Consciousness is embodied

Neuroscientist Anil Seth is the Director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science. In Being You, he distinguishes between three aspects of consciousness:

• Conscious Level: how conscious we are, the difference between being conscious or not

• Conscious Content: what we are conscious of, what our perceptions are about

• Conscious Self: what it means to be you

Let’s explore Conscious Self.

The experience of ‘being you’

The experience of ‘being you’ consists of five types of experience:

• embodied self: we own our bodies in a way that does not apply to other things

• perspectival self: our first person, subjective perspective

• volitional self: our sense of agency

• narrative self: our sense of identity

• social self: our embeddedness in social worlds

Different organisms experience conscious self differently 

The bedrock of ‘being you’ is our sense of being a living organism and having a body. Animals and other organisms have different bodies so have different experiences of conscious self.  While the social and narrative self are limited to animals and humans that are self-aware, other non-human animals and organisms will have various degrees of embodied, perspectival and volitional self. 

‘Being you’ is malleable and can be undone

Although we perceive that we have some kind of inner essence- a stable and unified experience of ‘being you’ behind all of your experiences- each aspect of our conscious self can be challenged when perceptions change that affect how our brains make predictions about the boundaries of our body. For example:

• phantom limbs challenge embodied self

• out of body experiences challenge perspectival self

• schizophrenia challenges volitional self

• amnesia and dementia challenge narrative self

• autism challenges social self.

Our conscious self is always changing since our bodies continually change albeit so slowly that we don't notice it. We are always responding to, and learning about, the world, updating the background context of our prior beliefs, knowledge and expectations even if only by small amounts.