the plasticity of synaptic contacts (p. 245). At variance with the assumptions of the times (e.g., clonal selection theory), Varela and Vaz’s picture of the immune system stressed the cooperative nature of events typical of lymphoid cells as a network of interactions that defi ned the organism’s macromolecular individuality (p. 255).
How did Varela view self in relation to mind? Varela ( 1999 ) described the mind as phenomenology in action. Viewed from both the fi rst-person and third- person perspectives, he situated behavior in a specifi c cycle of operation where the locus of the mind emerged through a distributed process within its organizational closure.
Mind was an aspect of a pattern in fl ux in which our concrete biophysical being lives. As embodied selves in dynamic equilibrium, we continually emerge in inter- actions of constituents and interactions of interactions. Varela and Cohen ( 1989 ) viewed the body as the locus where the corporal ego emerges such that the ego gives rise to a sense of self in which this selfl ess self takes on a form so that it looks like our experience inside. Experience continuously shapes this dynamic core at all lev- els of reciprocal causality through the organizational complementarity of the circu- lar closure of its nervous, hormonal, and mechanical pathways. Varela ( 1991 ) conceptualized the organism’s identity as an autonomous self, its constitution, nature, and mode of existence as a meshwork of selfl ess selves:
Thus we need to deal with a multiplicity of regional selves, all of them having some mode of self-constitution, and in their overall assemblage giving rise to an organism. Accordingly, I want to invoke here the following “regional” selves: (1) a minimal or cellular unity, (2) a bodily self in its immunological foundations, (3) a cognitive perceptuo-motor self associated to animal behavior, (4) a socio-linguistic ‘I’ of subjectivity, and (5) the collective social multi- individual totality. In all these regions we are dealing with levels and processes where an identity comes about—not as substance, but as movement—and whose fabric of articulation is the organism. To efface the multiplicity of this meshwork is a source of confusion. (p. 80)
Varela et al. ( 1991 ) argued that cognitive science does not distinguish between the idea or representation of the self and the actual basis of that representation, which is the individual’s grasping after an ego-self, nor does it take seriously its own fi ndings of the lack of self, which is rooted in not having a disciplined method for examining human experience. Their concept of embodiment provided for the emer- gence of a global state among resonating neuronal ensembles in which the auto- nomic, neuroendocrine, and limbic systems, as autopoietic networks or aggregates of resonant neurons, have patterns of activity that are altered by experience—the phenomenological life world, intentionality, and attention through a process of becoming that is conditioned by its past. Knowledge is thus the result of ongoing subjective interpretations that emerge from our capacities of understanding rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment that are enacted within the domain of consensual action and cultural history.
happens to us (Noë, 2004 ). As the enactive approach reveals, perception is not only a process in the brain but an activity on the part of the person as a whole. Embodiment thus plays a central role in structuring human experience, cognition, and action. We are both mindful of bodily sensations and we have a sense of ownership built into the prerefl ective structure of experience that does not require conscious perception or judgment to recognize in awareness or introspection. We live not only along the lifespan, horizontally, but in an ever expanding and contracting experience of states along a vertical plane in the immediate moment (Gordon, in press a , b , 2012 , 2013 , 2007 ). We are prerefl ectively aware as our consciousness expands and contracts with our breath in moment-to-moment subjective experience. However, the experi- ence of self, the quality of mineness or for-me-ness , self-as-subject, sense of self, or prerefl ective self-consciousness, pertains to our consciousness of self as the given subject of experience, which remains constantly present while other aspects of phe- nomenal experience change (Legrand, 2007 ).
Prerefl ective self-consciousness is the primary feature of fi rst-person experience or consciousness of the self-as-subject that is not taken as an intentional object. It is characterized by a mode of givenness that feels like something for the experiencing subject that is not reducible to phenomenal experience (Legrand, 2007 ; Zahavi, 2008 ). I would argue that pure experience is broken down into categories by the senses and experienced as already intrinsically subjective. We do not make sense of conscious experiences that occur to Searle’s ( 2005 ) “objective’ self.” There is no screen between our senses and the things from which our senses would otherwise have formed an immediate impression. The distinction between subject and object is not ontological, but phenomenological. However, while I would agree that s elf cannot be an object of experience, body image can be an intentional object of con- sciousness (Legrand, 2007 ), and body schema , which is neither an intentional object of consciousness nor a partial representation of the body, can be viewed as an inte- grated set of dynamic sensorimotor principles that organize perception and action in a subpersonal and nonconscious manner (Thompson, 2005 ).
As Legrand ( 2007 ) points out, the distinction between body schema and body image leaves out a fundamental form of bodily experience, namely, prerefl ective bodily self-consciousness —or consciousness of the body as subject—the dynamic link between outward perception and inward feeling in ones encountering one’s own bodily sentience directly. “Prerefl ective bodily self-consciousness is evident in touch, for we not only feel the things we touch, we feel ourselves touching them and touched by them” (Thompson, 2005 , p. 412). Prerefl ective consciousness can thus be thought of as the ground to which self-consciousness is anchored (Legrand).
In fundamental agreement with this view of embodiment, Merleau-Ponty (1945/ 1962 ) argued for the primacy of perception over cognition, and the unity of experience. He posited that the essence of perception is an objective phenomenon tied to exploratory and goal-directed or intentional movement grounded in the sub- jective, sense experience of the body. Following from Descartes and Kant, he defi ned sensation as a unit of experience — a phenomenological gestalt or unifi ed fi eld that is “intentional, co-existence or communion” (p. 248), in which the whole system of experience—“world, own body, and empirical self—are subordinated to a universal thinker charged with sustaining the relationship between the three of
them” (p. 241). Behavior is thus a projection into the world toward an intentional object or a goal. However, the relationship between self and the world, as Merleau- Ponty correctly points out, is not subject to object, but “the world, which the subject itself projects” (p. 430). Although the unity of experience is established experientially and phenomenologically, there have been many attempts to distill the ingredient(s), which are responsible for this unity. There are many opinions (e.g., De Preester & Tsakiris, 2009 ; Di Paolo, 2009 ; Froese & Fuchs, 2012 ; Langfur, 2012 ; Melzoff & Moore, 1977 , 1983 , 1989 ). According to De Preester ( 2007 ), there are suffi cient physiological, clinical, and conceptual arguments for a stratifi cation of the body into body image and body schema in which the subjective perspective constitutes itself rooted in the in-depth body . In agreement with De Preester’s ( 2005 ), I too assert that the body, as the ground of subjectivity, objectivity, and inter- subjectivity, requires a multi-perspectival, interdisciplinary approach to embodi- ment rather than only observing the object of representation associated with subjective feelings, emotions, and self-awareness in the brain.
What is embodiment? Embodiment refers to the bodily aspects of human subjec- tivity, the biological and physical presence of our body as a necessary precondition for the experience of emotion, language, thought, and social interaction. It is our kinesthetic awareness of the body as the vehicle through which we experience the sensorimotor, perceptual, and nonconceptual lived world. This is not a cognitive understanding of self in the world, but a proprioceptive, nonconceptual awareness (Fridland, 2011 ) that is tacit, prerefl ective, and intersubjective.
This awareness may in fact constitute the beginning of the newborn’s primitive body image. Melzoff and Moore ( 1977 , 1983 , 1989 ) found that newborn infants remember and imitate gestures, i.e., open mouth and tongue protrusion (echolalia), once the adult who demonstrates this behavior vanishes from their perceptual fi eld.
As Gallagher notes, the study of mirror neurons in the Macaque monkey (Fadiga, Fogassi, Pavesi, & Rizzolatti, 1995 ; Gallese, 1998 , 2001 ; Gallese, Fadiga, &
Fogassi, 1996 ; Grafton, Arbib, Fadiga, & Rizzolatti, 1996 ; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Gallese, & Fogassi, 1996 ) suggests that the mechanism of imitation is prenoetic because these neurons function in Broca’s area from birth. According to Gallagher, the infant’s sense of self starts out closer to an embodied sense than to a cognitive or psychological understanding because intermodal translation between the visual and motor systems appear to be operative in the newborn. In agreement with Gallagher, I would argue that the newborn’s proprioceptive self or embodied per- ception of self in imitation is intersubjective, “it indicates a rudimentary differentia- tion between self and non-self… a bare framework of the self that is based on an innate system of embodiment” ( 2005 , pp. 83–84). Likewise, Langfur ( 2012 ) pres- ents empirical evidence to suggest that an infant fi rst becomes aware of him or herself as the focal center of a caregiver’s attending through neural matching (kin- esthesis of the infant’s gestures is experienced by the infant as what the caregiver is focusing on). However, this theory does not account for the infant’s awareness as agent, which occurs with the acquisition of language.
Recent theories of embodied subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and social cognition claim that individuals exist on the most fundamental level in relation to others given a history of relationship through a joint process of sensemaking (Di Paolo, 2009 ).
In their theory of the “extended body,” Froese and Fuchs ( 2012 ) argue that “inter- bodily resonance between individuals” (p. 205) gives rise to self-sustaining interaction patterns that go beyond the behavioral capacities of isolated individuals.
Caracciolo ( 2012 ) argues that socioculturally mediated meaning-making can be accounted for in enactivist terms through the production and interpretation of narra- tives. De Preester ( 2005 ) argues that body image and schema are embodied in the structuring effect of neuronal organization, bodily experience, and the formation of the subject. I speculate that the intrauterine environment provides the developing fetus with his or her fi rst intersubjective, co-creative, consensual, organismic expe- rience from which maternal hormonal, autonomic, and affective states are imprinted during the period of gestational bonding.