Copy

Absent efference copy at the forward comparator, or absent any pre-action preparatory processes at the neurological level, however, the body-schematic system will fail to register a sense of agency

Gallagher argues that efference copy — the internal motor signal sent to a comparator — is a necessary condition for the body-schema to generate a sense of agency, and its absence directly produces the alienated self-experience characteristic of schizophrenia.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis

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this with a conscious monitoring of efference copy. Frith’s analysis relies, not just on an intention to act (move or think), but an awareness of the intention to act, and he defines this awareness as a case of ‘metarepresentation’.

Gallagher examines Frith’s claim that conscious tracking of efference copy constitutes metarepresentation, the second-order monitoring whose failure or excess underlies schizophrenic disruptions of self-attribution.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis

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it seems possible for metarepresentation to go wrong in at least two ways. First, as Frith emphasizes, it can fail in such a way that the schizophrenic can be left without the ability to monitor his own experience.

Gallagher demonstrates that the efference-copy comparator model admits of two distinct pathological modes — under-monitoring and hyper-reflexive over-monitoring — complicating any simple equation of copy-failure with psychopathology.

Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting

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When Jim Burwell had his personal copy of the Multilith Copy rebound sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, he instructed the binder to print ‘ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, Book No. 2 of the First Hundred Mimeographed Copies’ in gilt lettering on the front cover.

Schaberg’s bibliographic reconstruction of the AA Big Book shows that the material copy — how many were printed, what they contained, how they were labeled — is not incidental but constitutive of the text’s therapeutic authority and its community’s founding mythology.

Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019supporting

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his ideas helped transform biochemistry… from a discipline concerned with enzymes and the transformation of energy… to a discipline concerned with the transformation of information (how information is copied, transmitted, and modified within the cell).

Kandel situates biological copying — the replication and transmission of genetic information — as the conceptual pivot that redirected mid-twentieth-century science toward the informational paradigm now central to memory research and the neuroscience of mind.

Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting

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there are three minor and two substantive differences between the text of this letter saved in the Rockefeller archives (which is quoted here) and the one in the A. A. archives in New York City.

Variant copies of the same foundational document preserved in different archives yield substantive textual discrepancies, illustrating how the copy rather than the hypothetical original is what depth of historical reconstruction must actually work with.

Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019supporting

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he wondered aloud if perhaps an annotated copy of the Multilith printing might still be found in the archives of the Archdiocese of New York; an excellent suggestion that was never pursued.

The search for an annotated copy of the Multilith printing exemplifies how the physical survival of a marked-up text would provide irreplaceable evidence about early editorial interventions in the creation of AA’s foundational document.

Schaberg, William H, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside

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use of certain cell functions by the organism during its lifetime actually alters the structure of that cell, leading to what has been called ‘cell memory’.

McGilchrist’s discussion of epigenetic ‘cell memory’ implies that biological copying is never neutral reproduction but always an expression shaped by prior use, paralleling depth-psychological arguments about how experience modifies the templates it transmits.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside

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