Interoception & self modelling in Tourette Syndrome with Darius Parvizi-Wayne & Liberty Severs

In this fun conversation, Darius Parvizi-Wayne and Liberty Severs introduce research summarised in their paper "When the interoceptive and conceptual clash: the case of oppositional phenomenal self-modelling in Tourette Syndrome." We talk about the interplay between sensorimotor, cognitive, and phenomenological aspects of Tourette Syndrome (TS), offering a way to view these aspects through the lens of hierarchical generative modelling and active inference.
We consider what this perspective might mean for an understanding the sense of self in both individuals with and without TS. Liberty and Darius articulate how tics in TS can be seen as efforts toward sensory attenuation and as forms of epistemic foraging,
A preprint of the paper - When the interoceptive and conceptual clash: the case of oppositional phenomenal self-modelling in Tourette Syndrome can be found here:
osf.io/preprin...
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[@dariusparvizi-wayne8508]

Thank you so much for having us Ian! It was a real pleasure. p.s. for those interested in the pre-reflective bodily self, please do check out the work of Dorothée Legrand (2006, 2007), as well as Legrand & Ruby (2009) and Christoff et al. (2011). She, perhaps better than anyone else, has elucidated the notion of the bodily self-as-subject (I.e. that is not the object of intentional consciousness) and tied it to sensorimotor integration. Furthermore, she offers an interesting perspective divergent from Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity, which is certainly not the only approach to minimal (bodily) selfhood - although it does provide a useful spectrum of self-consciousness that permits the notion of oppositional self-modelling. I have written about this briefly in other work - e.g. Parvizi-Wayne et al. (2024) on flow states.

[@Interoception_InnerSense]

Thanks for those suggestions @dariusparvizi-wayne8508, I'm looking at one of the papers from Dorothée Legrand now - very interesting.

[@dariusparvizi-wayne8508]

Oh, and I should have added, that not only do you not need to reflect on the pre-reflective self, but in fact it it’s non-reflectiveness is intrinsic to its nature. The moment it has been reflected on it becomes transmuted into an object of consciousness - i.e., it changes from a self-as-subject to a self-as-object. Thus, for qualitative characteristics to belong to this form of selfhood - e.g. perspectivalness, mineness etc - they must be an intransitive, intrinsic part of experience, not the product of conscious intention!