Narrators and comparators

the architecture of agentive self-awareness

Tim Bayne

Elisabeth Pacherie

pp. 475-491

in: Jakob Hohwy (ed), Functional integration and the mind, Synthese 159 (3), 2007.

Abstract

This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a high-level, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent’s narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production.