Theories of Consciousness 4/6: The Bodily Roots of Conscious Experiences in Early Life (with Anna Ciaunica)

February 18, 2024. 1 hour and 50 mins. Discussions about the nature of consciousness are typically couched in a way that endorses a tacit adult-centric and vision-based perspective. Here Ciaunica examines the nature of subjective experiences through a bottom-up developmental lens, drawing attention to experiencing subjects as embodied and situated organisms essentially concerned with self-preservation within a precarious environment. How do embodied experiences ‘arise’ from square one? She concentrates on a key yet overlooked aspect of human consciousness studies, namely, that the earliest and closest environment of an embodied-experiencing subject is the body of another human-experiencing subject. She presents evidence…