Self-Consciousness

Three Usages of Self-Consciousness

• 1.
  Core self-consciousness. According to this usage, self-consciousness is an essential structural property of consciousness that conditions all other forms of awareness. The controversial claim presupposed by the usage (sometimes referred to as the “self-awareness thesis” or SAT) is that all conscious beings possess this type of self-consciousness irrespective of their conceptual sophistication or their capacities for introspection. According to the SAT, consciousness is necessarily aware of itself in all its streams or episodes. The SAT has been held, in one form or another, over millennia by a variety of philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and other investigators of consciousness, including, notably, Aristotle, René Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Franz Brentano, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, and the phenomenologists who followed Husserl. The SAT has had few supporters in Anglo-American philosophy of mind, but this has recently changed. In the cognitive neuroscience literature, the most notable proponent of the SAT is Antonio Damasio, with his distinction between core and extended consciousness and his focus on the primordial experience of the body and emotion. In the artificial intelligence-inspired literature, it is Douglas Hofstadter. The qualifier “core” derives from the work of Damasio; in the literature, one will find many qualifiers used to designate this form of self-consciousness (e.g., prereflective, nonpositional, nonthetic, marginal, inattentive, peripheral, tacit).
• 2.
  Introspective self-consciousness. The second usage refers to the exercise of the ability to attend to, conceptualize, and report on one's mental states. This form of self-consciousness is also sometimes marked by the qualifiers “reflective” and “attentive.” This form of self-consciousness plays a crucial role in normal mental life: in self-orienting and ongoing inner dialogue, in reconcep-tualization of personality traits and goals, and in sharing intentions, feelings, and so forth with others. Presumably, animals and infants could be self-conscious in the first sense of the term but have limited or no introspective self-consciousness. Introspective self-consciousness plays a critical role in the practice of cognitive psychology and neuroscience, both in the scientists’ own heuristic introspection and in the self-reports of experimental subjects, a crucial source of data in many experimental paradigms. However, it remains subject to multiple sources: “noise” fatigue, distraction, failure to communicate or understand instructions, personality and emotional biases, social conformity, and confabulation. Researchers have called for the development of rigorous experimental methods of cross validation to minimize errors stemming from such limitations and to allow for the better correlation of ongoing experiences with spontaneous brain activity.
• 3.
  Extended self-consciousness. The third usage is sometimes indicated with the qualifier “autobiographical,” and refers to the conscious access to and projection of the memory-laden information necessary for conceptualizing and situating oneself as an ego, self, person, or responsible agent with a culturally and socially mediated history and anticipated future. It is closely related to the notion of the “self-concept.” Extended self-consciousness may be the most derivative of the three as it seems to depend on the former two. It requires an extended degree of conceptualization of space, time, dispositions, causal relations, and moral notions, and is likely most developed in adults. Its accuracy depends on the time and resource-consuming cognitive ability to reflectively notice and integrate one's stream of experiences, patterns of behaviors, affective reactions, interests, and motivations. It can be biased by various motives, personality traits, and coping mechanisms. The self-concept tends to undergo development during childhood, adolescence, and midlife and can be modified by positive or negative experiences (e.g., love, loss, depression, and treatment). Finally, the self-concept can be eroded by degenerative disease (e.g., Alzheimer's disease [AD]) or strongly affected by other forms of brain damage, while the subject can remain otherwise self-conscious in senses one and two. Extended self-consciousness is thus a far more dynamic property than the other two types. During the progression of AD, extended self-consciousness is among the first cognitive functions to be affected, followed by introspective self-consciousness, while core self-consciousness is among the last functions to disappear. Core, introspective, and even some extended self-consciousness appear to remain largely preserved in neuropsychological cases of patients with profound retrograde and anterograde amnesia.

[Page 675]Many authors cite experiences of complete absorption during activities in which one seems to lose track of oneself as evidence that there can be consciousness without any self-consciousness whatsoever. Beyond the potential paradox of such a position, which seems to imply the possibility of experiences (e.g., pain) with no owner or subject of the experience, it seems generally to assume that self-consciousness is to be taken in senses two or three. While it is true that one is not introspecting all the time and that one ceases to think about oneself as an autobiographical ego in times of complete absorption, it also does not seem entirely implausible that animals, infants, and sufferers of degenerative disease could be self-conscious without introspective capacity and without having much of an autobiographical self.

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