Self-consciousness in biological organisms depends on an individual's ability to distinguish sensory input from its environment from input arising from its own body, a process grounded in embodiment. Artificial systems, by contrast, lack this embodied distinction because software processes input but does not substitute for a body. To replicate biological self-consciousness, an artificial system would need hardware with a comprehensive sensorium integrated throughout its material, software that can separate bodily from environmental signals, bidirectional communication between hardware and software, and the capacity to integrate bodily signals into a unified sense of self. Meeting these requirements in non-living material is considered unlikely.
A patient with both delusion (false belief) and hallucination (false perception) was diagnosed not with psychosis or schizophrenia but with Capgras syndrome and autoscopic phenomenon (out-of-body experience). The delusion involved believing a close relative had been replaced by an imposter, while the false perception involved feeling the self located outside the physical body. The patient also experienced inability to recognize his own face in a mirror (autoprosopagnosia). These symptoms occurred in an 18-year-old who had recovered from a subdural hematoma in the right frontoparietal lobes after a motorcycle accident, one week after leaving the hospital.