Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood.

Modern psychology has long focused on the body as the basis of the self. Recently, predictive processing accounts of interoception (perception of the body 'from within') have become influential in accounting for experiences of body ownership and emotion. Here, we describe embodied selfhood in terms of 'instrumental interoceptive inference' that emphasises allostatic regulation and physiological integrity. We apply this approach to the distinctive phenomenology of embodied selfhood, accounting for its non-object-like character and subjective stability over time. Our perspective has implications for the development of selfhood and illuminates longstanding debates about relations between life and mind, implying, contrary to Descartes, that experiences of embodied selfhood arise because of, and not in spite of, our nature as 'beast machines'.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences

• Publication date

  2018-09-14

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tics.2018.08.008PMID 30224233
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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