Neuroimaging the self ?

1 Attention & Performance 2006 Sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition The concept of self lacks of clear definition and boundaries and is still widely debated in the philosophical community. Positions oscillate between an elimination of the notion of self and the extension of the list of different forms of self. Following Strawson, one can easily quote up to 25 forms of self: "it is difficult to know where to begin, because there are many different notions of the self. Among those I have recently come across are the cognitive self, the conceptual self, the contextualized self, the core self, the dialogic self, the ecological self, the embodied self, the emergent self, the empirical self, the existential self, the extended self, the fictional self, the full-gown self, the interpersonal self, the material self, the narrative self, the philosophical self, the physical self, the private self, the representational self, the rock bottom essential self, the semiotic self, the social self, the transparent self, and the verbal self" It is important to note that whether "the self" is eliminated or multiplied, it remains under-specified since the following questions remain unanswered: What is it that has to be eliminated? Or what is it that is common to all phenomena referred to as "self", despite their diversity? In either case, one needs a criterion to determine what a "self" is, to justify its elimination or the categorization of different phenomena as a form of "self" (Legrand 2004). Therefore, the question is to determine such a criterion. It is the reason why the question we will tackle in this paper is the following: what is self-specific ? Answering this question is a prerequisite to understand what the self is. In order to answer this question, we will start with a review of neuroimaging studies which investigated the cerebral correlates of the " self " , the " other " , the resting state, reasoning and memory recall. This merging of results from these various domains of research will lead to a reinterpretion of the brain activations found in studies which investigated the self in cognitive neuroscience. On the basis of the conclusions of this review, we will then elaborate a 2 Attention & Performance 2006 Sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition theoretical framework allowing the understanding of self-specificity as a self-specifying sensorimotor process. We will conclude by considering the consequence of our approach for the very possibility …