The paper examines the sense of body ownership through various empirical and clinical phenomena, including somatoparaphrenia and the Rubber Hand Illusion. These examples demonstrate that both the sense of ownership and its disownership are experiential phenomena, with specific neurological and affective correlates. The role of affect is further explored, particularly in how affective responses contribute to the experience of ownership. The paper argues that affect, particularly the emotional significance attached to one’s body, is a critical marker for self-significance and therefore for body ownership. Without affective engagement, self-specific sensory content fails to elicit the necessary sense of ownership. 

The question of what explains the sense of body ownership is a longstanding one, and various theories have been proposed. Central to these debates are what Hong Yu Wong calls the ‘single X accounts’, which propose a single defining feature, X, as the key to explaining ownership. Major candidates for this "X" include, feeling the body ‘from the inside’, spatial content, and agency. Wong argues against all extant Single X accounts of ownership, instead proposing a pluralist account of ownership. In contrast to the single X accounts, pluralist accounts argue that ownership may be explained by multiple factors working together. Wong compares his pluralist account with recent affective accounts and develops a pluralist affective account.

Hong Yu Wong is Chair of Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science at the Philosophisches Seminar and Head of the Philosophy of Neuroscience (PONS) Research Group at the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), University of Tübingen. He is also a faculty member of the Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience (an International Max Planck Research School) and the Tübingen Cognitive Science Programme. His primary research interests concern the relations between perception and action, and the role of the body in structuring these relations. Currently he is exploring new approaches to studying the mind and the brain through the lens of VR, AI, and evolution.