Embodiment, ownership and disownership

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Abstract

There are two main pathways to investigate the sense of body ownership, (i) through the study of the conditions of embodiment for an object to be experienced as one’s own and (ii) through the analysis of the deficits in patients who experience a body part as alien. Here, I propose that E is embodied if some properties of E are processed in the same way as the properties of one’s body. However, one must distinguish among different types of embodiment, and only self-specific embodiment can lead to feelings of ownership. I address issues such as the functional role and the dynamics of embodiment, degrees and measures of ownership, and shared body representations between self and others. I then analyse the interaction between ownership and disownership. On the one hand, I show that there is no evidence that in the Rubber Hand Illusion, the rubber hand replaces the biological hand. On the other hand, I argue that the sense of disownership experienced by patients towards their body part cannot be reduced to the mere lack of ownership.

Introduction

Our body may be the object we know the best, from which we constantly receive a flow of information from vision, touch, proprioception, the vestibular and the interoceptive systems. Not only do we receive more information on our body than on any other objects, but we also have an internal access to it that we have to no other bodies. What makes our body so special may thus be that unlike other physical objects and other bodies, we perceive it from the inside. Only in our body, or at least in what we represent as our own body, do we feel bodily sensations. We also care for our body like we care for no other bodies, let alone other objects. Finally, it seems that it is only our own body that obeys our will with no intermediary.

Yet, the relation between the body and the self is complex, giving rise to vivid philosophical debates (see Table 1).

Some debates have been going on for centuries like questions about the ontological nature of the self and personal identity or about the epistemological certainty we have that this is our own body with no possible doubt. Other debates have emerged from recent scientific progress like issues about the moral and legal status of body parts in a time of research on biological materials or questions about the sensory and cognitive underpinnings of the sense of body ownership following a booming of studies in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology these last 10 years.

Here, I shall set the agenda for the investigation of the sense of ownership of body parts.1 I shall focus on two main pathways, through the study of embodiment and through the study of disownership (see Table 2). However, the relation between embodiment, ownership and disownership is too often left unarticulated. In the paper, I shall bring out some of the main lines of force in this literature and lay the foundation for a proper theory of the sense of ownership. Two questions are of particular interest. First, are embodiment and ownership a matter of all-or-nothing or does it come in degrees or in various types? Second, what is the relationship between experiences of ownership and experiences of disownership?

Section snippets

The sense of body ownership

Before investigating the grounds of the sense of body ownership, one must distinguish between feeling of ownership and judgement of ownership (for a similar distinction within the sense of agency, see Bayne & Pacherie, 2007). Some philosophers, however, take the sense of ownership to be exclusively judgmental (Bermudez, in press). On the deflationary conception of ownership, there is no such thing as a feeling of body ownership, that is, a positive phenomenology of ‘myness’ that goes beyond the

The measures of embodiment

The definition of embodiment in terms of the types of processing that characterize the representation of one’s body does not inform us about the specific way the properties of one’s body are processed. One possible strategy to address this question is to analyse the various attempts to operationalize the notion of embodiment in clinical and experimental studies. Unfortunately, most studies on amputees merely rate the patients’ degree of satisfaction with the graft or the prosthesis or the

The manifold of embodiment

There are many differences between the artificial embodiment of allograft, prostheses, rubber hands, virtual avatars and tools, and at various levels. To start with, some artificial embodiments occur in amputees with missing limbs (e.g., graft, prosthesis), while others occur in healthy individuals with a fully functioning body (e.g., RHI; virtual avatar). What is embodied can be the whole body (e.g., virtual avatar, full-body illusion) or merely a body part (e.g., rubber hand, prosthesis,

Ownership and disownership

Although the sense of body ownership may appear as a given, various pathological conditions reveal the possibility of feeling disownership towards one’s body (see Table 2). For example, patients suffering from the psychiatric disorder of depersonalization experience a general alteration of their relation to the self, such that they often feel as if their body did not belong to them or as if it had disappeared, leading them to compulsively touch their body and pour hot water on it to reassure

Conclusion

This paper did no deliver the key to the sense of ownership. Rather, it did the spadework to clarify the conceptual landscape of ownership, embodiment and disownership. In particular, I highlighted the conceptual knots that need to be untied before building up any theory of ownership. I addressed issues such as the functional role and the dynamics of embodiment, degrees and measures of ownership, shared body representation between self and others, and disownership delusions. I proposed that an

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by an ANR Grant 07-1-191653.

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    This article is part of a special issue of this journal on Brain and Self: Bridging the Gap.

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