Phenomenology and interoception: Comment on Leder
Interoception is an important contributor to our everyday phenomenology. Two thought experiments can tell us something about the role it plays in our experience. The first is Avicenna’s “flying man” thought experiment which involves the idea of sensory deprivation, but shows how difficult it is to e...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Mimesis Edizioni, Milano
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.rifp.it/ojs/index.php/rifp/article/view/rifp.2024.0015/1350 |
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| Summary: | Interoception is an important contributor to our everyday phenomenology. Two thought experiments can tell us something about the role it plays in our experience. The first is Avicenna’s “flying man” thought experiment which involves the idea of sensory deprivation, but shows how difficult it is to eliminate interoception. The central question is whether one would still have self-awareness if, along with all of the external senses one could eliminate interoception. I argue that this type of thought experiment necessarily leads to an abstraction that fails to take into account the rich context of bodily and environmental factors. A second, more recent thought experiment, the brain-in-the-vat argument, on one interpretation, fails to take into consideration the constraints imposed by the biological body with respect to hormonal, neurotransmitter chemistry, as well as anatomically based pre-neural processing of sensory input and post-neural processing of motor output, as well as interoceptive and affective/emotional processes. As Leder points out, most interoceptive processes happen without our awareness, although they shape our experience and if they were altered or missing our experience would be different, which is what he calls the “projective” feature of interoception. I conclude by suggesting that, as part of the rich context of everyday phenomenology, the projective feature can involve intersubjective processes. |
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| ISSN: | 2039-4667 2239-2629 |