Embodied selfhood

The claim, long-standing (James’s “material me”; Damasio, Craig, Metzinger), that mental representations of self are ultimately grounded in representations of the body, with the internal physiological milieu as the primary reference. Selfhood is a “constellation concept” operating on multiple levels: physiological homeostasis, bodily integrity/morphology/position, first-person perspective, intention/agency, and the metacognitive/narrative “I.”

Seth’s predictive account

In Seth (2013), embodied selfhood is unified under predictive-coding: the organism maintains generative models of the signals “most likely to be me” across interoceptive and exteroceptive domains (Apps & Tsakiris, “the free-energy self”). Self-related predictive coding simultaneously engages all levels of self-representation. Emotions (via interoceptive-inference) and the experience-of-body-ownership are two faces of the same self-modeling process.

Craig’s anatomical grounding

The “material me” is not just metaphor for Craig: Craig (2002) locates it in the homeostatic afferent pathway and its re-representation in the right anterior insula, and Craig (2009) pushes it to a full model of the sentient self (the global-emotional-moment), with the mirror test and von-economo-neurons as phylogenetic markers of self-awareness. This is the anatomical bedrock Seth’s predictive account reinterprets rather than replaces.

Anatomy and pathology

The anterior insular cortex (right-lateralized) is emphasized as supporting conscious access to interoceptive state and its relation to the biological self (see ad-craig, insular-cortex). Disorders of selfhood — depersonalization/derealization, Cotard’s, alexithymia, and self-disturbances in psychosis — are framed (by Seth) as disrupted or imprecise interoceptive inference, and (by Craig) as damage to the insular re-representation (e.g., VEN loss in frontotemporal dementia), giving the concept clinical traction from both directions.

Two complementary senses (Farb et al. 2015)

Farb et al. (2015), building on Seth, Suzuki & Critchley (2011), argue the embodied self is “more fully realized” through awareness of ongoing interoceptive interaction via two complementary senses — see presence-and-agency: presence (connection to the moment) and agency (ability to effect change). Both are proposed as downstream markers of successful prediction-error minimization, giving embodied selfhood a testable behavioral signature beyond neuroanatomy alone.