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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Noah Jupe (“The Undoing”)