Italy The paper by Vogeley et al. provides an ambitious and thought provoking integrated framework highlighting the strict relation between disfunctions of the self model and the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. The authors review multiple sources of evidence spanning from neuroscience, to neuropsychology and philosophy of mind, in a praiseworthy attempt to give coherence to the multiple level of descriptions of the schizophrenic syndrome, stressing the necessity to re-integrate psychopathological symptoms into neuroscience. The issue tackled by the authors is a tough one.
Schizophrenia is a clinical disorder of the self model.
I will focus here only on the first point. In section 1 the authors clearly define both consciousness and the self model. From their definition of consciousness the possibility emerges to de-compose what is experienced as a unitary phenomenon, into several and distinct functional components. If one admits that the holistic phenomenon of consciousness can be dissected to reveal its inner functional architecture, then new possibilities are opened for the scientific investigation of consciousness. Our apparently 1unitary model of the world relies on the possibility to switch from one frame of representational reference to the other.