On the self-ascription of deafferented bodily action

Abstract

Subjects suffering from extreme peripheral deafferentation can recruit vision to perform a significant range of basic physical actions with limbs they can’t proprioceptively feel. Self-ascriptions of deafferented action – just as deafferented action itself – fundamentally depend, therefore, on visual information of limb position and movement. But what’s the significance of this result for the concept of self patently at work in these self-ascriptions? In this paper, I argue that these cases show that bodily awareness grounding employment of the self-concept in self-ascriptions of action can be fundamentally third-personal and concern a body that is not presented as one’s own, but as an object among others.