What is self-awareness, anyhow?
Yeah, navel-gazing. I’m reading more from Covey’s Seven Habits and he describes this wonderful thing we have that animals presumably don’t, called self-awareness. He says that we are superior and have dominion over the earth because of this ability to observe our thoughts and feelings and understand ourselves as being separate from these thoughts and feelings.
I think that’s important – believing myself to be my thoughts is a trap I used to fall into. I like the way my priest described it: in meditation, all our organs continue to function: our stomachs digest food, our hearts pump blood, and our brains produce thoughts. My thoughts are vital to me, but they are not me, any more than my blood, food, or air are me.
So the question is: what is this self of which I’m supposed to be aware? I am aware of these aspects of me, my heartbeat, my thoughts, and so on, but I’m not really sure what else there is other than the assembled parts. We can’t really be aware of ourselves any more than we can see our own eyeball. If an animal has sophisticated cogitative facilities, I assume that it would be aware of its thoughts. So I’m not sure that it’s self-awareness that distinguishes us.
I dunno. On the other hand, I am aware of my experience as I act and cogitate. Maybe that’s all it means. Still, why assume that an animal with less sophisticated thinking ability would be any less aware of their own actions and experiences?
Have you heard of the
Have you heard of the “mirror test”?
I’m deeply, deeply
I’m deeply, deeply suspicious of any philosophy that presumes an innate, unbridgable gulf of difference between “humans” and “animals”. We came out of the same base material and evolutionary processes that created all the other animals. We’re animals. Our differences are differences of degree rather than differences of kind.
All mammals have neocortexes, which seems to be the root of our ability to remember past experiences, predict the consequence of future ones, and modulate our behavior accordingly. I think that intersection of memory and imagination is where consciousness comes from — we perceive a coherence to our existence as we pass through time, rather than experiencing an endless, instinctual *now*.
Our neocortexes are much more complicated than any other mammal’s, so dogs for example are probably much more limited in their capacity for both memory and imagination, but they clearly have some of both. They remember and learn. They modulate their behavior based on their predictive abilities. I think dogs are at least as self-aware as a very small child.
The best book I’ve ever read on the phenomenon of consciousness is Jeff Hawkins’ “On Intelligence,” which gives a great overview of the science of the brain.
I think dogs are at least
I think dogs are at least as self-aware as a very small child.
By that do you mean: not at all?
I don’t know that you’ve made a good case for dogs (or any other non-human animal) having an imagination. And even if you did, I don’t see how that implies any level of self-awareness.
I like the definition of “self-awareness” as “thinking about thinking.” I sometimes speculate on all the things going on inside my head that I am unaware of, such as memory. Yeah, sure, my brain can somehow dredge up the details of a Bugs Bunny cartoon I haven’t seen in 20 years and present it to my conscious thoughts, but how does it do that? I am unaware of the process until such time as the images appear in my head of a little-person bank robber shaving in Bugs’ bathroom while Bugs peeks around the corner, and says “Fenster? Smoking a cigar? And shaving?”
I don’t know that you’ve
I don’t know that you’ve made a good case for dogs (or any other non-human animal) having an imagination. And even if you did, I don’t see how that implies any level of self-awareness.
Perceiving time, and perceiving our experience cohesively through time, is the basis of self awareness. Dogs demonstrate a pretty advanced ability to remember past consequences of their actions, to predict the consequences of future actions, and to modulate their behavior accordingly. This is what makes them so trainable. Predicting future consequences is also the essence of imagination.
Dogs have the same basic brain structures we do. There’s no scientific reason to think that the basic mechanics of thinking work differently in our brains than in a dog’s. We do the same kind of thought processing, even though obviously we can do more of it.
Yeah, sure, my brain can somehow dredge up the details of a Bugs Bunny cartoon I haven’t seen in 20 years and present it to my conscious thoughts, but how does it do that?
I’d suggest reading a book on the biology of the brain. There are still a lot of unanswered questions in neuroscience, but we seem to be getting a pretty clear picture of how the mechanics of memory storage and recall work.
“Thinking about thinking”
“Thinking about thinking” doesn’t do it for me, because I don’t believe that my thoughts are myself any more than, say, my blood is myself or my foot is myself. It is a part of my self. Thinking about thinking doesn’t define self-awareness any more than thinking about breathing or thinking about grasping an object with my hand.
Now, OK, that means that I do have a concept of self to which I attach “hands”, “feet” and “thinking”, but that really doesn’t imply any holistic understanding of that self.
I’m happy to accept a continuum of self-awareness. Ants, for example, don’t have any internal biofeedback. If you pull off a leg, they do not notice any difference. A dog, however, knows that her leg is a part of her. Or at least appears to if you start to pull on said leg. You can tell me that a dog doesn’t think about thinking, but I’m not sure that means much, because I don’t believe that dogs have thought processes as sophisticated as ours. It’s an indication of less-sophisticated thought, not an indication of less-sophisticated self-awareness.
Dogs have the same basic
Dogs have the same basic brain structures we do. There’s no scientific reason to think that the basic mechanics of thinking work differently in our brains than in a dog’s. We do the same kind of thought processing, even though obviously we can do more of it.
The bio-mechanics may be the same, but the results not. There could be some “critical mass” of non-aware processes that need to be achieved before self-awareness is possible. Like Hofstadter’s “Ant v. Ant Colony” analogy in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
(I don’t really have much knowledge in this area. I’m just kicking this stuff around because it’s slow at work.)
Our differences of degree
Our differences of degree are still differences, so I’m not sure that describing those differences, or pointing out characteristics that a human should have that other animals should not. It’s absurd to imagine a self-help book titled “You’re Human, So You CAN Walk On Two Legs”, but it’s only absurd, not suspect in my opinion.
I’ll agree though that if that aspect of a philosophy were really a key component, I’d have to consider it a fundamental flaw of the philosophy. To throw out Covey’s “Seven Habits” because he claims that self-awareness is unique to humans when it’s possible or even likely that other creatures are self-aware would be like throwing out a book on walking because I’ve seen bears and cats and dogs get up on their hind legs.
Thinking about thinking
Thinking about thinking doesn’t define self-awareness any more than thinking about breathing or thinking about grasping an object with my hand.
Thinking about thinking is an inherently different process than thinking about breathing or thinking about picking up whatever. Because it shows an awareness of the existence of thought.
Consider all the things you do without really thinking about them. Breathing, throwing a ball, typing, etcetcetc. These are all a kind of “pass-through” processes for your central nervous system. Even though you may be drawing on memory or whatever, it all happens outside of your thoughts. Kind of like a file server. Yes, the processor is involved, but in the end it’s just shuffling the bits back and forth.
But thinking about thinking (meta-thought?) seems to be where the center of my sense of self is. I am centered inside my thoughts and extend out from there, with a rapidly decreasing sense of “me.” To parallel the computer analogy about, thinking about thinking would be actually crunching numbers. Not just moving the bits from the hard drive to the LAN, but performing operations on them that generate new data.
Meta-thought is not the
Meta-thought is not the center of self. Meta-thought is basically masturbation, which is something plenty of lower animals do. How is “huh, I’m thinking” any more of a groundbreaking realization than “huh, I’m walking”?
The computer analogy is deeply flawed. Is a computer that error-checks its processes self-aware?
You also seem to be basing your entire premise on the idea that conscious thought is the self. What if your brain is no more you than your computer? Then it becomes a useful appendage to be valued like your hands, but not your identity. All you have to do is catch a ball thrown at you without consciously calculating the trajectory, speed, and air resistance to know that your conscious thought processes != your self.
Again, how is thinking about thinking special in a way that thinking about physics isn’t? In that it’s part of self-awareness how is it different from thinking about, say, playing basketball?
I think that statements like
I think that statements like Covey’s are horseshit.
It’s similar to “intelligent design,” which has been described as “drawing a target around the arrow.”
Sure, pick something that humans do best, and/or we can’t yet prove that animals can do, and declare that ability to be proof that humans are superior.
We’re always doing it. Decide that written language is what separates the humans from the lower forms of life, and hey, you can even exclude some actual HUMANS.
I first noticed this almost 20 years ago, observing (and, yes, participating) arguments about the “superiority” of different personal computing platforms. PC clone fans claimed that the system that ran productivity apps the best was “best.” Amiga fans believed that multitasking and graphics were the things that determined the superiority of a platform, programmers laughed at anything but UNIX, graphic artists wanted nothing to do with anything that didn’t have a rainbow Apple on it, etc. etc.
And we all managed to get by with systems that were second best at the other things. The real zealots convinced themselves that their systems did EVERYTHING better than all the others (yeah, sure, buddy, there is a version of Photoshop that will start on your Windows 3.0 system, and there’s a shareware Word clone that the Amiga “community” says is far superior to the Microsoft version.…)
Anyway, most of the “what sets humans apart from lower life forms” arguments remind me of that.
And conversely, the arguments for humans being inherently more evil are horseshit as well. Anyone who thinks that humans are the only animals who kill for fun has never lived with a yard cat. Anyone who believes that humans are the only animals that go to war needs to read up on ants and primates.
Yeah.
House cats kill for
Yeah.
House cats kill for fun, too.
So the only reason I’m backpedalling on this point at all is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don’t think that Covey’s assertion that certain qualities are uniquely human invalidates the rest of the book.
“Drawing a target around the arrow” is the best description I’ve ever heard for the anthropic principle. Love it!
In the end, Covey is flattering the reader based on the (likely valid) assumption that the reader is human. It’s sort of the reverse of the comedian I saw make a tasteless joke about the Amish. When the audience booed him, he pointed to the cameras taping his performance and said, “what, like they’re gonna hear me say that on cable?”
Generally what annoys me are
Generally what annoys me are the analyses that start from what I think is a religious distinction between humanity and the rest of the animal world, and then seek to support that faith-based distinction by placing undue importance on our species-level variations. I’m not talking about Covey here because I haven’t read him, but certainly your summary of his thinking – “we are superior and have dominion over the earth” – makes the warning siren flash in my head. That’s Old Testament terminology, not science.
We are much more intelligent than any other species, and that has made us remarkably successful, but we are not the most successful species on the earth. We are neither the most long-lived nor the most numerous of Earth’s organisms. We’re not most adaptable, and we’re certainly not the one that contributes the most to the larger biosphere. And the “dominion over the beasts” rhetoric seems to me, in practice, to do little but justify cruelty to animals and foster in us a destructive (and illusory) sense of dissociation from the workings of nature.
There’s obviously something special about human consciousness, I’m not denying that. I’m just agreeing with you that other mammals likely do have some degree of self-awareness. And from a moral perspective, I think that we’d be a lot better off as a species if we stopped seeing ourselves as divinely-anointed rulers of the beasts, and instead were mindful of our kinship and similarites with the other animals populating this planet.
House cats kill for fun,
House cats kill for fun, too.
weird! I’ve been thinking about “evil” a lot lately, and specifically about how to reconcile my beliefs that a) it is not evil for a housecat to torture a mouse, or for a tiger to torture a human; b) it is evil for a human to torture an another human or an animal; and c) humans are animals. I’ve been mulling over a post on the subject; it’s an interesting synchronicity to see it on my friendslist!