Visceral Extension and the Beast-Machine: Toward a Neuropsychological Criterion for the Extended Self

EasyChair Preprint 15366

Abstract

When does a distributed brain-body-world cognitive system constitute an extended self or person? When cognition is extended “beyond skin and skull,” then is the self also extended? Or is cognition simply offloaded to an external resource that is not part of the self or person? I argue that there are some cases in which it does make sense to speak of the self as extended, and that a criterion is needed. I consider several possibilities and ultimately propose a conception of extended selves rooted in neural mechanisms for proprioception and interoception.

David Chalmers (2019) distinguishes between two kinds of extended cognition, circuit extension and sensorimotor extension. I suggest a third possibility which crosscuts this distinction: visceral extension. Drawing on Anil Seth’s (2019) concept of the self as a “beast-machine” and Gallagher’s (2023) theory of the “self-pattern,” I argue that extending the embodied self is very different from extending cognition, in part because the self is not co-extensive with cognition. While various forms of the Parity Principle (e.g. Reiner & Nagel, 2017) can provide a criterion for cognitive extension, meeting this criterion is not sufficient to establish an extended self. But the self is not co-extensive with consciousness, either. The embodied self runs deeper than consciousness; the lived body is not simply the body as it appears in consciousness.

I argue that technology becomes a proper part of an embodied self-pattern when it is anchored in the control-oriented predictive processing mechanisms in the mid-line neural systems implicated in self-regulation and self-control. Thus, the way to visceral extension of the embodied self leads through the default mode network.

Keyphrases: Neuropsychology, extended cognition, pattern self, predictive processing

@booklet{EasyChair:15366,
  author    = {Joseph Neisser},
  title     = {Visceral Extension and the Beast-Machine: Toward a Neuropsychological Criterion for the Extended Self},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15366},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}