Embodied mineness and background agency: a neurophenomenological approach to the minimal self

Summary

The concept of minimal selfhood, which refers to the pre-reflective sense of personal experience, is shown to be an embodied and agential phenomenon. Evidence from multisensory integration and interoceptive processing indicates that the neurocognitive mechanisms of bodily ownership are linked to this sense of self. The lived body serves as a foundation for orientation in the world, suggesting that background agency—a form of pre-reflective bodily self-awareness—is integral to understanding minimal selfhood.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract The phenomenological concept of minimal selfhood (understood as the pre-reflective dimension of ‘for-me-ness’ or ‘mineness’ that is constitutive of the first-personal character of experience) is often treated as so formal and abstract that it remains neutral regarding embodiment. This paper challenges that view through a neurophenomenological approach that circulates between empirical evidence and phenomenological analysis to argue that minimal selfhood is fundamentally an embodied and agential phenomenon. At the empirical level, evidence from multisensory integration and interoceptive processing reveals that the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the sense of bodily ownership and presence span across brain and body, grounding the pre-reflective quality of mineness. At the phenomenological level, the lived body is pre-reflectively self-manifest as the zero-point of orientation or an absolute ‘here’ that I argue is inseparable from a practical, outward orientation toward the world. This practical orientation corresponds to what I call background agency: a passive, pre-reflective form of bodily self-awareness that is captured by the phenomenological concept of the ‘I can’, which denotes a form of self-manifestation related to the capacity of engaging in action. Drawing on enactive and dynamical approaches to cognition, I further argue that the neurocognitive processes underlying background agency are entangled with those responsible for bodily ownership and mineness, suggesting that these two structures are co-emergent, giving rise to minimal selfhood. The ‘me’ of for-me-ness, I conclude, is an embodied and agential subjectivity.

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