Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Real people and virtual bodies: How disembodied can embodiment be?

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Minds and Machines Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

It is widely accepted that embodiment is crucial for any self-aware agent. What is less obvious is whether the body has to be real, or whether a virtual body will do. In that case the notion of embodiment would be so attenuated as to be almost indistinguishable from disembodiment. In this article I concentrate on the notion of embodiment in human agents. Could we be disembodied, having no real body, as brains-in-a-vat with only a virtual body? Thought experiments alone will not suffice to answer this Cartesian question. I will draw on both philosophical arguments and empirical data on phantom phenomena. My argument will proceed in three steps. Firstly I will show that phantom phenomena provide a prima facie argument that real embodiment is not necessary for a human being. Secondly I will give a philosophical argument that real movement must precede the intention to move and to act. Agents must at least have had real bodies once. Empirical data seems to bear this out. Finally, however, I will show that a small number of aplasic phantom phenomena undermines this last argument. Most people must have had a real body. But for some people a partly virtual, unreal, phantom body seems to suffice. Yet though there is thus no knockdown argument that we could not be brains-in-a-vat, we still have good reasons to suppose that embodiment must be real, and not virtual.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. An animat is an artificial animal or agent; it can be either robotic or virtual.

  2. And even Putnam’s argument that we could not all be brains-in-a-vat because our internal representations must derive their meaning from a link with the real world would fail if everything in the virtual world were as if the real world existed (see Putnam, 1981).

  3. The interaction between mother and infant is probably of primary importance for the development of self-awareness.

  4. We also see our own bodies, but this is not usually reckoned as proprioception. Internal proprioception is deemed to be immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun; visual information is not. (See Bermúdez, 1998; Evans, 1982; Shoemaker, 1968).

  5. Deafferented subjects can often tell where on the body they receive a stimulus, but unless they see that particular body part, they are unable to point or otherwise act towards that location. (e.g. Cole & Paillard, 1995, 254).

  6. See Ramachandran and Hirstein (1998), who call it the textbook account of phantom phenomena; see also Katz, 2000. Descartes didn’t make the distinction between efferent and afferent nerves; he thought that there was only one kind of nerve. In fact there are two: afferent nerves lead from the periphery to the brain and efferent nerves lead out of the brain to the periphery. And of course most of the neural activity occurs within the brain. It is clearly the afferent nerve (and not the efferent nerve, which comes from the brain) that is stimulated in the bell-rope account. Modern theories often mention the stimulating of neuroma in the stump of the amputated limb as the cause of phantom phenomena.

  7. Of course we no longer believe in Cartesian dualism or in res cogitans. In the modern, materialist version, however, we still might be brains-in-a-vat. But the evil scientist himself must presumably have a real body. He has to pull real strings, provide real stimulation.

  8. Cf. Damasio (1999) for the importance of humoral signals.

  9. Cf. Dennett (1991, 5ff).

  10. Especially Carnap (1928).

  11. Cf. Carnap (1936/1937) See also Fodor (1981, 1987, 1990, 1998).

  12. Cf. Stern (1985), Johnson (1987), Bermúdez (1998), Lakoff and Johnson (1999).

  13. See Hurley (1998) for an extended discussion on externalism, internalism and contextualism.

  14. Cf. also Hurley (1998, 272 ff.) and Sheets-Johnstone (1999).

  15. That is to say, in the ontogeny of an individual real movements precede the occurrence of the first intentions to move. Whether conscious intentions ever precede the movements or actions they are intentions for, is quite another question. The famous experiments of Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl (1983) and Libet (1985) seem to cast doubt on this. But his outcomes are notoriously difficult to interpret. Haggard (e.g. 2005) suggests that pre-movement brain activity in the supplementary motor area plays an important role in the rise of the conscious experience of intention. I won’t go into the question whether this brain activity is to be identified with what I call the basic intention, or whether it is the cause of the conscious experience of intention, or whether conscious experience of an intention is the same “thing” as an intention or not. These are metaphysical questions that deserve discussion elsewhere.

  16. Cf. Gallagher (2000), who develops a model to account for the fact that in schizophrenia, the senses of ownership and of agency come apart. Schizophrenics sometimes suffer from thought insertion, where they experience their thoughts as their own in the sense of ownership, yet as alien because they do not consider themselves to be the agents of these thoughts, the instigators or origins.

  17. Cf. Wegner (2002), for an extended discussion of the conscious experience of free will. See also Haggard (2005).

  18. See Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998, 66–67).

  19. Katz (2000, 79) urges to use both spinal and general anaesthesia before amputation, in order to block both somatosensory and cognitive memories and thus to prevent or diminish post-amputational phantom pain, which can otherwise be extremely persistent.

  20. Or anaesthesia: see Dirksen et al. (2000), Paqueron et al. (2003). See also Katz and Melzack (1990).

  21. Weinstein, Sersen and Vetter (1964), Saadah and Melzack (1994), Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998), Wilkins et al. (1998).

  22. E.g. Skoyles (1990).

  23. See e.g. Hasan and Stuart (1988), Butterworth (1993), Thelen and Smith (1994).

  24. But not, presumably, in the absence of a real mouth!

  25. See e.g. Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox (1995), McNeill (1995, 2000), Skoyles (1990).

  26. See Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998).

  27. See also Meijsing (2000).

  28. I.W. realises the importance of making gestures in communication. He claims that he had to consciously relearn them. Yet it is remarkable that now he is able to make normal gestures while telling a story without being able to see his hands, though after a while he loses track of his hands and the gestures deteriorate, first topokinetically and finally morphokinetically (Cole et al., 1998; Cole, Gallagher, & McNeil, 2002). Apparently gestures, being much more a linguistic phenomenon than an instrumental movement, depend less on visual feedback than other movements. I.W.’s linguistic abilities were in no way influenced by his illness.

  29. I would like to thank Ton Derksen for making this suggestion.

  30. I would like to thank an anonymous referee of my article for her/his very helpful remarks, and especially for this suggestion.

References

  • Armstrong, D. Stokoe, W., & Wilcox, S. E. (1995). Gesture and the nature of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bermúdez, J. L. (1998). The paradox of self-consciousness. Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bermúdez J. J., Marcel A., & Eilan N. (Eds.), (1995), The body and the self. Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blakemore, S. J., Wolpert, D. M., & Frith, C. D. (2000). ‘Why can’t you tickle yourself?’. Neuroreport, 11(11), R11-R16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brewer, B. (1995). Bodily awareness and the self. In J. L. Bermúdez, A. Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds.), The body and the self (pp. 291–310). Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butterworth, G. (1993). Dynamic approaches to infant perception and action: old and new theories about the origins of knowledge. In L. B. Smith, & E. Thelen (Eds.), A Dynamic systems approach to development: Applications (pp. 171–187). Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carnap, R. (1928). Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carnap, R. (1936/1937), ‘Testability and Meaning’, Philosophy of Science 3, pp. 419–471 and 4, pp. 1–40.

  • Cole, J. (1995). Pride and a daily marathon. Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, J., Gallagher, S., McNeill, D., Duncan, S., Furuyama, N., & McCullough, K-E. (1998), Gestures after total deafferentation of the bodily and spatial senses. In C. Cavé, I. Guaïtella, & S. Santi (Eds.), Oralité et gesturalité: Interactions et comportements multimodaux dans la communication (pp. 65–69). Paris: L’Harmattan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cole, J., Gallagher, S., & McNeill, D. (2002). Gesture following deafferentation: A phenomenologically informed experimental study. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1.1, 49–67.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cole, J., Paillard, J. (1995). Living without touch and peripheral information about body position and movement: Studies with deafferented subjects. In J. L. Bermúdez, A. Marcel, & N. Eilan (Eds.), The body and the self (pp. 245–266). Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens. body and emotion in the making of consciousness. San Diego/New York/London: Harcourt.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston etc.: Little, Brown and Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Descartes, R. (1967 [1641]). ‘Meditation II’, ‘Meditation IV’, ‘Principles IV’. In E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, trans., The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Dirksen, R., te Giffel, S., Slappendel, R., Eling, P. A. T. M., Bugter, M. L. T., Geeraedts, L. M. G., & Weber, E. W. G. (2000). Fantoomsensaties tijdens plexus brachialis anesthesie’, Tijdschrift voor Anesthesiologie, 13, 4–9.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dobbyn, C., & Stuart, S. (2003). The Self as an Embedded Agent. Minds and Machines, 13, 187–201.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. A. (1981). Tom Swift and his Procedural Grandmother. In J. A. Fodor, (Ed.), Representations philosophical essays on the foundations of cognitive science (pp. 204–224). Brighton: Harvester Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. A. (1987) Psychosemantics. The problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. A. (1990). A theory of content. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fodor, J. A. (1998). Concepts: Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S. (2000). Self-reference and schizophrenia: A cognitive model of immunity to error through misidentification. In D. Zahavi (Ed.), Exploring the self (pp. 203–239). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S., & Cole, J. (1995). Body image and body schema in a deafferented subject. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 16, 369–390.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher, S., Butterworth, G. E., Lew, A., & Cole, J. (1998). Hand-mouth coordination, congenital absence of limb, and evidence for innate body schemas. Brain and Cognition, 38, 53–65.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grush, R. (2004). The emulation theory of representation: motor control, imagery, and perception. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27, 377–442.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Haggard, P. (2005). Conscious intention and motor cognition, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 290–295.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hasan, Z., & Stuart, D. G. (1988). Animal solutions to problems of movement control: The role of proprioceptors. Annual Review of Neurosciences, 11, 199–223.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hunter, J. P., Katz, J., & Davis, K. D. (2003). The effect of tactile and visual sensory inputs on phantom limb awareness. Brain, 126, 579–589.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hurley, S. (1998). Consciousness in action. Cambridge MA/London: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katz, J. (2000). Individual differences the consciousness of phantom limbs. In R. G. Kunzendorf, & B. Wallace (Eds.), Individual differences in conscious experience Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Katz, J., & Melzack, R. (1990). Pain ‘memories’ in phantom limbs: Review and clinical observations. Pain, 43, 319–336.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kita, S. (2000). How representational gestures help speaking’, in D. McNeill 2000, pp. 162–185.

  • Lakoff, G., Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 529–566.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness potential): the unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106, 623–642.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lott, T. L. (1986), Descartes on phantom limbs. Mind & Language, 1, 243–271.

    Google Scholar 

  • McNeill, D. (1995). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McNeill D. (Ed.) (2000). Language and gesture. (language, culture and cognition 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meijsing, M. (2000). Self-consciousness and the body. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7, 34–52.

    Google Scholar 

  • Melzack, R., Israel, R., Lacroix, R., & Schultz, G. (1997). Phantom limbs in people with congenital limb deficiency or amputation in early childhood. Brain, 120, 1603–1620.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Melzack, R., & Wall, P. D. (1988). The challenge of pain, (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moya, C. J. (1990). The philosophy of action. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paqueron, X., Leguen, M., Rosenthal, D., Coriat, P., Willer, J. C., & Danziger, N. (2003). The phenomenology of body image distortions induced by regional anaesthesia. Brain, 126, 702–712.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Penfield, W. (1975). The mystery of the mind: A critical study of consciousness and the human brain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Poeck, K. (1964). Phantoms following amputation in early childhood and in congenital absence of limbs. Cortex, 1, 269–275.

    Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, language and reality. philosophical papers Volume, 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, truth and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind. New York: William Morrow & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramachandran, V. S., & Hirstein, W. (1998). The perception of phantom limbs. The D. O. Hebb Lecture. Brain, 121, 1603–1630.

    Google Scholar 

  • Saadah, E. S. M., Melzack, R. (1994). Phantom limb experiences in congenital limb-deficient adults. Cortex, 30, 479–485.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1999). The primacy of movement. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shoemaker, S. (1968). Self-Reference and Self-Awareness. The Journal of Philosophy, 65, 555–567.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Simmel, M. L. (1958). The conditions of occurrence of phantom limbs. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102, 492–500.

    Google Scholar 

  • Skoyles, J. R. (1990). Is there a genetic component to body schema?. Trends in Neuroscience, 13, 409.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant: a view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Streeck, J. (1996). How to do things with things. Objects trovés and symbolization. Human Studies, 19, 365–384.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thelen, E., & Smith, L. B. (1994). A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weinstein, S., & Sersen, E. A. (1961). Phantoms in cases of congenital absence of limbs. Neurology, 11, 905–911.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weinstein, S., Sersen, E. A., & Vetter, R. J. (1964). Phantoms and somatic sensation in cases of congenital aplasia. Cortex, 1, 276–290.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weir Mitchell, S. (1872). Injuries of nerves and their consequences. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weir Mitchell, S., Keen Jr. W., & Morehouse G. (1864). Gunshot wounds and other injuries of nerves. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilkins, K. L., McGrath, P. J., Finley, G. A., & Katz, J. (1998). Phantom limb sensations and phantom limb pain in child and adolescent amputees. Pain, 78, 7–12.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Monica Meijsing

Authors
  1. Monica Meijsing
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Monica Meijsing.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Meijsing, M. Real people and virtual bodies: How disembodied can embodiment be?. Minds & Machines 16, 443–461 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-006-9044-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-006-9044-0

Keywords

Search

Navigation