"Mineness," also called "subjective presence" or "personalization," is the feeling that experiences belong to a continuing self. This article argues that mineness is produced by processes of ...interoceptive active inference that model the self as the underlying cause of continuity and coherence in affective experience. A key component of this hierarchical processing system and hub of affective self-modeling is activity in the anterior insula cortex. I defend the account by applying it to the phenomenon of pain asymbolia, a condition in which nociceptive signals (of bodily damage) are not attributed to the self. Thus, pain asymbolia is a form of "depersonalization for pain" as Klein puts it. The pain is experienced as happening to my body but is not experienced as mine. Thus, we can describe it as loss of subjective presence or "mineness" for the experience of pain.
The initial cause of Cotard delusion is pervasive dyshomeostasis (dysregulation of basic bodily function).This explanation draws on interoceptive active inference account of self‐representation. In ...this framework, the self is an hierarchical predictive model made by the brain to facilitate homeostatic regulation. The account I provide is an alternative to two factor accounts of the Cotard delusion that treat depersonalisation experience as the first factor in genesis of the Cotard delusion. I argue that depersonalisation experience and the Cotard delusion are produced by different breakdowns in the process of self‐modelling.
A recent strand in the philosophical literature on addiction emphasizes problems with diachronic self-control. Hanna Pickard, for example, argues that an important aspect of addiction consists in ...inability to identify with a non-addicted future self. This literature sits alongside another that treats addiction as the product of neural changes that "hijack" mechanisms of reward prediction, habit formation decision making and cognitive control. This hijacking literature originates in accounts that treat the neural changes characteristic of addiction as a brain disease. This paper provides a framework based on predictive processing accounts of self-awareness that integrates the hijacking and diachronic accounts. I discuss a hijacking account proposed to explain disruption of addiction following lesion to the anterior insula cortex. I show how insula activity contributes to the type of identification implicated in diachronic accounts and how deactivation of the anterior insula can disrupt addiction by alienating the subject from her addictive tendencies. This is consistent with neural evidence but also incorporates the personal level features of addiction that are opaque to neural level explanation
A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder (DPD) provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences “belong” to the self. In this paper I argue that ...this feeling, baptized “mineness”(Billon
2013
,
2018a
,
b
) or “subjective presence” (Seth,
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
17(11): 565–573,
2013
) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The “self” to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect the organism needs to explain this unpredicted absence of feeling. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind’s representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization.
Abstract
Distributed processing that gives rise to pain experience is anchored by a multidimensional self-model. I show how the phenomenon of pain asymbolia and other atypical pain-related conditions ...(Insensitivity to Pain, Chronic Pain, ‘Social’ Pain, Insensitivity to Pain, Chronic Pain, ‘Social’ Pain, empathy for pain and suffering) can be explained by this idea. It also explains the patterns of association and dissociation among neural correlates without importing strong modular assumptions. It treats pain processing as a species of allostatic active inference in which the mind co-ordinates its processing resources to optimize basic bodily functioning at different time scales. The self is inferred to be source and target of regulation in this process. The self-modelling account reconciles conflicting deaffectualization and depersonalization accounts of pain asymbolia by showing how depersonalization and pain asymbolia arise at different levels of hierarchical self modelling.
Abstract
Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or ‘I’ distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved. Neuroscientific study of such ‘ego ...dissolution’ experiences offers a window onto the nature of self-awareness. We argue that ego dissolution is best explained by an account that explains self-awareness as resulting from the integrated functioning of hierarchical predictive models which posit the existence of a stable and unchanging entity to which representations are bound. Combining recent work on the ‘integrative self' and the phenomenon of self-binding with predictive processing principles yields an explanation of ego dissolution according to which self-representation is a useful Cartesian fiction: an ultimately false representation of a simple and enduring substance to which attributes are bound which serves to integrate and unify cognitive processing across levels and domains. The self-model is not a mere narrative posit, as some have suggested; it has a more robust and ubiquitous cognitive function than that. But this does not mean, as others have claimed, that the self-model has the right attributes to qualify as a self. It performs some of the right kinds of functions, but it is not the right kind of entity. Ego dissolution experiences reveal that the self-model plays an important binding function in cognitive processing, but the self does not exist.
Unraveling the mind Gerrans, Philip
The Behavioral and brain sciences,
06/2013, Volume:
36, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A radical interpretation of the predictive coding approach suggests that the mind is "seamless" - that is, that cancellation of error signals can propagate smoothly from highest to lowest levels of ...the control hierarchy, dissolving a distinction between belief and perception. Delusions of alien control provide a test case. Close examination suggests that while they are evidence of predictive coding within the cortex, they are not evidence for the seamless interpretation.
Jennifer Radden has drawn attention to two features of delusion, ambivalence and subjectivity, which are problematic for theories of delusion that treat delusions as empirical beliefs. She argues for ...an ‘attitude’ theory of delusion. I argue that once the cognitive architecture of delusion formation is properly described the debate between doxastic and attitude theorists loses its edge. That architecture suggests that delusions are produced by activity in the ‘default mode network’ unsupervised by networks required for decontextualized processing. The cognitive properties of these networks explain the features of delusion which generate the debate between doxastic and attitude theorists.
The ability to challenge and revise thoughts prompted by anomalous experiences depends on activity in right dorsolateral prefrontal circuitry. When activity in those circuits is absent or compromised ...subjects are less likely to make this kind of correction. This appears to be the cause of some delusions of misidentification consequent on experiences of hyperfamiliarity for faces. Comparing the way the mind responds to the experience of hyperfamiliarity in different conditions such as delusions, dreams, pathological and non-pathological déjà vu, provides a way to understand claims that delusions and dreams are both states characterized by deficient "reality testing."
This paper develops an account of the nature of imagination as a discrete mental process underpinned by a specialised neural and computational architecture. The account integrates evidence from ...cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology with philosophical arguments about the nature of imagination. We situate the account against other philosophical accounts and apply it to the understanding of some puzzling phenomena: delusion, pretence and self-deception. We argue that many of the puzzling features of these phenomena arise because they are analysed with a doxastic framework. When the role of imagination in these cases is properly understood these puzzles become more tractable.
PDF
