Sensitive Subjects: Bodily Awareness, Pain, and the Self by Adam L Bradley A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor John Campbell, Co-chair Professor Geoffrey Lee, Co-chair Professor Michael Martin Professor Alison Gopnik Summer 2019 Abstract Sensitive Subjects: Bodily Awareness, Pain, and the Self by Adam L Bradley Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Berkeley Professor John Campbell, Co-chair Professor Geoffrey Lee, Co-chair Imagine that you feel a pain in your hand, notice the movement of your limbs as you tie your shoes, or attend to your feeling of balance as you ride a rollercoaster. These phenomena are exercises of bodily awareness, the type of awareness one has of one’s body ‘from the inside.’ My dissertation is an investigation into the nature of bodily awareness. In it I describe and attempt to resolve a number of serious puzzles raised by the philosophical and scientific investigation of bodily self-awareness. My solution to these puzzles is to develop a novel account of bodily awareness. On the view I develop bodily awareness is basic, irreducible to other mental capacities such as perception and introspection. Only by treating bodily awareness as basic, I argue, can we understand what is distinctive about it. I begin by establishing the unity of bodily awareness. Though bodily awareness is comprised of sensory systems that are physically, functionally, and phenomenologically distinct, these distinct sensory systems nevertheless generate a single form of awareness. What unifies bodily awareness and distinguishes it from other forms of awareness such as vision and audition is its phenomenological structure. Whereas other forms of sensory awareness are perspectival, serving to make one aware of objects as they relate to one’s body, bodily awareness is non-perspectival, serving to make one aware of one’s body itself. The different aspects of bodily awareness, then, correspond to those bodily features that one can become aware of in this non-perspectival manner. 1 Having characterized the unity and structure of bodily awareness I go on to consider its relationship to other forms of conscious awareness, in par- ticular perception and introspection. Some of the most recalcitrant puzzles about bodily awareness stem from the fact that it resembles both our per- ceptual awareness of the external world (in virtue of making us aware of a physical object) and our introspective awareness of our own minds (in virtue of licensing first-personal judgments concerning what we are aware of init). Since these forms of awareness are typically regarded as exclusive, this makes it difficult to locate bodily awareness with respect to our other mental fac- ulties. I address this issue by arguing that bodily awareness is sui generis, irreducible to either perception or introspection, though it shares key features with each. Another characteristic feature of bodily awareness is that involves a feel- ing of bodily ownership, or a sense that what one is aware of in bodily aware- ness is one’s own body. One of the chief ways researchers try to understand this feeling of bodily ownership is by looking at subjects in whom it is im- paired. In startling disorders such as somatoparaphrenia and depersonaliza- tion subjects report feeling alienated from their own bodies. I explore these ownership disorders and provide a novel account of them, one which allows us to hold onto the intuitive thought that bodily awareness invariably presents our bodies to us as our own. I do so by distinguishing a feeling of affective ownership from a feeling of minimal ownership, arguing that it is the former rather than the latter that is impaired in characteristic ownership disorders. Finally, I address some issues raised by bodily sensations such as pain. Bodily pain strikes many philosophers as deeply paradoxical. The issue is that pains seem to bear both physical characteristics, such as a location in the body, and mental characteristics, such as being subjective entities to which subjects have privileged and peculiar epistemic access. In this final chapter I clarify and address this alleged paradox of pain. I begin by showing how a further assumption, Objectivism, the thesis that what one feels in one’s body when one is in pain is something mind-independent, is necessary for the gen- eration of the paradox. Consequently, the paradox can be avoided if one rejects Objectivism and instead adopts the Embodied View of Pain, a novel metaphysical account on which pains are constitutively mind-dependent fea- tures of parts of a subject’s body. 2 Contents Acknowledgments iii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Structure of Bodily Awareness 4 2.1 Introduction ............................ 4 2.2 Bodily Awareness, A Primer ................... 5 2.3 The Unity Puzzle ......................... 15 2.3.1 Individuating the Senses ................. 15 2.3.2 Multimodality ...................... 19 2.4 Forms of Awareness and The Spatiality Puzzle ......... 26 2.4.1 The Structure of Visual Awareness ........... 28 2.4.2 The Structure of Bodily Awareness ........... 35 2.5 Recap ............................... 41 3 Bodily Awareness, Perception, and Introspection 43 3.1 Introduction ............................ 43 3.2 The Puzzle of Bodily Awareness ................. 45 3.3 Perceptualism ........................... 49 3.3.1 The Nature of Perceptual Awareness .......... 53 3.4 Introspectionism ......................... 59 3.5 The Hybrid View ......................... 64 3.6 Bodily Awareness as Sui Generis ................ 67 3.6.1 Bermúdez’s Argument .................. 68 3.6.2 The Flaw in Bermúdez’s Argument ........... 72 3.6.3 Bodily Awareness as Contrastive ............ 73 3.6.4 Why It Matters ...................... 78 i Contents 4 The Feeling of Bodily Ownership 81 4.1 Introduction ............................ 81 4.2 Groundwork ............................ 84 4.3 Ownership Disorders ....................... 86 4.3.1 Somatoparaphenia .................... 86 4.3.2 Depersonalization ..................... 87 4.4 Sufficiency ............................. 88 4.5 Sufficiency and Self-Awareness .................. 90 4.6 The Disownership Puzzle ..................... 92 4.7 Varieties of Ownership Feelings ................. 97 4.7.1 Minimal Ownership ................... 98 4.7.2 Affective Ownership ................... 104 4.8 Conclusion ............................. 108 5 The Paradox of Pain 109 5.1 Introduction ............................ 109 5.2 The Paradox of Pain ....................... 112 5.3 The Embodied View ....................... 116 5.4 Objections and Replies ...................... 122 5.4.1 The Phantom Limb Objection .............. 122 5.4.2 The Circularity Objection ................ 124 5.4.3 The Naturalism Objection ................ 125 5.4.4 The Conceptual Objection ................ 127 5.5 Conclusion ............................. 129 Bibliography 130 ii Acknowledgments During my time at Berkeley I have had the great fortune of belonging to a remarkable community of friends, colleagues, and scholars. Writing this dissertation has been a process of more than 5 years, with many detours along the way. As a result, I cannot possibly acknowledge every debt that I have accrued, but I will try my best. To those I have left out, I can offer only my apologies, and the solace that whatever mistakes remain in this work cannot be traced back to you. Among the faculty at Berkeley I would like in particular to acknowledge Timothy Clarke, Tim Crockett, Shamik Dasgupta, Hannah Ginsborg, Wes- ley Holliday, Katharina Kaiser, Niko Kolodny, John MacFarlane, Veroniqué Munoz-Dardé, Alva Noë, Kristin Primus, R. Jay Wallace, Daniel Warren, and Seth Yalcin. These individuals have contributed to my growth as a philosopher and put me in a position to write this work. From seminars to colloquia to conservations at our department’s opulent wine and cheese receptions, they have helped to make me feel like a genuine participant in the philosophical enterprise. I would like to make special mention of Barry Stroud. Barry, along with Hannah, led my first-year seminar. I can only liken the experience of doing philosophy with Barry to being thrown into the deep end of the pool: prior to it, one has little idea just how deep the thing is. If anyone in the history of philosophy has ever managed to get to the heart of the matter, it was Barry. One of the great joys of being an academic is belonging to a larger com- munity of scholars. Beyond Berkeley, my studies have put me into con- tact, either in person or electronically, with faculty members from a num- ber of different institutions from all across the world. Here I acknowledge some who have made a contribution to this thesis. This list includes Mu- rat Aydede, Frédérique de Vignemont, Susanna Siegel, Adam Pautz, Bence iii Acknowledgments Nanay, Jonathan Cohen, Colin Klein, Jennifer Corns, Emma Borg, Wayne Wu, David Chalmers, José Luis Bermúdez, Hong Yu Wong, Ophelia Deroy, and Alisa Mandrigin, as well as several anonymous referees, whose work must remain clandestine. Three members of the Berkeley faculty deserve special acknowledgment: the co-chairs of my dissertation committee, John Campbell and Geoff Lee, and Mike Martin, a member of my dissertation committee and a mentor throughout my time in graduate school. I cannot imagine having completed this thesis without them.