I Move, therefore I am - A Comment on "The Importance of Sensing One's Movements in the World for the Sense of Personal Identity" by Haselager, Broens, & Quilici Gonzalez

• Main Author: Sandro Nannini
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Mimesis Edizioni, Milano 2012-01-01
• Series: Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia
• Subjects: Movement; Anti-representationalism; Identity; Bodily Sense; Motor Scheme
• Online Access: http://www.rifp.it/ojs/index.php/rifp/article/view/rifp.2012.0002
• ISSN: 2039-4667; 2239-2629

The position taken by Haselager, Broens and Quilici Gonzalez in The Importance of Sensing One’s Movements in the World for the Sense of Personal Identity consists in three fundamental theses which can be summarized as follows: (1) The fundamental core of human self-consciousness is not language or thought but the body sense; (2) The traditional dichotomy between external and internal senses is false; (3) There is no prominence of the brain over the rest of the body with regard to the sense of identity that every human being has. This paper aims at showing that – while thesis (1) is perfectly convincing - theses (2) and (3) must be revisited in part since they are too committed to the kind of anti-representationalism proposed by Brooks. In fact, several experimental findings (see above all the vestibulo-ocular reflex) show – in contrast to (2) – that the brain distinguishes even at a purely perceptual level between self and external world. Moreover, while other experiments do confirm the “importance”of the body for cognition and the steady interaction between the brain and the body including for the execution of cognitive tasks, they also show – in contrast to (3) – that the influence of bodily movement on the associative areas of the cortex is not directly due to the motor schemata that direct bodily movements but to “higher” brain representations of actions each of which can be executed by different motor schemata.