The affectively embodied perspective of the subject
Philosophical Psychology May 27, 2022 S. Smith
Phenomenal consciousness—what it is like to be an organism—is at least partly constituted by the capacity to feel with one's living body. The subjective character of experience, the sense that the world seems a certain way for a subject, is grounded in embodied affect: the ability to feel what happens on and inside the body. This view, called the affectively embodied perspectival view (AEP), argues that hedonic perturbation by the environment is essential to having a perspective. The argument combines empirical findings, phenomenological description, and conceptual analysis to show that subjective character cannot be fully understood without reference to bodily feeling.