Consciousness-Body-Time: How Do People Think Lacking Their Body?

The sense of self is a broad, general term with many possible definitions (philosophical, psychological) and it is thus necessary to outline the borders of this term before progressing any further. Damásio (1999) sense of self is equivalent to the core consciousness. In the sense of self discussed in this article is close to Damásio (1999) autobiographical self (extended consciousness) or what Zahavi (2006) describes as personality. I don't think the last sentence has any place here, but correct me if I am wrong.

The word "content" may seem vague, yet from a cognitive perspective we may simply say that "content" is information processing (Glicksohn 2001). Thus the sense of time is reduced to information processing, meaning that the sense of time can basically be deduced from the cognitive resource consumption necessary to process information.

It is important to emphasize that we are not claiming that there exists any kind of dualism.

Merleau-Ponty was one of the central thinkers to make an attempt at developing a theory not dependent on the representational framework—for a discussion see Dreyfus (2002). Noë (2004) continues in this manner, trying to generate a theory of perception which does not require representation. Although terminology of representation is used here, we do not claim that the world is represented perfectly in the brain; for more on this see Noë (2004). At the same time, Varela (e.g., Varela et al. 1991) and other central thinkers do not deny the importance of neurological activity or negate the possibility that exists neural activity rooted in the way that the body is present in the world. Rather, they oppose the approach of radical representationalism which claims that the brain is disconnected from the world. Indeed, we are convinced that there is no possibility of a brain in a vat, yet at the same time a discussion of neural maps is possible (even useful), as demonstrated by Damásio (2003, 1999). Moreover, representation—neural activity representing a certain situation of the body in the world—can also be applied in dynamic approaches to neuroscientific research using the phenomenological approach, yet the nervous system alone cannot provide us with information about the subjective experience (Cosmelli et al. 2007; Thompson 2007; Thompson and Varela 2001).

In addition, the phenomenological approach rejects the concept of representation advocated by philosophy of mind (Zahavi and Parnas 1998; Thompson 2007). In fact, “The representative theory of perception claims that the rose affects my sensory apparatus, and that this causes a mental representation of the rose to arise in my consciousness. According to this theory, then, every perception implies (at least) two different entities, the extra-mental object and the intra-mental representation” (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 91). Indeed, this approach claims that the world is not represented neutrally and passively in one’s mind (Noë 2009) but that, since consciousness is part of nature and the mind is embodied, the mind extends into the world (Clark and Chalmers 1998) while representations do not reflect the world perfectly (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, (see also the special volume of Review of Philosophy and Psychology (2012): 1–13).

At the same time, it is likely that if this process continues for a prolonged period it will result in depersonalization, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and so on.