Professor Hills and Professor Stephen Butterfill, from Warwick’s Department of Philosophy, created different descriptive models to explain the process behind the rat’s deliberation at the ‘choice points’.
One model, the Naive Model, assumed that animals inhibit action during simulation. However, this model created false memories because the animal would be unable to tell the differences between real and imagined actions.…
“The study answers a very old question: do animals have a sense of self? Our first aim was to understand the recent neural evidence that animals can project themselves into the future. What we wound up understanding is that, in order to do so, they must have a primal sense of self.”
“As such, humans must not be the only animal capable of self-awareness. Indeed, the answer we are led to is that anything, even robots, that can adaptively imagine themselves doing what they have not yet done, must be able to separate the knower from the known.”
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-06-self-awareness-unique-mankind.html#jCp
The question is what do we mean by “sense of self”.
When we talk about sense of self, what we say is influenced greatly by culture, by what others say about themselves. I doubt that other animals have that kind of sense of self. But they pretty much have to have some kind of sense of self — at least for mammals and birds.
The definition here is a bit more narrow. Do rats, et al have the ability to imagine consequences of actions before acting.
The implication — as I see it — is whether anticipation evolved gradually.
That seems to me fairly obvious. I mean I don’t see why it shouldn’t have, and every reason why it should.
It’s the reason I think pzombies are nonsense. In order to navigate the world successfully, we need to make a “map” of the past and future, on which we ourselves feature. Any navigating animal has to do this, but animals probably vary in how meta the maps are (maps that include the mapper, for instance).
A pzombie that behaved “exactly like we do” would have to have, I would argue, a sense of self in order to be able to accomplish such behaviour.
OK, back to rats….
I have to say that not all our furry friends are equally endowed in the smarts department. I have a very nice cat door with a vinyl flap you can see through if you are paranoid about what’s on the other side.
My cat has used this door thousands of times both coming and going.
But a couple times a day he will track down a human to let him out the human door. It’s actually out of his way.
I’m pretty sure that the answer is “yes”. They might not see as many consequences as we see, but that’s a different issue.
Elizabeth:
Sure, but no one (that I’m aware of, anyway) is arguing that p-zombies would lack a sense of self — just that they would lack qualia (by definition).
Self-driving cars actually meet your criterion for having a “sense of self”:
I would argue that a self-driving car, despite meeting that criterion, is more like a p-zombie than like a conscious human.
I would argue — without evidence — that self-awareness must evolve. If we figure out how to build AI that can evolve, watch out.
Could be a slow process, however.
petrushka,
In that case you must be thinking of “self-awareness” as quite different from what Lizzie and I are discussing.
How would you describe it?
petrushka,
Betty the New Caledonian Crow certainly does.
In a prior thread Elizabeth made a distinction between sense and perception. Would that be useful here as well?
What needs to be added to sense, if anything, for something to have a sense of self? A memory? The capacity to develop some level of a model of the environment?
Why can’t a bacteria have a sense of self?
If an organism can adapt to it’s environment, doesn’t it follow that it has a sense of self?
Careful, you’re getting awfully close to the sorts of questions asked by biosemioticians!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexk%C3%BCll
Posting by phone makes me stupider than usual.
Tomorrow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_ecology
http://sensoryecology.com/
http://sensoryecology.blogspot.com/
Inner Representations and Signs in Animals
Yes I think they do. They are beings working with their memory.
Robis never will have a self. They only are memory machines however different layers of memory may be created.
God created life with his shadow the bible says. Its alive in its being.
Its thoughtful.
Mung, your links are interesting. We have some advantages over the early 20th century behaviorists.
We can image brain activity while subjects are conscious and performing tasks.
We can model neurons in silicon and test hypotheses about connections and networks.
We know a lot more about things like glial cells and the endocrine system.
Actually those are good questions. I think you might need more than just awareness of surroundings for a sense of self, you also need to have a sense of others. It may be that a sense of self is more useful in a social species where you need to know your status with respect to your peers.
Is there a difference between action and reaction as understood from Newtonian physics and action and reaction as observed in living organisms?
If there is a difference, how could such a difference arise?
Newtonian physics doesn’t describe chemistry very well.
An E.coli bacterium can locate itself in an optimum nutrient concentration without knowing where it is going or being able to to steer itself by a “run and tumble” strategy that is informed by sensory readings of nutrient concentration.
Nice overview by Mark Lasbury
Does communication require a sense of self?
Biocommunications
I would describe it as awareness by the aware thing that the aware thing is a member of the category “aware thing”.
And I don’t see why it shouldn’t evolve. Awareness that other things include aware things and not-aware things is obviously hugely advantageous (from telling predators or prey from plants, for instance) – the step in which the organism reflexively so-categorises itself doesn’t seem a huge one. Indeed there are intermediary steps. And again, one can see huge advantages.
I
No.
One of your more convincing arguments. However, communication involves concepts such as sender and receiver and intention. Are you saying biological organisms don’t communicate?
In addition:
So yes.
Well, I wasn’t sure what you are getting at, or just what you meant by “communication”. But if you mean “a signal passes between two entities that causes one to change its behaviour”, not only are there examples in subatomic physics, and in inorganic chemistry, but there are countless examples in organic chemistry and in between higher biological units including your own cells, bacteria. and between plants, and I think in most cases it doesn’t involve “a sense of self”, at least according to most concepts of a “self”.
But perhaps you meant something different by “communication”?
Communicate:
to convey knowledge of or information about : make known
to reveal by clear signs
to cause to pass from one to another
to transmit information, thought, or feeling so that it is satisfactorily received or understood
I find it incredibly odd that we can think that two machines can communicate but we don’t want to say that animals (other than humans) communicate.
http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/communicate