A squeeze machine that applies pressure along the whole body, used by autistic people for relaxation, may transform bodily self-consciousness. The authors hypothesized that such a transformation could enable empathy for others, as claimed by the machine's inventor, Dr. Temple Grandin. In an experiment, they simplified the machine's design and measured changes in peri-personal space (PPS), the area immediately surrounding the body. During squeeze-machine use, the usual boundaries of PPS disappeared, and subjective reports indicated that bodily self-consciousness drifted between the external pressure and internal bodily forces, leading to a loss of fixed PPS boundaries. The results suggest the machine alters the sense of bodily self.
Linking consciousness and qualia to natural science may be possible by adopting an endo-perspective, which treats the external world as not directly perceived but only indirectly summoned, rather than an exo-perspective that treats it as directly operated. The difference between these perspectives corresponds not to Western versus Eastern cultures but to modernism versus animism. A causation-reversal pair—upward causation from premise to consequence and downward causation from consequence to premise—is modeled using Bayesian and inverse Bayesian inference (BIB inference). Endo-consciousness is proposed as an agent equipped with BIB inference, which yields both efficient computations via Bayesian inference and robust computations via inverse Bayesian inference. Adapting the free will theorem to BIB inference suggests that endo-consciousness can explain free will as a regression of controllability of voluntary action.