Introduction: The Relational Self: Basic Forms of Self-Awareness

Topoi https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09689-z Introduction: The Relational Self: Basic Forms of Self‑Awareness Anna Ciaunica1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 Self-awareness, the feeling that our experiences are bound to the self—as a unitary entity distinct from others and the rest of the world—is a key aspect of the human mind. But how do we become aware of ourselves in a constantly changing and complex physical and social environment? How do we relate to others while keeping in touch with one’s self, with the fundamental feeling that there is an ‘I’ at the core of all our experiences and exchanges with the world and others? How is it possible to navigate such a dynamic environment without losing track of one’s self? What are the mechanisms underlying typical and atypical self-awareness and how can we spell them out within a coherent conceptual and empirical framework? What are the most basic or minimal forms of self-awareness? Is the minimal self relational or is it preferable to conceptualise it in an individualistic manner, as a fundamentally subjective sense of mineness? Is there is a ‘sense of we’, and if yes, what is its relationship with the minimal ‘individualistic’ self? This special issue tackles these key questions by bringing together papers from philosophy, developmental and clinical psychology and theoretical neuroscience. The aim is to provide a multifaceted, interdisciplinary and rich perspective on the perennial and fundamental questions i) “what is a (minimal) self?” and ii) “how the self relates to the world and others?” The papers in this special issue can be divided into three main groups. The first consists of four papers discussing the question whether (i) the minimal self is best understood and defined relationally, that is in terms of social interactions; or rather (ii) the minimal self is a tacit, non-socially grounded, experiential self-awareness. The second group contains three papers and combines resources from theoretical neuroscience (the Predictive Processing framework), experimental work (developmental studies), and philosophy in order to * Anna Ciaunica [email protected] 1 Senior Researcher Institute of Philosophy Porto, Portugal & Research Associate Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL, London, UK emphasise the fundamentally dynamic aspect of self-awareness. Finally, the last group consists in three papers bringing insights into these questions by focusing on atypical forms of self-awareness and social interactions, in particular schizophrenia and Autism Spectrum Condition. In what follows I provide a brief synopsis each of these contributions. 1 Minimal and Relational Self: Conceptual Issues Hutto and Ilundáin‐Agurruza’s “Selfless activity and experience: radicalizing minimal self-awareness” begins the special issue by offering a rich discussion of the key question “how best to characterize the most fundamental ways social creatures have of engaging and sharing experiences with others?”. They contrast relational and non-relational or individualistic views of the self. For example, relationalists hold that whatever awareness of the self exactly involves it is acquired through interactions with others. By contrast, the rival non-relationalist view of selfhood, individualists for short, assume that we possess a tacit sense or awareness of the self—a kind of non-socially grounded self- awareness—that is either already implicated in the way we act successfully in the world and in the ways that we experience the world and our actions in phenomenally charged ways. Pivotally, however, if such deflationary individualist theories of the self are accepted, then pre-reflexive self-awareness is at least one primitive, defining feature of who we are that would need to be in place before we are in a position to relate to and intersubjectively engage with others. They attempt to “give the individualists their due”, explicating how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences, by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. They also defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based selfawareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. In doing so, they challenge Ciaunica’s (2017) developmental relationism 13 Vol.:(0123456789) A. Ciaunica which defends the possibility that there are quite basic forms of skin-to-skin sharing with others that precede rather than presuppose the exercise of empathetic abilities. They argue that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists. Bolis and Schilbach’s “ ‘I interact therefore I am’: the self as a historical product of dialectical attunement” proposes a shift in perspective, i.e. moving from addressing the question of self-awareness from ‘being’ to ‘becoming’. They hold the radical claim that we construe the ‘self’ as a dynamic process rather than as a static entity. To this end they draw on dialectics and Bayesian accounts of cognition which allows us to holistically consider the ‘self’ as the interplay between internalization and externalization and the latter to operationalize our suggestion formally. Internalization is considered here as the co-construction of bodily hierarchical models of the (social) world and the organism, while externalization is taken as the collective transformation of the world. They suggest that the self is an historical product of dialectical attunement across multiple time scales, from species evolution and culture to individual development and everyday learning. Specifically, they describe concrete means for empirically testing their proposal in the form of two-person psychophysiology and multi-level analyses of intersubjectivity. In short, they argue that a fine-grained analysis of social interaction might allow us to reconsider the ‘self’ beyond the static individual, i.e. how it emerges and manifests itself in social relations. They make the case that such an approach could be relevant in multiple fields, from ethics and psychiatry to pedagogy and artificial intelligence. Higgings’s “The ‘we’ in ‘me’: an account of minimal relational selfhood” critically discusses the idea that selfhood involves a uniquely first-personal experiential dimension, which precedes any form of socially dependent selfhood (Gallagher 2005; Legrand 2007; Strawson 2009; Kriegel 2009; Nida-Rümelin 2017; Zahavi 1999, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2017a, b). In his paper he draws attention against the temptation to view minimal experiential selfhood as “ontogenetically more primitive” (Zahavi 2014, p. 14) than socially constituted selfhood. In other words, he argues that the ‘thinnest’ construal of minimal experiential selfhood fails to properly account for characteristics that are essential to human selfhood; namely, the intimate, embodied interactions that unfold at the incipient moments of human life. He argues that taking the ontogenesis of embodied human existence seriously involves accepting the de facto equiprimordiality of minimal experientialism with a ‘minimal’ form of relational selfhood, i.e. the co-constitution of experience through engagements with others. Specifically, he focuses on the dynamical and relational structure of consciousness, as 13 a property of human beings considered holistically (i.e. as embodied beings) who are embedded in subject- dependent contexts and are therefore irreducible to descriptions that accord with some independent ‘objective’. In doing so he draws on work by Krueger (2013, 2015) to show that early stages of human life, inclusive of the perspective of phenomenal consciousness, involve shared experiential states, in which one’s experiences are constitutively dependent on the modulatory role of others. One’s corporeality is thereby partly given over to another’s agency. Lastly, these kinds of experiential states are shown to be present at the most incipient moments of human life, thereby affirming that any naturalistically grounded notion of pre- reflective human minimal selfhood should be construed as ontogenetically equiprimordial with socially constituted experience. Such socially constituted experience amounts to a form of minimal relational selfhood, which is not preceded by any other dimension of selfhood within the manifestation of human life. Leon’s “For-me-ness, for-us-ness, and the we-relationship” investigates the relationship between for-me-ness and sociality. He draws very careful conceptual distinctions in order to point out some ambiguities in claims pursued by some of the critics that have recently pressed on the relationship between the two notions. He starts with the observation that the idea of for-me-ness or mineness raises a host of far-reaching questions, some of which concern its proper characterization, pervasiveness, phenomenal reality, and its relation to the prospects of providing a naturalistic account of consciousness. Leon notices that the proposal according to which there is a very tight link between subjectivity and sociality is certainly not new in the philosophical and psychological literature. However, a novel feature of some of the recent criticisms to the received understanding of for-meness is that they don’t appeal to language, narratives, social roles or cultural context to support this view, but rather to bottom-up approaches from developmental psychology (Ciaunica and Fotopoulou 2017; Ciaunica 2016). The main aim of his contribution is to discuss the relationship between for-me-ness and sociality, mainly in the context of recent criticisms to the received understanding of for-me-ness that have appealed to research in developmental psychology. He articulates a question concerning this relationship that builds on the idea that, occasionally at least, there is something it is like ‘for us’ to have an experience. This idea, he argues, has been explored in recent literature on shared experiences and collective intentionality (Schmid 2014a, b), and it gestures towards the question of the extent to which some social interactions make a difference in the phenomenal character of their participants’ experiences. In the main part of his article, Leon proposes a construal of for-us-ness that complements the received understanding of for-me-ness, by drawing on Alfred Schutz’ concept of the “we-relationship” (Schutz Introduction: The Relational Self: Basic Forms of Self-Awareness 1962, 1967; Schutz and Luckmann 1973), and on the idea of second-personal awareness, i.e. awareness of a ‘you’, as distinguished from awareness of a ‘she’ or he’. He concludes that this proposal provides a suitable account of basic forms of phenomenally manifest social connectedness, in a way that is cognitively undemanding and without incurring the theoretical costs of positing a sui generis plural pre-reflective self-awareness (Schmid 2014a). 2 The Dynamic, Situated and Scaffolded Self Kiverstein’s “Free energy and the self: an ecological-enactive interpretation” addresses the interesting question: how did the feeling of being alive get started? One key observation is that not all living things feel alive. Plants almost certainly don’t. Bacteria are capable of a minimal form of purposive agency (Fulda 2017; Di Paolo et al 2017). However, since they lack a brain for regulating the changing internal state of their bodies, they probably also lack feeling (Thompson 2015). But what about insects that continue behaving in the same way when they have suffered severe injuries? They too most likely lack feeling insofar as their behaviour seems to be unaffected by damage to their bodies. Kiverstein give us an account about how subjectivity might have emerged early in evolutionary history out of processes of action control. In other words, subjectivity might be thought of as tied to processes of purposive agency on the one hand, and sensorimotor integration on the other. He defends the “phenomenological theory of selfhood” according to which any naturalistic explanation of phenomenal consciousness in the terms of psychology and the neurosciences will need to explain how mineness can be intrinsic to phenomenal consciousness. He gives a detailed account of a such naturalistic explanation that takes selfhood to emerge out of self-organising biological processes. Kiverstein builds upon the free energy principle, according to which any living system will aim to minimise free energy in its sensory exchanges with the environment (Friston 2007). He shows how such a process of free energy minimisation is accomplished through a process referred to as “active inference”. He claims that active inference is best understood in ecological and enactive terms, with focus on the coupled dynamics of the animal in its eco-niche that lead towards dynamic equilibrium (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg et al. 2017). Importantly, active inference doesn’t suffice to explain mineness, since every living system will keep its own free energy to a minimum through a process of active inference. In order to address this key question, Kiverstein asks: what would need to be added to active inference to yield mineness? He suggests that recent theoretical work by Karl Friston may give us an answer to this question (Friston 2018). The basic idea is that once an organism reaches the level of complexity so that it can act to minimise its own expected free energy, mineness will emerge as intrinsic to the process of life itself. The author closes his paper by showing how the resulting account of mineness supports a relational theory of the self. This is because on this ecological and enactive reading of active inference the organism and its environment are co-specifying, and co-determining. The argument of Kiverstein’s paper is that any organism capable of action control of the right complexity will also be a self. Since organisms are best understood in relation to their environment, so also are selves. Crucianelli and Filippetti’s “Developmental perspectives on interpersonal affective touch” draws attention to a relatively overlooked aspect of interpersonal affective touch in shaping self-awareness and body ownership from the outset, in early life. They start with the basic observation that our first sensorial experiences, which provide us with information about our own body and the surrounding environment arise in the womb (Ciaunica 2016, 2017; Ciaunica & Crucianelli 2019). In these early sensory interactions, touch is possibly the first route by which the developing body receives inputs from the external world and gradually shapes one’s body boundaries and its capabilities for action (e.g. Atkinson and Braddick 1982; Bernhardt 1987; Bremner and Lewkowicz 2012). The skin is the largest of our sensory organs and wraps our entire body surface (Serino and Haggard 2010; Gallace and Spence 2014); hence, evidence suggests that touch might play a pivotal role in developing a sense of self as separate from the other (see Field 2010 for a review). Somewhat paradoxically, touch is also our most social sense since it is fundamentally involved in how we explore the environment and engage in successful interactions (Gallace 2012; Ebisch et al. 2014; Rochat 2011; Gallace and Spence 2014), as well as how we bond with other people and form interpersonal attachments. In their paper they review and discuss recent developmental and adult findings, pointing to the central role of interpersonal affective touch in body awareness and social cognition in health and disorders. They propose that interpersonal affective touch, as an interoceptive modality invested of a social nature, can uniquely contribute to the ongoing debate in philosophy about the primacy of the relational nature of the minimal self. In the wake of these recent conceptualisations, Crucianelli and Filippetti review experimental and clinical evidence supporting the importance of interpersonal affective touch to the way we recognise and make sense of our body as our own. In line with previous work by Ciaunica (2017) and Ciaunica & Fotopoulou (2017) they defend the claim that affective touch constitutes a fundamental aspect of bodily self-consciousness (Blanke 2012; Dijkerman 2015) from the very first stages of human life. Gallotti’s “Shared and social discourse” discusses the scope and importance of claims about shared intentionality 13 A. Ciaunica in social discourse. What is it for the capacity of sharing mental attitudes and contents to play an explanatory role in the study of the social mind? The motivation for addressing this question is originally tied to theoretical preoccupations about the tendency to make claims about shared and, especially, ‘we- intentionality’ in support of arguments about socially extended forms of mentality. The fact that evidence is interpreted as showing that shared intentionality works as a scaffolding for the development of full- blown, representational and normative, thinking, is often associated with claims about the conditions for the existence and identity of mental attitudes and contents being social all the way down. This argumentative line is present in several strands of social-cognitive research at the intersection of studies of shared intentionality and radically (i.e. en-active) externalist views of the mind, but it has not yet been articulated in a satisfactory manner. The key question is what human cognition could be like on the premise that humans are capable of creating cultures and institutions of unique complexity in the animal kingdom. Tomasello’s response is an account of the evolution of the human mind, which identifies the origin of species-specific forms of modern thinking in the emergence of a genetically evolved psychological adaptation for engaging in cognitively shared activities with co-specifics (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007; Call 2009). In a similar vein, Jane Heal has offered an authoritative formulation of the significance of shared cognitive activities in philosophical work on co-cognition (Heal 2013). Building upon earlier reflections on co-cognition in simulation theory (Heal 1998), Heal draws on insights about shared intentionality to advocate ‘Co-cognitivism’, the view that the logical structure and criteria of adequacy of psychological concepts are determined with a view to the sort of activities that individuals pursue together in everyday life. Co-cognitivism and the ‘Shared Intentionality Hypothesis’ gesture to something like a general view of the function of shared intentionality, which has only begun to emerge in the philosophy of mind and society. The idea is that human psychology has evolved in accordance with the fact that novel routes to knowledge of things become available to interacting agents when they align their mental and bodily resources and act as a ‘we’ (Tollefsen and Dale 2012; Gallotti et al. 2017). Gallotti’s goal is to develop a more balanced, if not cautious, assessment of the explanatory role of claims about shared intentionality in social discourse. 3 Minimal and Relational Self and its Disruptions Krueger’s “Schizophrenia and the scaffolded self” takes as a starting point a family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind which argue that our psychological 13 capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. Surprisingly, he writes, despite much recent interest in this topic, it has not yet found its way to philosophy of psychiatry in a substantive way. Since disturbances of affectivity figure so prominently in a wide variety of mental disorders, the topic seems like a fruitful place to bridge externalist paradigms and psychiatry. The main aim of his paper is an attempt to build such a bridge. Krueger considers how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. In doing so, he first introduces the idea of “affective scaffolding” and makes some taxonomic distinctions. More specifically, he uses schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self- disturbance. Building upon previous existing work, he offers a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. He claims that schizophrenia is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. He concludes that this way of thinking about the scaffolded self is potentially transformative both for our theoretical as well as practical understanding of the causes and character of schizophrenic experience, insofar as it suggests the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment. Constant, Bervoets, Hens and Van de Cruys’s “Precise worlds for certain minds: An ecological perspective on the relational self in autism” addresses the question of how the various aspects of the relational self are experienced by people presented with clear challenges in social interaction, such as people with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). Indeed, relational and social accounts of the self posit that the sense of self depends on the entanglement of the individual with a significant, or generalized other, understood respectively as the representation of an individual profound significance in one’s life (Andersen and Chen 2002), and as the individually internalized ‘attitude of a whole community’ (Mead 1934). On that view, the self would heavily rest on the individual’s ability to coordinate a diversified repertoire of selves (cf. Zahavi 2010) accumulated over time through interpersonal relationships (Andersen and Chen 2002). However, ASC offers an interesting challenge for the relational views of the self precisely because it is broadly recognized as a disorder primarily impacting social relationships. Indeed, while they do not claim that autistic people completely lack a sense of self, many influential theories tend to suggest that the requirements for a sense of relational self are reduced or otherwise impaired. Yet, the abundance of autobiographical reports (Van Goidsenhoven and Masschelein 2016) by autistic people across the spectrum suggests that a desire for self-identification and recognition is particularly pronounced in people with ASC. Building upon the influential predictive Introduction: The Relational Self: Basic Forms of Self-Awareness processing (PP) paradigm, in explaining core behavioral traits of ASC (e.g., Lawson et al. 2014; Palmer et al. 2015; Pellicano and Burr 2012; Van de Cruys et al. 2014) PP approaches challenge the claims about the presence of specific neurocognitive dysfunctions in autistic cognition, as it traces back the symptoms of ASC to normal, though differently ‘tuned’, domain general neurocognitive mechanisms (cf. Bolis and Schilbach 2017). The main aim of their paper is to use the PP paradigm to attempt an ecological explanation of atypicalities of the relational self in ASC, specifically, those relating to its minimal, extended, and intersubjective aspects, though without positing major incapacities in social functioning. The main focus is in how these aspects become organized in patterns of sensory and social interactions with the body (e.g., interoception), the world (e.g., exteroception and material (environment), and other agents (e.g., social interactions). Specifically, they focus on a recent PP account of ASC called “HIPPEA”, the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism account (Van de Cruys et al. 2014). PP accounts of ASC emphasize different aspects of PP, even though they generally include a treatment of all basic mechanisms. The focus on HIPPEA is motivated by its interpretation of the mechanism of meta-learning. According to PP, meta-learning enables to detect learnable sensory cues, relevant for predicting future events with a certain level of reliability. It is a mechanism crucial to distinguish random sensory variability from the variability reporting causal regularities (e.g., recurrent causes of inputs). This new account enables a leverage the ecological and embodied implications of PP to discuss aspects of the relational self in ASC. The ecological implications of PP for understanding ASC are far-reaching (e.g., Bolis and Schilbach 2017; von der Lühe et al. 2016), but have so far not been exhaustively treated in the literature. This paper intends to fill this gap. Kartner and Clowes’s “The pre-reflective situational self” critically addresses the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. They argue that there are reasons to doubt this constituting role of mineness. Specifically, they claim that there are alternative possibilities and that the necessity for an adequate theory of the self within psychopathology gives us good reasons to believe that we need a thicker notion of the pre-reflective self. The authors propose instead the idea of a Pre-Reflective Situational Self. In a first step, they show how alternative conceptions of prereflective self-awareness point to philosophical problems with the standard phenomenological view. They claim that this is mainly due to fact that within the phenomenological account the mineness aspect is implicitly playing several roles. Consequently, they argue that a thin interpretation of pre-reflective self-awareness—based on a thin notion of mineness—cannot do its needed job within psychopathology. Rather a thicker conception of pre-reflective self is needed. In their proposal they carefully develop the notion of a pre-reflective situational self by analyzing the dynamical nature of the relation between self-awareness and the world, specifically through our interactive inhabitation of the social world. Specifically they discuss three alternative views which give reasons to question the standard phenomenological interpretation of pre-reflective self- awareness. They start by reviewing several of the most important of these, namely the cognitive view, the structure-awareness view and the relational view and show that each cast rather different light upon the interrelations between first-person givenness, mineness and the minimal self. They argue that the problematic nature of pre-reflective self-awareness this is especially revealed in the context of the Ipseity Hypothesis of Schizophrenia. Here, the thin notion of pre-reflective self does not appear to do what is required of it, namely to fulfil the necessary conceptual role in explaining what appears disrupted in this type of mental illness. This is problematic in their view, as the deployment of the notion of minimal self in “ipseity theories” of schizophrenia might be thought to be one place where the notion of pre-reflective self-awareness earns its status as a concept that has some empirical standing (Nordgaard and Parnas 2014; Parnas et al. 2005; Sass et al. 2013) In their paper they use this discussion to link it to related work on self-diminishment in schizophrenia, namely the self-diminishment view (Lysaker and Lysaker 2008) in order to argue that our sense of pre-reflective self is better understood as labile and situational through a thicker conception of self than is entertained in the more standard phenomenological views. On these grounds, they conclude that our sense of pre-reflective self in part must be dynamical in order to reflect our fluid embedding in shifting social contexts. References Andersen SM, Chen S (2002) The relational self: an interpersonal social-cognitive theory. 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