What does it mean to be “self-conscious?”
As human beings, we know what self-consciousness is. We experience it all the time. We experience being aware of ourselves as separate from other things.
Self-consciousness is rooted in the experience of an inner and outer world. The inner world being that which I call “myself” and the outer world the “not me.” The inner world is what we commonly call the “self.” If we were unable to distinguish between inner and outer, between self and not-self, then we could have no concept of self, and by extension, no self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness also implies a consciousness that is aware of the inner (self) and the outer worlds. Jung calls this consciousness the Self (capitalized first letter). This is the agent of self-consciousness. The Self is aware, or conscious of, the self.
As stated previously, we know about self-consciousness from our own subjective experience. We may assume that everyone’s experience of consciousness is pretty much the same as our own. The truth is though, that we really don’t know whether this is the case or not. We make assumptions about other people’s consciousness from what we perceive of them through their actions.
Just as there are levels of consciousness or awareness, there are also levels of self-consciousness. The ancient maxim “Know Thyself” inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, refers to the strengthening of this ability.
But can computers be “self-conscious?”
Filed in Thoughts 4 Comments so far
4 Responses to “What does it mean to be “self-conscious?””
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dgreene on 12 Nov 2009 at 12:24 am #
This would require that we create new consciousness rather than extend our own, and I see two problems there. We only know of self-consciousness associated with “living things,” and it seems possible that “living” and “non-living” are distinct categories, like “real” and “imagined,” or “finite” and “infinite.” If we try to base a created self-consciousness on us, the factors include all the physical and biologic events interacting on Earth over the last several billion years that have given rise to our blogging today. Could self-consciousness arise given a certain number of complex neural-type connections, as an “identity” that “lives” in the machine? Such an identity would appear to belong to the same category as ghosts and flying Kung Fu masters.
dgreene on 13 Nov 2009 at 12:48 am #
If consciousness is a process that can’t be held by the mind as an object, then self-consciousness must be of the same stuff. The “spiritual” must enter here, with consciousness omnipresent with the physical, and with self-consciousness as a “higher” consciousness, and as religions claim, higher levels beyond. I suspect knowledge of the physical will never answer all of our questions, but just demarcate our limits. M-theory may be the “theory of everything,” except of us. So while the strings vibrate, and the 11 dimensions surround us, our starting point for exploring consciousness will remain “I am,” and we will be left to accept with the Zen masters that the highest consciousness isn’t “out there,” but here now, “in the present moment.”
drbrown on 15 Nov 2009 at 12:31 pm #
Thank you VERY much for your wonderful comments!
I’m sure it says something about me that even the distinctions of living/non-living, real/imagined, finite/infinite are not nearly as clear cut to me as they once were. I’m not really arguing that computers are going to be self-conscious in the same way that we are. Just as we didn’t design airplanes to flap their wings like birds, any self-conscious technology that emerges will likely not closely resemble the self-conscious mechanism of humans (although advances in biology, physics and nanotechnology might allow this).
Hey… wait a minute! What’s this about ghosts and flying Kung Fu masters? I still hope to be a flying Kung Fu master some day…
dgreene on 17 Nov 2009 at 11:31 pm #
You’ve raised amazing questions I would never have conceived, that are at the “cutting edge” of today’s science/technology, and I suspect you are one of the very few who could lead and frame the discussion. I’m gonna have to go back to the philosophy books before I can go any further. I would bet on you against any flying Kung Fu master in a dunking contest!