Self-Consciousness Without Consciousness

Honestly I have not ever witnessed a serious person mistakenly define ‘consciousness’ as ’self-consciousness,’ nor conflate the two if they are discussing consciousness. But I have seen countless philosophers set their definitions in unsure territory, presuming that others like to define consciousness as or similar to self-consciousness, I guess because they are themselves unsure of the semantic arguments available. People seem to think that self-consciousness somehow has something to do with consciousness; it is another sort of consciousness at least. Color me disagreed.

The problem is, even in an entirely physical system, without any inclination a priori to account for consciousness, we would naturally stumble upon members in our model that have self-consciousness, which is a physical phenomenon, almost completely accounted for in our current spatiotemporal explanations.

Imagine that we run a grand simulation of our universe that takes account of an at least slightly advanced model of physical matter that we have now — advanced enough to run a convincing simulation of our universe — and we begin to run it from the Big Bang. We speed ahead billions of years to our simulated Earth. We then use our engine interface to travel below SimEarth’s clouds, and we see there cities; humans. We choose a human and zoom in on it, penetrate the body, through the nose, going up into nerve wiring, and follow its electrical path into the temporal cortex. From there we activate some engine AI to help brighten up our view of the brain, and we’re presented with a hideously squished up neuron parade, thousands of them, passing information back and fourth. Our engine AI also has another trick — its ability to convert the neural firings into a language we can sort of understand. What we’ll find, if we dig around enough in the brain, and witness enough reactions of, are meta-configurations in the brain, or parts of the brain which seem to model other parts of the brain; refer to other parts of the brain. The brain of this simulated human seems to have naturally evolved a completely physical process of referring to itself. We do not at all need to assume beforehand that it is conscious for us to clearly see that it is self-conscious. The self-consciousness allows the human to regulate its actions according to previous actions, previous thoughts, and quite recent thoughts as well. The human’s brain system is calculating the causality of the system — in at least some sense, the brain is as cognizant of the outside world as it is of itself. And all of this evolved naturally, and physically, without us needing to presume any sense of experience or quality of consciousness itself.

The point is that self-consciousness is capable of being completely defined in our current models of the universe; self-consciousness is a predictable, physical state of matter. We do not at all need to talk about a system being conscious, or assume that it is, to arrive at conditions that are self-conscious. We have that proof in our own wirings.

This is not to say that I don’t think self-consciousness implies consciousness. I think that it does, but only in the way that I think that all physical states, and all matter, have consciousness as well. I am not going to defend a sort of panexperientialism here. It is just a semantic bit this time. (However, I will add, that one not inclined towards non-dualist panexperiential ideas should think about how it is possible to say ‘I am cognating about experience itself’.)