From being to identity: analysis and synthesis of the self

This talk will consider the specific challenge of synthesising a robot "sense of self". The starting point is an analysis of the human self that see it as brought into being by the activity of a set of transient self-processes instantiated by the brain and body. I propose that we can better understand this self-system, and thereby this core aspect of the human condition, through embodied (robotic) modelling. The self begins with the brain's discovery of the body, of its ability to control it, and of the distinctive dynamics of interoceptive compared to exteroceptive sensory signals. These processes give rise to a minimal sense of self as a bounded agent, upon which layers of reflective self-processes are constructed that extend the self in space and time and that allow recognition of other selves. To illustrate the talk, I will discuss ongoing attempts to created a sense of self for robots within my own lab and others.

Professor Tony Prescott

University of Sheffield, UK

Professor Tony Prescott

University of Sheffield, UK

Tony Prescott is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield in the UK. His background mixes psychology, neuroethology and brain theory with robotics and AI, and his research aims at answering questions about natural intelligence by creating synthetic entities with capacities such as perception, memory, emotion and sense of self. He has co-founded the International Living Machines conference series, and two UK companies developing robotic platforms and software. He has worked extensively on brain-inspired cognitive architectures for both mammal-like and humanoid robots, and with his collaborators he has created a number of novel animal-like robot platforms. Tony has co-authored over 250 journal articles and conference papers and the edited volumes, Scholarpedia of Touch and The Handbook of Living Machines. His popular science book, The Psychology of Artificial Intelligence, published in 2024, explores the similarities between human and artificial intelligence. His research has been covered by major news and scientific media including the BBC, CNN, Discovery Channel, Science Magazine, France 24 and New Scientist.

It should by now be fairly well established that it makes little sense to ask questions such as "what are the underlying mechanisms of selfhood", "when in development does selfhood emerge" or "can the intake of psychedelics lead to self-loss" if one does not specify what aspect, or dimension or sense of self one is targeting. Already in 1988, Neisser distinguished five senses of self (the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private, and conceptual) and went on to argue that they differ in their developmental histories and in the pathologies to which they are subject. Given this variety, one obvious question to ask is how minimal one can go. What is the least you can make do with and still call a self? The discussion of that particular question is ongoing. In my talk, I will engage with quite recent debates in philosophy of mind, Buddhist studies, and the study of psychedelics, and address the question of whether the subjectivity of experience amounts to a minimal and foundational form of selfhood.

Professor Dan Zahavi

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Professor Dan Zahavi

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and director of the Centre for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. Zahavi’s primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and their intersection with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology. In addition to various scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Zahavi has mainly written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, empathy, and most recently on topics in social ontology. His most important publications include Self-awareness and Alterity (1999/2020), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005), The Phenomenological Mind (together with Shaun Gallagher) (2008/2012/2021), Self and Other (2014), Husserl’s Legacy (2017), Phenomenology: The Basics (2019/2025), and Being We (2025). His work has been translated into more than 30 languages.

Individuals in the modern world have complex social identities based on the groups and social categories with which they identify. Social psychology has shown that identifying with groups, even artificial minimal groups, generates behavioural effects in adults and children, such as ingroup favouritism, loyalty, and conformity. We propose that such effects originated evolutionarily from humans' unique skills and motivations to form shared agencies, with the evolutionarily original form of social identity being one's moral identity as a cooperative group member. For ancient humans, survival depend on being an assimilated member of a cultural group that was in turn competing against other groups. This context selected for self-reflective capacity to adopt a social identity (ie to view oneself as a member of a particular group) and concomitant self-regulatory motivations to maintain a positive social identity (ie to ensure that "I" the individual am being in line with what "we" the group expect, often via conformity). This evolutionary perspective helps account for a range of findings. Behavioural effects of group identity (eg ingroup favouritism, loyalty, conformity), moral emotions (eg guilt), and moral reasoning (eg deploying reasons and justifications to defend against threats to one's moral identity) are all expressions of social identity as a self-regulatory mechanism for maintaining one's good standing as a committed and trustworthy group member.

Dr Leon Li

Leipzig University, Germany

Dr Leon Li

Leipzig University, Germany

Dr Leon Li is a postdoctoral researcher at Leipzig University in Dr Sebastian Grueneisen's Cooperative Minds Lab. His postdoctoral research investigates the ontogeny of prosocially motivated rule-breaking and is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He obtained his PhD in 2022 at Duke University, advised by Dr Michael Tomasello, and his dissertation was titled The Development of Language and Morality as Forms of Social Action. Since his early days working as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr l Robert Slevc and Dr Melanie Killen at the University of Maryland, his research interests have broadly spanned the topics of language, morality, and social cognition. In addition to social identity, another topic he is currently investigating with Dr Gueneisen and Dr Tomasello is children's understanding of the objective reality (the other side of false belief).

How do we come to be the way we are? Tracing the origins of selfhood takes us back to the experience of one’s body as a first prior. Starting from the privileged status that homeostatic priors have within the cortical hierarchy of an organism whose main imperative is to maintain homeostasis, one can consider the mechanisms that underlie interoceptive precision and its impact on embodiment and cognition. But the self’s body is not only felt from within, it is also perceived and understood from the outside. The psychological roles that interoception and exteroception play for the scaffolding, maintenance or updating of self-awareness throughout life need to be understood not in their antagonism but in their integration. 

Professor Manos Tsakiris

Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Professor Manos Tsakiris

Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Manos Tsakiris is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he leads the Lab of Action & Body (LAB). His research is highly interdisciplinary and focuses on how bodily and feeling states influence our self-awareness and socio-political behaviour. He is the recipient of the Young Mind and Brain Prize, of the 22nd Experimental Psychology Society Prize, and the NOMIS Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award. Since 2021, he has been the director of the interdisciplinary Centre for the Politics of Feelings at the University of London.

Under the unrealistic and ethically doubtful endeavour of building conscious machines, we decided to build a sympathetic minimal self on a robot following neuroinspired principles. Our starting point was understanding how the brain perceives and controls the body, and our endpoint will be achieving physical intelligence. Grounded on well-known theories, such as the Ideomotor, the Comparatory model, and the Free Energy Principle, I summarise a set of experiments and theoretical accounts that drive us from learning the sensorimotor mapping behind body ownership to controlling and anticipating and the consequences of the robot actions, developing some kind of agentive behaviour. In particular, I describe the generalisation of von Helmholtz's perceptual unconscious inferences to action, showing that we exert compensatory movements to reduce our world model uncertainty, complementing the classical intentional goal-directed movements. Its corollary is my proposal of an Embodied Turing Test where the active self participates as a key ingredient in problem-solving. This experiment forces the "facio, ergo sum, ergo cogito", as the robot needs to disambiguate itself before making any decision. Fortunately, we failed, the robot is still not conscious. But, can robots think about thinking?

Dr Pablo Lanillos

Spanish National Research Council, Spain

Dr Pablo Lanillos

Spanish National Research Council, Spain

Pablo Lanillos leads the Neuro Ai and Robotics group (NAIR) at the Cajal Neuroscience Centre, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and guest researcher at the Donders Institute for Cognition. His research leitmotif is to transform our understanding of human embodied cognition into future technologies. His team develops neuroscience-inspired AI algorithms for achieving human-like perception and action in robots, and form providing better models of body perception. His lab is well know for active inference in robotics. He completed his doctoral studies in Computer Engineering at the Complutense University of Madrid, got the Marie-Sklodowska Curie award at the Technical University of Munich, gained tenure as as Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen and obtained a (civil servant) permanent position at the CSIC in 2025.