From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli



68

G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)

From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience.
Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli

IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com

neuroscience research. As underlined by Jeannerod and Pacherie [90]:

Our contention is that this [premotor] cortical network provides the basis for the
conscious experience of goal-directdness - the primary awareness of intentions - but
does not by itselfprovide us with a conscious experience of self- or other- agency.

(p.140).

Finally, different neurological disorders suggest the existence of naked intentions [30,
90]. For instance, in
anarchic hand, patients seem to be aware of the actions of their
anarchic hand but do not attribute to themselves its intentional behavior: the complex
movements of one hand are apparently directed towards a goal and are smoothly
executed, yet are unintended [101]. This condition seems to demonstrate that the
recognition of an intentional action can be separated from the awareness of its
authorship: the patients affected are aware of the intentional actions of their anarchic
hand, which they know to be their hand, yet they disown them.

In another disturbance - echopraxia - found in demented patient, the subject has an
impulsive or automatic imitation of other's people gestures. The imitation is
performed immediately - irrespective of the meaning or the nature of the gesture -
with abruptness and speed of a reflex action. This condition suggests that the patient,
who recognized an intentional action in the other, mistakenly attributed it to himself.

It is also important to note that naked intentionality allows a simple form of
imitation found in newborns,
resonance behavior: the tendency to reproduce,
immediately or with some delay, movements, gestures or actions made by another
individual.

3.5.2 From Naked Intentionality to Presence

If intentionality in neonates is naked, they require a specific mechanism to
differentiate between internal and external intentions, between their actions and the
other’s ones:
(Inner) Presence.

Presence is described here as a defining feature of self allowing the nervous system
to solve a key problem for its survival:
how to differentiate between internal and
external
(see also the next chapter by Waterworth and Waterworth). In other words,
is presence that transforms
intentionality - the ability to recognize purposeful actions
- in the ability of producing an
intention - the agent’s mental state that drives such
actions.

In this vision it is critical to distinguish between presence-as-process and presence-
as-feeling. The presence-as-process is the continuous activity of the brain in
separating “internal” and “external” within different kinds of afferent and efferent
signals. So, presence-as-process can be described as a sophisticated form of
monitoring of action and experience, transparent to the self but critical for its
existence. As clarified by Russell [102]:

“Action-monitoring is a subpersonal process that enables the subjects to
discriminate between self-determined and world-determined changes in input. It can
give rise to a mode of experience (the experience of being the cause of altered inputs
and the experience of being in control) but it is not itself a mode of experience.”
(p.263).



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