• 1  It is important to note that the traditional interpretation of Descartes often overemphasizes the (...)

1The notion of consciousness prima facie refers to the familiar sensation of being awake and aware of ourselves and the surrounding world. However, we can theoretically conceive a state of consciousness that is progressively deprived of references to the surrounding environment and the body, eventually imagining a pure state of consciousness that is disembodied and disconnected from the world. This idea is not new. In the history of philosophy, we can find some theoretical attempts to conceive the existence of the mind as being detached from the body and the world. For example, to prove the ontological difference between the soul and the body, Avicenna created the thought experiment of the “floating man”, i.e., a man who is suspended in the air, created at a stroke, perfectly developed and incapable of perceiving his body (his limbs are separated and insensible) or external objects (Avicenna, 1959). Despite this speculative and odd situation, the man would be able to think of himself without any reference to his body or environment, therefore exhibiting signs of self-consciousness. Of course, Descartes’ meditations are another example of a theoretical investigation that questions the validity of an intrinsic connection between thought, the body, and the world (Descartes, 1641/2003).1 Similarly, Anscombe (1981) introduced the thought experiment of the sensory-deprivation tank to argue that – even in the absence of both exteroception and interoception – consciousness would remain intact as the presence of a thinking Cartesian ego without any reference to the body.

• 2  Regarding the relation between consciousness, the body, and the world in Sartre, see also some pre (...)

7Now, we must clarify the meaning of the relation between consciousness/intentionality and the body because one could easily misunderstand it as a relation between the conscious subject and the body-machine. The intrinsic body–consciousness relation does not mean that every single conscious act is actively focused on a body part; indeed, according to Sartre, the lived body, introduced by classical phenomenology (le corps-existé, in the words of Sartre), is not something of which I am constantly aware; rather, it is “surpassed towards the world” as the pre-reflective consciousness of the revealing intentionality of the world (Sartre, 1956, p. 309).2 This means that, usually, the body is the unperceived condition of the possibility of being-in-the-world – i.e., it is the orientation, the point of view and the permanent structure of the conscious being within the world (Sartre, 1956, p. 328) in such a way that everything I perceive or even imagine does not exist somewhere without any reference to me. The world is not in front of me like an external and detached set of things; I am within it, with a body that gives me the coordinates for the things of the world, so that, “[f]or me this glass is to the left of the decanter and a little behind it; for Pierre, it is to the right and a little in front” (Sartre, 1956, p. 306).

• 3  See also Husserl’s (1982, p. 42) concept of the body as the zero-point (Nullpunkt) or “hereness”, (...)

8This being-in-the-world condition does not entail that consciousness is “engulfed” in a body that is, in turn, “engulfed” in the world (Sartre, 1981) like separate elements inserted one into the other; rather, the body is the concrete manifestation of consciousness. The body provides the “situation” for my experience, i.e., my possibilities, orientation, and point of view. Therefore, we are not merely embodied; we are also embedded – in the sense that our embodied being expresses itself through and within environmental interactions such that the body, as a point of view, is “surpassed”, “transcended” and “passed by in silence” towards the world, and I cannot have a point of view upon it without creating an additional bodily point of view on my objectified body (Sartre, 1956, p. 329).3 In other words, when we are conscious of the red tomato, we can see it, touch it, taste it, weigh it in our hands, etc. During these conscious acts of intentionality, at no time is the body revealed; the only intentional object is the red tomato. We do not experience our eyes seeing, our fingers touching or our tongue tasting. When I weigh the tomato, I feel nothing but the tomato’s weight in the same way as, when I write, my hand vanishes behind the words I am writing.

• 4  “Thus to the extent that my body indicates my possibilities in the world, seeing my body or touchi (...)

9Of course, this does not mean that we cannot perceive our own body: while I am weighing the tomato, I can concentrate, at some point, on my hand holding the tomato, but this does not mean that I am perceiving my lived body. At that specific moment, my consciousness is positing my hand from the point of view of the other as a “psychic object” (Sartre, 1956, p. 347) – as a body part among others’ body parts or a tool among a world of tools.4 As Moran pointed out, “[f]or Sartre, I cannot see the sensitivity of the hand or even the ‘mineness’ of my hand” (Moran, 2011, p. 275) because the subjectivity of my body is pre-reflectively and non-positionally defined. For example, while weighing the tomato, I am not feeling the effort being exerted by my hand and arm (skin, bones, tendons, muscles, etc.) during that action; I am precisely feeling the weight of the tomato, i.e., the resistance of a thing against me. We always perceive the things in the world (their resistance, hardness, softness, etc.), not the lived body as such, which, instead, is invisible because it is integrated within the world (embeddedness) and can be experienced as an object only in specific situations, such as during reflection, i.e., when we posit ourselves as intentional content, or illness and other psychosomatic conditions, i.e., when the body appears as an obstacle that influences our being-in-the-world condition (Carel, 2016; Costa & Cesana, 2019; Leder, 1990) or when I am seen by the other and “I exist for myself as a body known by the Other” (Sartre, 1956, p. 351).

• 5  “To come into existence, for me, is to unfold my distances from things and thereby to cause things (...)

11The next step will be to identify the matrix of these concrete forms of experience, i.e., to understand how the experience can be defined as a relationship with the world. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes how consciousness essentially unfolds in a temporal and spatial sense. Here, time and space do not entail anything close to the physical time and space that are considered the “building blocks” of nature, the homogeneous and pure extension of the Cartesian res extensa or the spatiotemporal coordinates within which the objects of the world are situated (e.g., “the house is located to the north of the square, 50 meters away”). A rock is “in-the-midst-of-the-world”, i.e., an inert presence as a passive object among other objects, while consciousness is “in-the-world”, which implies the involvement with a world that must be engaged, revealed, and differentiated. To avoid confusion, it would therefore be better to talk about “temporality” and “spatiality”. Our experience as a spatiality is rendered through the body in relation to the world – not as an abstract, centerless, independent space but as a hodological space, i.e., a lived situation as a field of forces of the experiencers – with its capabilities and needs – in accordance with the potentialities and resistances of the objects of the world.5 Similarly, consciousness does not simply exist in time like a thing but is the temporalization, i.e., the act of relating things to us through temporality. This temporality is not a universal, Newtonian container, nor an extrinsic law of nature; instead, it is how bodily consciousness relates to things in time, i.e., how embodied intentionality acts in a temporal way (Wehrle, 2019). In other words, before cognitively manipulating information and symbols, mentalizing the external stimuli in representation, or even bodily interacting with the environment through action-perception loops, the world is experienced through the temporalization and spatialization of the things that are in relation to us.

• 6  Interestingly, one could criticize the concept of embodiment and embeddedness without evoking odd (...)

15As a final point, I would like to present certain questions regarding a possible counterargument to consciousness as an embodied-being-in-the-world. Someone could identify instances of experience that are disconnected from the environment and the body, i.e., dream states (Loorits, 2018), altered states such as out-of-body experiences (Blanke & Dieguez, 2009) and brain-in-a-vat scenarios (McKinsey, 2018).6 I will argue that even these cases do not imply the existence of a consciousness completely deprived of corporeality in a spatiotemporal sense.

• 7  As I have discussed in Zilio (2020a, pp. 319-321), it should be noted that not all stimulus–intera (...)

16When we are dreaming, we are somehow conscious of something even though it is not actually in front of us and our bed, and we can also experience our body in different ways than usual. Generally, the dream state is considered one of “disconnected consciousness” (Nir & Tononi, 2010; Tononi & Koch, 2008) in which the brain can still produce conscious experiences on its own (Tononi, 2009), undermining the idea of the necessity of the relation to the body and world. The case of out-of-body experiences is similar to the dream state, as it seems to be a genuine case of a disembodied point of view, as the subject perceives himself and the surrounding environment from a location outside their physical body, with an elevated visuospatial perspective (Blanke & Dieguez, 2009). From a phenomenological perspective, these states are particular cases of consciousness during which the relationship with the world is altered, as our embodied-being-in-the-world changes considerably; but this does not imply disembodied/disconnected consciousness. It is perhaps possible that during dreams or out-of-body experiences, the brain can produce consciousness in the absence of regular stimulation from the rest of the body and the environment;7 however, this does not mean that consciousness can be developed without an embodied and embedded phenomenological structure. Even in the foggiest of dreams or out-of-body experiences, the experience never ceases to be expressed through the hodological space and temporal synthesis of the experienced objects, which can acquire meaning only from a bodily point of view.

• 8  “I observed my body from outside”; “Different parts of my body disappeared completely”; “My bounda (...)

17In particular, out-of-body experiences are characterized by a loss of geometrical self-location, where the subject might feel detached from their physical body; nevertheless, they still perceive it from an “autoscopic body”, i.e., a projected perspective that resembles the phenomenological structure of the actual body. Fingelkurts et al. (2021) have recently collected and classified reports of altered states of selfhood (ASoS) during mental exercises, many of which were characterized by an alteration of bodily awareness.8 The study suggests that many components of the phenomenal structure of experience can be modified in a specific altered state of consciousness: for example, body image, body perception, and body orientation can change with respect to the size and position of the physical body; the phenomenal center, the first-person perspective, the epistemic certitude, and the witnessing observer can move and expand beyond the physical body towards the environmental context. In other words, our spatiotemporal perspective spreads and the body – rather than “disappearing” – becomes the new environment and, thus, the embedment itself in both temporal and spatial terms.

• 9  “My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body in so far as the hou (...)

18As argued before, these excellent examples of altered states of (dis)embodied consciousness suggest that consciousness can go beyond the boundaries of the anatomical body while maintaining a minimum level of “dynamic proprioception”, “phenomenological center of gravity”, and “phenomenological self-location”. This is completely consistent with the concept of the spatiotemporal body as a hodological space and original synthesis, which is characterized by the range of bodily possibilities defined by the spatial and temporal context of the environment. Following Sartre’s phenomenological analysis, consciousness transcends into the world not only through the body but also through objects such that bodily consciousness always represents a world–body connection.9 Surely, the aforementioned states are different in their phenomenological structure than the normal perception of the world because the usual body and environment that offer a stable spatiotemporal background for our experience do not exist. For example, when we are dreaming, we usually recognize places, things, and people from individual details and not from a rich environmental context that we reconstruct through reflection after waking up instead (“I remember I was in my bedroom, at least I remember that I was in front of my bed and my desk”). Similarly, temporal synthesis is modified, and we experience greater or shorter times and durations than we would expect in the real world (e.g., during a dream it might take us “hours” to leave a room, then, the sky might go from day to night in a second). Furthermore, during specific states such as OBEs and ASoS, there is a disruption of the normal environment–body and world-self coupling that, on a phenomenological level, implies a change in the structure of our spatiotemporal body and, consequently, of our embodied-being-in-the-world. Nevertheless, the phenomenal reality created during dreams or altered experiences is still structured through a hodological, embodied and embedded perspective that constitutes the experience as such. Altogether, the spatiality and temporality of consciousness necessarily depend on the fact that the experience is intrinsically corporeal, which implies that every experienced object is manifested through bodily temporalization and spatialization regardless of whether it is physical or mental. In other words, dreams and altered experiences differ from the usual perception precisely because the body changes its spatiotemporal relations with the world.

• 10  One might propose the sensory deprivation tank as a concrete example – not a thought experiment –  (...)

19Perhaps the most radical attempt to conceive of a disembodied consciousness is the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. As is well known, it involves imagining a brain, without the rest of the body, that is inserted into a vat of nutrients, whose nerves are connected to a supercomputer that sends electrical impulses to stimulate it in the same way as brains are normally stimulated by the perception of external objects; the result is that the brain’s conscious experiences are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal human being (McKinsey, 2018).10 The thought experiment has been discussed, proposed and criticized by many authors (for example, Putnam, 1981). Here, we are not discussing the logical or semantic validity of the experiment but its phenomenological consistency. In this regard, it seems that the brain-in-a-vat is an instance of completely disembodied and disembedded consciousness. However, interestingly, Thompson and Cosmelli (2010; 2011) argue that the brain-in-a-vat scenario provides no evidence for the possibility of such consciousness; rather, it shows that the experience is intrinsically embodied and embedded even in the case of a surrogate body such as that virtually produced by the supercomputer and sustained by the vat system that mimics the vital functions of a biological body. Indeed, if the brain-in-a-vat needs a synthetic body (the vat and the supercomputer) that provides it with a virtual body and world (simulated by the supercomputer) to produce consciousness, then the thought experiment shows that it is not possible to conceive of an experience other than the one as the embodied-being-in-the-world condition. Hence, although it is possible to conceive of an experience as being biologically produced by only a brain or a disembodied system, it does not seem possible to conceive the phenomenological structure of experience as being deprived of a spatiotemporal corporeality in relation to a (virtual or actual) world.