My science literacy is lacking.
Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study, but any brain research pretty fascinating.
That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
I don't think this is correct.
Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way.
But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
Reality, again is a very vague word in physics. One definition is, real is that which always is, not that which is not. Material nature is subject to constant change, there is nothing in the material universe that is immovable, unchanging and eternally static and stable.
Eastern philosophy describes the reality as the 'Self', the self is eternally existing without a causation but this Self, the observer, requires an observation and hence the concept of material nature comes into place to justify the existence of the observer but the Self is mutually exclusive to the material nature. The Self is not an manifestation of the material nature, otherwise it would be ever changing, like material nature.
For science to explain consciousness, it has to drop the idea of a controlled experiment. You cannot empirically verify certain thing to be true, this is what metaphysics is for.
I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions).
It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas.
Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction.
[0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
The "self" is just a psychological construct - the actor behind our actions, which in fact is just the brain. This is just the way our brain has evolved to understand/predict an evolutionary landscape full of autonomous agents, who we need to model to predict their behavior. There's no fundamental difference between "self" (my-self) and "you" (your-self) - our brain observes some (inner or outer) entity as a causal entity, and models it.
Well, most animals have awareness, but not self-awareness.
> there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
That doesn't seem to be true at all. The idea of a self is very testable.
I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness.
Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can.
I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else).
A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible.
How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. And since all that exists in our lives is our collection of sentient experiences of reality, this is a pretty big ethical question.
Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood.
> There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”.
Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it.
> Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient.
You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.
I don’t think so - see https://chatgpt.com/share/507ca1a4-43a3-4b30-afaf-08273ed54d...
(I just tried once)
This is of course not meant as proof or knowledge of any kind, but just that the way I’m using the words is what the “average” of how people in books and on the internet would use those words.
I don’t understand how “evolution and brain development” cause sensations to arise. What part of our biology is the part directly producing sentience experience? How would you explain why we experience anything instead of nothing? Can we replicate it in a non-biological system?
- consciousness
- sentience
- self-awareness
- sapience
(It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality.
I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.