Quo vadis, Self? - A Comment on "The Importance of Sensing One's Movements in the World for the Sense of Personal Identity" by Haselager, Broens & Quilici Gonzalez

This paper discusses the core arguments proposed by Haselager, Broens & Quilici Gonzalez in their paper The Importance of Sensing One’s Movements in the World for the Sense of Personal Identity, according to which spontaneous movement is the most relevant bodily factor with respect to the genesis of personal identity in human psychic processes. Moreover, this research aims to show that this principle could be included in an epistemological framework that can account for the double dynamic underlying the constitution of the Self, given by the intersection between the Mind-Body Problem and the Mind-Culture Problem. The paper suggests that it is possible to bind “I”-Experiences on the one hand to bodily sensations, understood as manifestations of a “flesh ontology”, and on the other to a semiotic matrix which is related to both the activity of movement and the proto-awareness of the potentiality for movement itself. Indeed, the early movements that generate the sensation of being “someone” and not only “something” already trigger a search for sense which is progressively carried out by determining a direction, i.e. choosing a goal and working out a strategy to reach that goal.