The Inside-Out Binding Problem

In Gareth Evans’s terms, the fundamental ground of difference that individuates our bodies is the very same fundamental ground of difference that individuates any other concrete object: namely, its position in space and time. An intuition-friendly way of thinking of this is as a division between ways of perceiving our bodies “from the inside” and “from the outside.” Even heavily edited to deal with the glitches, a purely spatial criterion seems unpromising: given that our bodies are by and large topological donut-shaped figures, any way of drawing the boundaries between inside and outside is bound to seem a little arbitrary. Personal-level recognition of identity of body(-part) perceived both interoceptively and exteroceptively is made possible by subpersonal binding of cues from both forms of perception grounded on recognised co-location at a time of body(-part) perceived both ways at once.