Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Hong Yu Wong
University College London

On the Necessity of Bodily Awareness for Bodily Action

        Bodily awareness appears to play a phenomenologically and conceptually central role in our ordinary experience of bodily action. However, it is unclear in what sense bodily awareness is central to bodily action. In this paper, I consider an influential line of thought – due to Brian O’Shaughnessy (1980 and 2004) – that bodily awareness is necessary for bodily agency. I will argue that whilst O’Shaughnessy is correct in thinking that there is an intimate connection between bodily awareness and bodily action, recent work in cognitive neuroscience points to a less direct connection than the one he envisages.

O’Shaughnessy argues that control of bodily actions is impossible in the absence of bodily awareness because it provides an ineliminable source of feedback. He challenges the objector to explain how bodily action as we know it is possible in its absence: How could one reach out and grab something if one did not have proprioception and kinaesthetic sensations to tell one about the position of one’s arm and the way it is moving? If one felt nothing in one’s limbs, they might be moved in all sorts of ways through space without one’s knowing – and they may even be torn off without one knowing, since, after all, one feels nothing in them. One’s limbs may be picked just as one’s wallet may be without one’s knowing. Without the feedback that we receive from bodily awareness, how might we correct for mistakes in the direction of movement? How would one know that one is moving one’s arm in this way rather than that. The problem is worse still for cases of more complex intentional movements – how can one walk without bodily awareness? How would one know whether one is balanced as one thrusts out one leg, or that one has tripped and is sprawled on the floor. And how does one even know that one is thrusting out one’s leg – because one has performed the preliminary volition to do so? It appears then that without bodily awareness we would have no ability to control our actions.

Whilst I agree with O’Shaughnessy that there is an intimate connection between feeling our limbs ‘from the inside’ and our power to act directly with them, I am sceptical that the role he ascribed to bodily awareness in control of bodily action is the correct way to cash out this intimate connection as there appear to be a number of empirical counterexamples to his claims. I discuss three kinds of cases, all of which put pressure on the idea that bodily awareness is an ineliminable source of feedback for all bodily action:

(One) Studies of deafferentated patients. Recent studies of deafferentated patients appear to show that we may learn how to compensate for loss of bodily awareness to some extent by trying to maximise our use of other cues from outer perception and lessons from past experience. (See, e.g., Cole and Paillard 1995.)

(Two) Brainwave technology. These are outré experimental cases in which, e.g., subjects are trained to alternatively switch on and off a light bulb with their brainwaves. Using brainwaves to perform physical actions has been shown to be possible and the technology exploited to create brainwave controlled joysticks. As of 2004 a video game in which the character is controlled directly from a player's brain without the need for wires has been developed by researchers. (See, e.g., the website of Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology, Inc., URL = http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/.) Whilst ‘brainwave actions’ are not bodily actions, and are extra-bodily, they are physical actions. These cases put pressure on the idea that basic physical action requires one to feel the target object ‘from the inside’, and insofar as the case of basic bodily action is a specific instance of this (since one’s body is a physical object), O’Shaughnessy’s thesis is threatened.

(Three) Online control. Finally, it appears that even if we restrict ourselves to central cases of ordinary bodily action, such as mundane arm raisings and the like, it appears that (a) most instances of these are accomplished automatically and without constant bodily awareness and (b) even when movement involves bodily awareness, the online control involved in fine-tuning actions is mostly non-conscious. (See Jeannerod 1997.) This, unsurprisingly, is due to the workings of various sub-personal mechanisms which monitor the state of our body and underwrite our ability to act. I review recent work in cognitive neuroscience that substantiates my claims here.

The upshot of these points is O’Shaughnessy’s claim that continuous conscious bodily awareness is required for epistemological feedback such that action is possible cannot be unrestricted true. In the final section, I put forward a sketch of the role that bodily awareness plays in basic bodily action.

 References

Cole, J. and J. Paillard (1995) “Living Without Touch and Peripheral Information about Body Position and Movement: Studies with Deafferented Subjects”, in J. Bermúdez, A. Marcel and N. Eilan (eds.) The Body and The Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Jeannerod, M. (1997) The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action (Oxford: Blackwell).

O’Shaughnessy, B. (1980) The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

—— (2004) “The Epistemology of Bodily Awareness”, in J. Roessler and N. Eilan (eds.) Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford: Oxford University Press).