thread: 2007-02-26 : Exorcism followthrough
On 2007-03-02, Charles S wrote:
The answer that experience of self (which we each know that we have) can not be addressed by science would seem to be saying that the question of the nature of experience of self is not merely a hard question, but an unanswerable one. It certainly doesn't sound like an easy question.
However, I experience myself as having a variable amount of awareness of self. There are times when I act without awareness of the action (to various degrees). There are times where I have no consciousness of self (deep sleep) some dreams, certain chemically altered states. If the degree of self reported consciousness of self can be associated with the state of the brain, then that would suggest that the consciousness of self is an emergent property of the brain.
The question then becomes why, and that one seems more easily answered. What does consciousness of self do for you? It seems to me that consciousness of self is integral to sophisticated learning. If you have no sense of self, no perception of your own thoughts, would you be able to consciously regulate your thoughts? It seems to me that you wouldn't. Or rather, that the ability to consciously regulate your thoughts manifests as an awareness of self.
I tend to assume that self awareness varies with the ability to learn, and that the self awareness in which you are able to understand that when you look in a mirror that what you see is yourself is probably connected to the self awareness in which you have an idea of yourself. Given that that sort of self awareness only exists in a few species of vertebrates (has anyone ever done those tests on any of the really smart octopods?), I tend to doubt that any living thing besides those species has a similar sense of self to what I experience myself as having, and I therefore tend to doubt that non-living things have anything like my sense of self. Perhaps rocks have some completely different sense of self, but I can't really see how (or even what that means).
If sense of self depends on thinking, and thinking is something that runs on brains, then sense of self depends on brains, and is probably only an emergent property of sufficiently complex brains. That still leaves why it is there at all, which is certainly not an answered question, and certainly the definitional problems of what does self consciousness mean make answering it more difficult, but it isn't answered for any specific clear definition of sense of self either.
So it is a hard question. And I don't think my answers are complete or particularly solid, but I don't think that the entire question of self awareness can simply be shunted off into the "We can never know" category.
