#62 Meet the Scientist Proving Your Whole Body is Conscious!

Dr. Anna Ciaunica is a philosopher and cognitive scientist,
Principal Investigator at the University of Lisbon’s Centre for
Philosophy of Science and Research Associate at UCL’s Institute
of Cognitive Neuroscience. She leads INTERSELF, a project on how
interactions with humans and artificial agents reshape our
self-model, and collaborates with Michael Levin on “From Cells to
Selves.”


Consciousness isn’t just in your head—**biology is cognition the
whole way down**. From co-embodiment in the womb to the immune
system’s quiet influence on mood and meaning, Anna reframes mind
as a body-wide process and the self as something we enact with
our nerves, guts, skin and others.


Expect to learn why the “self” may begin before birth, how
co-embodiment and maternal–fetal synchrony shape first-person
experience, why “the brain is not mental” reframes cognition as a
cell-level, body-wide system, how depersonalisation differs from
psychedelic ego dissolution, how interoception and precision
weighting tune the felt boundary between “me” and “not-me,” why
inflammation and sickness behaviour can alter mood, agency and
reality-feel, what a Markov blanket is in human terms, how
avatars, robots and social media recalibrate the self, whether
single cells display proto-cognition and what neurons uniquely
add, how to build a minimum viable self in AI (body, homeostasis,
immune-like error correction and development), practical ways to
stay embodied in a digital world, what this lens means for
therapy (vagus, gut–brain, immune), and much more…


Timestamps:


00:00 Intro


02:50 Cognition and Biological Systems


08:36 The Evolution of Intelligence


15:50 Challenging Traditional Definitions


29:08 The Ingredients of Cognition


39:53 The Balance of Inner and Outer Worlds


51:42 The Development of Self-Awareness


56:57 Sickness Behavior and Disconnection from Self


01:03:17 The Cell's Plan for Survival


01:09:33 The Nature of Self-Organizing Systems


01:16:44 Collective Intelligence and Self-Preservation


01:22:15 Conscious AI: The Quest for Understanding


01:33:53 The Developmental Turn in Understanding Human Mind…





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