts and bodily awareness.

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So whatdoesgo on at the personal level of psychological explanation? Howdoes the personal-level content of somatic proprioception feed into an awarenessof the body’s responsiveness to the will? How, for example, does somatic proprio-ception provide the infant with an awareness of the body as an object uniquelyresponsive to the will. Let me briefly mention four ways in which this emerges.First, somatic proprioception (in particular the sense of touch, as well as feedbackfrom receptors in the joints) yields an experience of the resistance provided by non-bodily objects – and hence of the distinctiveness of body-parts as objects that donot present resistance, or at least not resistance of the same type. Second, proprio-ceptive feedback, particularly kinaesthetic feedback, helps the infant to distinguishbetween those alterations in the perceived environment that are due to its ownmovement and those that are due to the movement of non-bodily objects. Third,proprioceptive feedback from random movements that are then repeated teachesthe infant that certain bodily movements are under its control. This provides thebeginning of a basic motor repertoire. Fourth, the calibration of somatic proprio-ception with visually-derived information about the environment allows the infantto distinguish between those (non-bodily) objects in the world that can only bemoved or otherwise altered by means of a bodily movement, and those that can bemoved directly. This feeds directly into the infant’s motor intentions in the formof a grasp of the distinction familiar from the philosophy of action (Danto, 1973)between basic actions and non-basic actions, where a non-basic action is one thatis performed by means of another action. Basic actions, as Davidson has plausiblyargued (Davidson, 1980), are bodily movements. The infant learns that certainmanipulations of the environment can only be achieved instrumentally, throughmanipulating the body.

Notes1Schopenhauer 1844/1966, pp. 101–103. See also O’Shaughnessy (1980) for an extended contem-porary treatment along similar lines, and the essays in Bermúdez et al. (1995).2See the essays in Bermúdez and Elton (2000) for further discussion of the personal/subpersonaldistinction and its role in psychological explanation.3See Jeannerod (1997) for a survey of what is currently known in this area.

References

Bermúdez. J.L. (1998),The Paradox of Self-Conciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Bermúdez. J.L. and Elton, M. (2000),The Personal/Sub-personal Distinction. A special issue of

Philosophical Explorations, Vol. 3.Bermúdez, J.L., Marcel, A.J. and Eilan, N. (1995),The Body and the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.Danto, A. (1973),Analytical Philosophy of Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Jeannerod, M. (1997),The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.O’Shaughnessy, Brian (1980),The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory, Vol. I. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press.Power, N.P. (2001), ‘The Origins of Self-Consciousness’,Mind and Machines11, pp. 133–137.