Back to Square One: The Bodily Roots of Conscious Experiences in Early Life

Abstract

This paper argues that consciousness science may be put on a fruitful track for its future evolution by endorsing a bottom-up developmental perspective. Specifically, we propose to go back to ‘square one’ and to examine the nature of subjective experiences as they emerge in early human life, in utero. We build upon the observation that current theories of consciousness tacitly endorse an adult-centric and vision-biased approach in tackling the problem of subjective experiences. Indeed, one basic yet overlooked aspect of current discussions on consciousness is that in humans, experiences and experiencing subjects first develop within another human body. Hence, this observation must be taken into account and incorporated by current theories of consciousness. We propose to zoom out from the classical conundrum of the relationship consciousness and its neural correlates. Rather we see consciousness necessarily related to experiences and from there to embodied experiencers. Given that experiencers are subjects actively engaging with an environment in order to maintain self-organisation and self-preservation, consciousness cannot be addressed in isolation from self-consciousness. We make use of the ‘iceberg’ metaphor to argue that in order to understand the nature of the visible ‘tip’ of our conscious experiences one needs to go back to its pre-reflective and bodily roots. This is because the basis of the ‘experiential iceberg’ is conceptually and ontologically prior to its ‘tip’. Examining the primitive and pre-reflective basis of the iceberg may teach us something essential not only about its visible accessible side (i.e. the contents of conscious experiences that we can explicitly attend to and report), but also about its entire structure as a whole. We conclude with some implications of our hypothesis for future research for consciousness studies.

The Radically Embodied Conscious Cybernetic Bayesian Brain: From Free Energy to Free Will and Back Again

“…LeDoux [ 179 , 369 ] has argued that animals without complex language cannot be said to possess emotions, but merely have functional activity within “survival circuits.” These claims are justified by language providing necessary syntactic structures for the construction of complex extended self-models; or as LeDoux states: “No self, no fear”. This emphasis on the foundational importance of selfhood for conscious experience is largely compatible with the view presented here, and elsewhere [ 91 ]. Without extended self-processes, emotions and feelings will be qualitatively different than the kinds of emotions and feelings constructed by humans governed by (and governing) a symbolic order of being.…”

“…High degrees of mutual information across ESMs may enhance capacities for self-organized synchrony and inferential stability [ 204 ]. Indeed, the early emergence (with respect to both ontogeny and phylogeny) of body-centered neural responses suggests they may be foundational for extra-bodily forms of perceptual inference [ 91 , 231 ]. In terms of developmental primacy, studies of zebra fish demonstrate that spinal motor-neurons begin a stereotyped process of establishing global synchronization dynamics, beginning with the reliable enabling of increasing degrees of synchronous local activity [ 232 ], followed by larger-scale integration (or self-organization) into well-defined oscillatory modes as critical thresholds are surpassed [ 233 ].…”

“…In their account, interoception supplies fundamental priors in yet another sense in playing central roles with respect to establishing models of body ownership and (minimal) selfhood, both of which constitute necessary preconditions for learning about other aspects of the world. The specific nature(s) of these embodied priors has been further explored in terms of their shaping by developmentally early socioemotional coupling, including with respect to perinatal and prenatal interactions with caregivers upon which infants depend for life [ 87 , 91 , 92 ]. Below, I explore some of these ideas, as well as additional (complementary) ways in which embodiment may form necessary foundations in growing minds, the extent of which may be difficult to overstate.…”

Getting in Touch with the Lost Self: Vicarious and Affective Touch in Depersonalisation

“…Moreover, the skin is the oldest and widest organ in terms of dimensions and functions (Montagu, 1971;Field, 2001). By providing the organism with the most primitive means to 'meet' and perceive the world, tactile experiences may constitute thereby the most ubiquitous and basic experiential background ( Ciaunica &Fotopoulou, 2017;Ciaunica et al 2021b).…”

Agency and Choice in Evolution

“…The human organism is an active agent even from before birth (Delafield-Butt & Gangopadhyay, 2013) and this agency is fundamental and necessary for its growth, learning, and development (Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2013). It is a source of active awareness that theories of consciousness are beginning to address (Ciaunica et al, 2021).…”