When the body feels like ours
Bodily ownership is part of experience and can be experimentally altered. Its construction helps explain embodiment while leaving the nature of the experiencing subject open.
A body has physical boundaries. Feeling that this body is mine adds something to a description of those boundaries. It concerns the organisation of experience: where sensation seems to occur, what belongs to the subject, and which movements seem to be initiated by it.
The rubber-hand experiment reported by Botvinick and Cohen made that organisation unusually visible. Participants watched an artificial hand being stroked while their hidden hand received corresponding touch. Under suitable conditions, they could experience the artificial hand as belonging to their body. The experimental result concerns an alteration in bodily ownership, rather than a transfer of consciousness into the object.
As de Vignemont’s discussion of bodily awareness explains, information from several senses contributes to bodily experience. Ownership and control can also come apart: feeling that a limb belongs to oneself differs from feeling that one controls its movement.
These distinctions matter because “the self” often conceals several questions. The capacity to experience, the location of a perspective, the feeling of bodily ownership, and the person’s remembered history need not be one indivisible phenomenon. An alteration in one tells us something specific about its organisation.
A constructed sense of ownership does not make the body unreal. It shows that our relation to it has experiential structure. Nor does the construction eliminate the subject. The illusion is still an experience whose occurrence requires explanation.
There is a productive connection with interface accounts of perception. The experienced body may be a representation shaped for coordinated action rather than an exhaustive disclosure of what the organism is. That proposal can illuminate how a perspective becomes embodied without establishing that the perspective exists independently of embodiment.
Within a temporal history, the body and its experienced ownership can change together. The continuity of a life need not consist in an unchanging self-image. It may depend partly on the relations between differently organised moments of experience. That makes embodiment a serious component of identity, while preserving the deeper question of what it means to undergo any of those moments.