Is minimal selfhood a build-in feature of our experiential life (Gallagher 2005; Zahavi 2005, 2014; Legrand 2006) or a later socio-culturally determined acquisition, emerging in the process of social exchanges and mutual interactions (Fonagy et al. 2004; Prinz 2012; Schmid 2014)? This chapter, building mainly on empirical research on affective touch and interoception, argues in favor of a reconceptualization of minimal selfhood that surpasses such debates, and their tacitly “detached,” visuo-spatial models of selfhood and otherness. Instead, the relational origins of the self are traced on fundamental principles and regularities of the human embodied condition, such as the amodal properties that govern the organization of sensorimotor signals into distinct perceptual experiences. Interactive experiences with effects on “within” and “on” the physical boundaries of the body (e.g., skin-to-skin touch) are necessary for such organization in early infancy when the motor system is not as yet developed. Therefore, an experiencing subject is not primarily understood as facing another subject “there.” Instead, the minimal self is by necessity co-constituted by other bodies in physical contact and proximal interaction.

The idea that our ongoing perceptions, cognitive processes and actions are influenced by prior events and experiences has recently received substantial support and attention from the proponents of the Predictive Processing (PP) and Active Inference framework (AIF) both in philosophy and computational neuroscience. In this view, the human brain actively 'predicts' or 'anticipates' what sensory input is coming next, on the basis of prior inputs. This is because humans are first and foremost biological organisms striving to reduce uncertainty and to survive within a highly volatile environment.In this paper we look at how perception, cognition and actions get off the ground from the outset, in utero.Indeed, one basic yet overlooked aspect of current PP and AIF approaches is that brains (and minds), and human bodies, first develop within another human body. Crucially, while not all humans will have the experience of being pregnant or carrying a baby, the experience of being carried and growing within another person's body is universal.Specifically, we define in utero development as a process co-embodiment and co-homeostasis, and highlight their close relationship under an active inference approach. Contrary to the common view of the foetus being passively 'contained' and solipsistically 'trapped' in the solitude of the womb, we will present evidence speaking in favour of an active, precarious and bidirectional co-regulation between the two living bodies, what we will call co-homeostasis. We build upon previous work looking at homeostatic and allostatic bodily mechanisms operating already in early stages of development. The co-embodiment and co-homeostasis theses will lay the preliminary ground for introducing an active inference reading of in utero development of perceptual experiences.We conclude that the co-embodiment and co-homeostasis theses may have important implications on several critical questions fuelling current debates on the nature of conscious experiences, minimal self-awareness and social cognition. Our paper lays the theoretical basis for understanding and addressing in future work the fundamental question: how humans self-regulate their homeostatic bodily states and build their most basic selfand world-models literally within and through others' bodies, in utero and beyond.

There has recently been a resurgence of philosophical and scientific interest in the foundations of self-consciousness, with particular focus on its altered, anomalous forms. This paper looks at the altered forms of self-awareness in Depersonalization Disorder (DPD), a condition in which people feel detached from their self, their body and the world (Derealisation). Building upon the phenomenological distinction between reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, we argue that DPD may alter the transparency of basic embodied forms of pre-reflective self-consciousness, as well as the capacity to flexibly modulate and switch between the reflective and pre-reflective facets of self-awareness. Empirical evidence will be invoked in support of the idea that impaired processing of bodily signals is characteristic of the condition. We provide first-hand subjective reports describing the experience of self-detachment or fracture between an observing and an observed self. This split is compared with similar selfdetachment phenomena reported in certain Buddhist-derived meditative practices. We suggest that these alterations and changes may reveal the underlying and tacit transparency that characterises the embodied and basic pre-reflective forms of self-consciousness, in the same way that a crack in a transparent glass may indicate the presence of an unnoticed window.