Subjective Misidentification and Thought Insertion

Abstract

This essay presents a new account of thought insertion. Prevailing views in both philosophy and cognitive science tend to characterize the experience of thought insertion as missing or lacking some element, such as a 'sense of agency', found in ordinary first-person awareness of one's own thoughts. By contrast, I propose that, rather than lacking something, experiences of thought insertion have an additional feature not present in ordinary conscious experiences of one's own thoughts. More specifically, I claim that the structure of an experience of thought insertion consists of two distinct elements: a state of ordinary first-person awareness and a sense that this state of awareness is highly unusual. In addition to modeling the experience of thought insertion, I also explain how a delusional pattern of thinking could lead someone who has this kind of experience to adopt a belief that some other entity is inserting thoughts into her mind. Finally, I briefly sketch a neurocomputational framework that could be developed to explain the sense that one's state of first-person awareness is highly irregular.Previous versions of this essay have been presented at Berkeley, King's College London, the University of Fribourg, the University of Manchester, and the University of Oxford. On all of these occasions, I was fortunate to receive extremely useful feedback and comments, for which I am very grateful. I would also like to thank

Psychedelics, Meditation, and Self-Consciousness

“…Likewise, one could expect attentional control of spontaneous thoughts in meditation to have an effect on the sense of cognitive agency, if this notion is valid. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the claim that voluntary movements and thoughts are ordinarily accompanied by a pervasive sense of agency has recently come under criticism (Grünbaum, 2015 ; Grünbaum and Christensen, 2017 ; Parrott, 2017 ). According to a more deflationary account, there is no special phenomenology of agency in ordinary experience 7 .…”

“…Accordingly, prediction error signals might give rise to a feeling of alienation from one's action, but the absence of prediction error signals should not be associated with a positive feeling of agency (Fletcher and Frith, 2009 ; although see Hohwy, 2016 for a predictive coding account of the sense of agency). This explanatory model can be extended to thoughts to account for schizophrenic thought insertion without appealing to a loss of the sense of agency (Parrott, 2017 ). However, it should be acknowledged that the existence of a positive phenomenology of agency might be more in line with the active inference framework, according to which organisms minimize prediction error not only by updating prior expectations, but also through action (Friston, 2013 ).…”

Delusional Predictions and Explanations

“…(Saks [2007], p. 27) The belief that one's own thought belongs to a house is odd. But one reason why an individual might form such a belief is that her own episodes of conscious thinking are tagged with an anomalous prediction error signal (Parrott [2017]). When we are engaged in spontaneous thought or mind-wandering, it is very doubtful that the brain makes precise predictions about what we will think next.…”

Radical disruptions of self-consciousness

“…Over the past two decades, philosophers and scientists have paid close attention to a number of empirical cases portrayed as disruptions of self-consciousness, including schizophrenic thought insertion (e.g. Metzinger, 2003;Billon, 2013;Parrott, 2017), alienation symptoms (e.g. Lane, 2014Lane, , 2015, depersonalisation disorder (e.g.…”