The paper discusses two recent approaches to schizophrenia, a phenomenological and a neuroscientific approach, illustrating how new directions in philosophy and cognitive science can elaborate accounts of psychopathologies of the self. It is argued that the notion of the minimal and bodily self underlying these approaches is still limited since it downplays the relevance of social interactions and relations for the formation of a coherent sense of self. These approaches also illustrate that we still lack an account of how 1st and 3rd person observations can fruitfully go together in an embodied account of disorders of the self. Two concepts from enactive cognitive science are introduced, the notions of autonomy and sense-making. Based on these, a new proposal for an enactive approach to psychopathologies of the self is outlined that integrates 1st and 3rd person perspectives, while strongly emphasising the role of social interactions in the formation of self. It is shown how the enactive framework might serve as a basis for an alternative understanding of disorders of the self such as schizophrenia, as a particular form of socially constituted self-organisation.

Key words: enactive cognition, autonomy, sense-making, enactive self, disorders of the self, meaning of symptoms, enactive approach to psychopathology, self-organisation, schizophrenia

In this paper we discuss the enactive self from a computational point of view and study the suitability of current methods to instantiate it onto robots. As an assumption, we consider any cognitive agent as an autonomous system that constructs its identity by continuous interaction with the environment. We start examining algorithms to learn the body-schema and to enable tool-extension, and we finalize by studying their viability for generalizing the enactive self computational model. This paper points out promising techniques for bodily self-modelling and exploration, as well as formally link sensorimotor models with differential kinematics. Although the study is restricted to basic sensorimotor construction of the self, some of the analysed works also traverse into more complex self constructions with a social component. Furthermore, we discuss the main gaps of current engineering approaches for modelling enactive robots and describe the main characteristics that a synthetic sensorimotor self-model should present.