Self-knowledge as a Result of the Embodied and Social Cognition

Abstract

The claim that a cognizer needs to act with the environment to gain knowledge about the world is trivial. No more does the claim sound trivial than when it is said that the cognizer¹ also needs to interact with the environment to know himself, i.e., to gain self-knowledge (SK), defined generally as the subject's knowledge of his mental states, such as feeling, beliefs, or desires (cf. Peacocke, 1999). But why should the cognizer interact with the external world to know the content of his states if they are given to him directly by introspection? In this paper, I support the thesis that to meet the requirements put on SK as knowledge (i.e., as justified, true belief), it must be both embodied and social. Otherwise, the subject has no tool to correct his false beliefs about himself since he is simply unaware that they are false. The vision of such a self-blind subject seems not quite optimistic; hence, in this article, I would like to investigate certain solutions which could help in the argumentation against such vision. The traditional account of SK separated the cognizer from the influence of other subjects by giving him the first-person-authority grounded on his privileged access to his internal psychological states. On such account, a society consisted of individual minds, interacting however with one another, but with no access to others' minds. On the early stage of computationalism, the already classic paradigm in cognitive science, an intuitive approach to SK was the one according to which a cognizer knew his own mental states by virtue of their appearance in mind (Haugeland, 1987; Guttenplan, 1994; Dretske, 1995). SK was then characterized by the propositional form of “I believe that I believe that p.” An explanation could easily be formulated with the nomenclature of computationalism by saying that to know himself, a subject needs to present two abilities (or in terms of functionalism: dispositions): to have a concept of I/Me to ascribe the attitude to oneself as to the subject of the experienced state, and to have a concept of an attitude such as BELIEF or DESIRE in order to identify the mental state in which he is (cf. Peacocke, 1992). If the concepts were understood as representations falling under computational operations (Fodor, 1998, 2000), then the SK also had a representational form composed of two basic representations: the one of I and the other of an experienced phenomenal state such as pain or belief (Newen and Vosgerau, 2007). The computability of SK, also called information processing, was determined by algorithmic processes on representations (Dretske, 1981; Fodor, 1987, 1991; Leake, 1995; David et al., 2004; Miłkowki, 2017). On such computational account of SK, a subject was closed in the internal loop of self-representational mind, which needed no non-neural body to gain the knowledge about itself. One of the newest examples of such an internalistic model of SK is the Epistemic Agent Model (EAM,) formed on the level of conscious processing and representing its owner as an individual capable of keeping autonomous epistemic self-control, i.e., monitoring and voluntary modification of his own mental states (Metzinger, 2017, p. 8). The components of EAM are two smaller models: a model of an entity exerting control (the self) as well as a model of the satisfaction conditions of the specific mental action and the asymmetric dynamic relation connecting these two models, the one which can be interpreted simply as an intentional attitude toward a content of the mental state such as belief (cf. Metzinger, 2017). All the components are internal and based only on the neural information processing. The subject (self) aiming at some action in the world first needs to be aware of the belief according to which he acts. To know this belief, he needs to be equipped with the model of himself as the subject having that belief. Therefore I interpret the EAM as a model of SK. Although this model does not include external elements (which are needed in the conception of the social and embodied SK) it points to a very important constituent of SK, namely the minimal phenomenal selfhood—the subjective experience of being a self. The processes responsible for physical self-specification are neuronal and hence internal. Basically, these are both homeostatic regulation as well as proprioception, which is understood as sensorimotor integration (Christoff et al., 2011, p. 104). They underlie higher level processes giving rise to self-experience. This self-experience is a fundament of EAM and, hence, SK. The constitution of SK as relying on the constitution of the self is crucial here. On the one hand, the development of self-experience constitutes a necessary element of SK, but on the other hand, it is the source of errors in self-cognition. The errors in self-cognition are reported in many empirical studies: Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI), Full Body Illusion (FBI), or Body Swap Illusion (BSI) have shown that the perception of self-location and first-person perspective can be experimentally influenced and changed (Lenggenhager et al., 2007; Blanke and Metzinger, 2009; Ionta et al., 2011; Aspell et al., 2012), and that certain dimensions of minimal phenomenal selfhood can be manipulated (cf. Limanowski, 2014, p.1). The cases of experiencing a phantom (de facto missing) limb as still belonging to the body (Ramachandran and Blakeslee, 1998; Ramachandran and Altschuler, 2009; Case et al., 2010; Ramachandran et al., 2011) well exemplify lack of resistance to an error in self-cognition. The examples involving self-illusions explicitly show that we can artificially induce the experience of self-location and ownership from the outside to evoke a false self-identification, and hence, to create a false content of SK. The newest empirical findings show the connection between...