Bodily awareness—the inner sense of one's own body—is a basic form of self-consciousness, on par with introspection. Through bodily awareness, perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. The paper clarifies the nature of bodily awareness, argues that it functions as self-consciousness, and connects this to the property of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. It considers and remains unconvinced by an argument that bodily awareness cannot have first-person content. Finally, it sketches an account of the spatial content of bodily awareness and the particular type of awareness of the bodily self it provides.
Self-consciousness, long considered a philosophical puzzle, can be understood by tracing its origins to simpler, nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. This paper argues that sophisticated self-conscious thought emerges from basic capacities present in visual perception, bodily awareness, spatial reasoning, and social interactions. By examining these primitive forms, the author shows how philosophical analysis and cognitive science can inform each other, offering a way out of the paradox that seemed to block progress on understanding self-consciousness.