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<p>This article develops the concept of <i>minimal self-sentience</i> to extend the phenomenological notion of minimal self-awareness to non-human animals. Drawing on the phenomenological account of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness (e.g., Zahavi), and on the view that such a minimal form of self-experience can be attributed to non-human animals (e.g., Strawson), we propose to deepen the analysis to show that sentience can be understood as a reflexive, automatic, and affectively valenced form of bodily responsiveness through which an organism experiences its own interactions with the environment prior to any higher-order cognition or reflective act. To develop this proposal, we examine and critically assess two influential accounts of the emergence of sentience. First, we engage with Nicholas Humphrey’s evolutionary theory, which ties phenomenal experience to the privatisation of sensorimotor feedback and the formation of recursive neural loops. Humphrey’s discontinuist framework locates the threshold of sentience at a relatively advanced stage of neural organisation, and his treatment of proprioception as phenomenally inert conflicts with substantial empirical evidence. Second, we consider Anil Seth’s predictive processing account, which grounds selfhood in interoceptive inference and homeostatic regulation. Although this approach, reconnects subjectivity to bodily life, it presupposes a hierarchical neural architecture that risks reproducing neurocentric limitations similar to Humphrey. We then propose an enactive reframing of Seth’s model, informed by an account of dynamical brain-body-environment coupling. To motivate this enactive reframing, we turn to William James’s notion of “warmth and intimacy” as the affective quality through which somatic self-experience is felt as <i>mine</i>, prior to any complex cognitive processing or reflective judgment. We argue that this Jamesian dimension, rooted in the sensorimotor feedback loop between organism and environment, identifies a phenomenological stratum that neither Humphrey nor Seth fully captures – one that constitutes the experiential core of minimal self-sentience.</p>

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Minimal self-sentience

  • 期刊论文

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年8月4日

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  • Guido Baggio,
  • Shaun Gallagher

摘要

This article develops the concept of minimal self-sentience to extend the phenomenological notion of minimal self-awareness to non-human animals. Drawing on the phenomenological account of minimal pre-reflective self-awareness (e.g., Zahavi), and on the view that such a minimal form of self-experience can be attributed to non-human animals (e.g., Strawson), we propose to deepen the analysis to show that sentience can be understood as a reflexive, automatic, and affectively valenced form of bodily responsiveness through which an organism experiences its own interactions with the environment prior to any higher-order cognition or reflective act. To develop this proposal, we examine and critically assess two influential accounts of the emergence of sentience. First, we engage with Nicholas Humphrey’s evolutionary theory, which ties phenomenal experience to the privatisation of sensorimotor feedback and the formation of recursive neural loops. Humphrey’s discontinuist framework locates the threshold of sentience at a relatively advanced stage of neural organisation, and his treatment of proprioception as phenomenally inert conflicts with substantial empirical evidence. Second, we consider Anil Seth’s predictive processing account, which grounds selfhood in interoceptive inference and homeostatic regulation. Although this approach, reconnects subjectivity to bodily life, it presupposes a hierarchical neural architecture that risks reproducing neurocentric limitations similar to Humphrey. We then propose an enactive reframing of Seth’s model, informed by an account of dynamical brain-body-environment coupling. To motivate this enactive reframing, we turn to William James’s notion of “warmth and intimacy” as the affective quality through which somatic self-experience is felt as mine, prior to any complex cognitive processing or reflective judgment. We argue that this Jamesian dimension, rooted in the sensorimotor feedback loop between organism and environment, identifies a phenomenological stratum that neither Humphrey nor Seth fully captures – one that constitutes the experiential core of minimal self-sentience.