Body Ownership, Self Consciousness, and Personal Bodily Identity

Abstract

A sense of bodily cohesion is necessary for understanding the phenomenological experience of self. There exists a physical boundary between perceiver and perceived. Yet the body does more than simply demarcate the self; the body and its relationships are influential on the phenomenological experience. Without an understanding of the body’s role in the phenomenological experience, the body becomes reduced to a “highly polished machine which the ambiguous notion of behavior nearly made us forget”. But scientific research points to the importance of behavior when conceptualizing the body as a whole. This paper will examine a scientific study conducted by Tsakiris, Mooney, and Prabhu in 2005 that focuses on how active and passive experience impacts bodily self-consciousness. The study finds that a motor sense of agency, as discovered through active movement, generates a stronger sense of bodily agency than proprioception. These results will then be cross-examined against two philosophical positions regarding the phenomenology of bodily experiences, bodily awareness, and self-consciousness.

RHI and body-ownership in psychology 

The typical Rubber Hand Illusion is an illusion that occurs when a participant in an experiment begins to identify with a rubber hand that is a part of the experiment. Both the rubber hand and the participant's natural hand experience the same sensations at the same time but only the rubber hand is visible. Participants find themselves identifying with the rubber hand, believing it to be part of their own body whereas their natural hand no longer exists. Botvinick and Cohen initially performed this experiment in 1998.

Tsakiris’s 2005 experiment specifically looks into body ownership. A sense of body ownership is present involuntary actions and passive experiences. This is a specific investigation into the strength and contribution of active and passive movement that create a sense of bodily agency. Participants in the study sat at a table where their right hand was visible from view. A fixed camera captured a video of the participant's hand and displayed this back to them through a projection. Before each condition participants were asked to identify the location of their right hand using a ruler projected ruler. After the condition was run, participants were once again asked to identify the location of their right hand. A significant proprioceptive drift would imply that the RHI was in effect and the participants would identify a sense of agency with the video image of the hand. There were several conditions applied during the experiment. Either the index or little finger was stimulated. The digit then experienced a tactile movement in the form of being stroked by a paintbrush, or it experienced an active movement where the participant was instructed to tap their finger in no particular pattern. 

The results provide a significant difference between synchronous and asynchronous stimulation. The synchronous and tactile stimulation provided a great amount of proprioceptive drift out of all three conditions. There was also a noticeable difference between the active and passive conditions. The RHI effect was present in all three conditions, however, it was inconsistent. The overall discussion and conclusion of Tsakiris’s experiment showcase that action produces a bodily coherence that passive movement can not. The RHI effect measured the strength the participants began to identify with the visual image of their hand. Participants attributed body ownership to the image of their hand when there was a synchronous tactile simulation. Movement, therefore, plays an important role in body awareness.  

Bodily Awareness and Self-Consciousness

Embodied phenomenology stresses the importance of the body for intentionality and meaning-giving acts. Indeed, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one the first phenomenologists to turn to the body for intentionality. Bermúdez attempts to draw a connection between bodily awareness and self-consciousness. His thesis proposes that the bodily awareness that emerges from embodies phenomenology is implicative of self-awareness and subsequently self-consciousness. It is only through first-person awareness of bodily ownership that this conclusion can be reached. 

The body, by nature of its ability to receive sensory signals, is a sensory object. However, while it is perceiving, it is also continuously being perceived. The body remains to be a physical object and it can be perceived in the same way any other physical object can be perceived, that is through touch, smell, taste, sound, and sight. This can be classified as a conscious perception of the body. Bermúdez goes into detail regarding unconscious and conscious bodily awareness. The most obvious unconscious awareness of the body would be proprioception. There is an inherent spatial awareness that the body carries of itself. There is a kinesthetic ability to judge the placement, weight, and motion of the body as the body is currently experiencing it. Conscious awareness is typically absent in the distribution of limbs and their motion. However, body image is an example of conscious and first-person body-relative information. Body image closely parallels the phenomenological experience of the body. The subject attributes meaning to their own body and is acutely aware of how they are experiencing that body. Shaun Gallagher in The Embodied Phenomenology of phenomenology describes the effect bodily states have on the phenomenological experience. Consciousness of bodily states is not necessary for their involvement in the experience. Gallagher specifically references negative bodily states and their ability to change dispositions and subsequently perception. Similarly, full awareness of the body is not necessary to develop body image. There is a semantic component of this body relative information through the naming of body parts. Yet there are bodily functions and body parts that go without semantic information that still hold value in the overall concept of body image.

Discussion

Bermúdez brings up body consciousness as something that is phenomenologically salient. He builds upon Gallagher’s inflationary conception of body ownership. There is knowledge of body ownership embedded in the experience itself. A phenomenologically salient version of body ownership allows for a clear explanation between first person and third person experiences of the body. Indeed, Bermúdez’s taxonomy of body relative information necessitates the body to be claimed; there must be the property of myness to create a first-person and third-person distinction. However, Tsakiris’s experiment undermines this notion of saliency. Body ownership comes under attack when synchronous and tactile stimulation is applied to the body. It is clear from Tsakiris that movement is an important determinant in body ownership. But if self-consciousness is meant to be derived from body ownership, then the subject's ability to detach from the natural body through synchronous tactile stimulation provides complications. 

Any discussion surrounding body ownership as phenomenologically salient has serious ethical and legislative effects. Body ownership can play an important role in the conversation surrounding body integrity identity disorder. This is a disorder where an able-bodied individual feels overcomplete with their limbs and desires the removal of one or more limbs. There is minimal research surrounding this disorder. But the current research classifies identity as the primary reason the individual desire an amputation. Bodily awareness and ownership, if phenomenologically salient, would necessitate physical cosmetic surgery for the physical body to parallel the phenomenological. There is much debate surrounding the moral obligations cosmetic surgeons have to uphold the request of individuals who desire such a proceeder. Regardless, this particular instance aids the claim that body ownership is actualized through movement that corresponds with the phenomenological body. 

Bibliography

Bermúdez, José. “Bodily Awareness and Self Consciousness.” Essay. In The Oxford Handbook of the Self, 158–79, 2011. 

Botvinick, M., and J. D. Cohen. "Rubber hand ‘feels’ what eyes can see." Nature 391, no. 756 (1998): 10-1038.

Gallagher, Shaun, and Benjamin Aguda. “The Embodied Phenomenology of Phenomenology.” University of Memphis, 2016. 

Moran, Dermot, and Timothy Mooney. The Phenomenology Reader. Routledge, 2010. 

Preester, Helena De. “Merleau-Ponty’s Sexual Schema and the Sexual Component of Body Integrity Identity Disorder,” 2011. 

Tsakiris, Manos, Patrick Haggard, and Gita Prabhu. “Having a Body versus Moving Your Body: How Agency Structures Body-Ownership.” Elsevier Inc, 2005.