[MD] Consciousness a la Platt

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Craig]
I don't think anyone knows what it's like to be a cat (or a bat). 

[Arlo]
No, we can only make assumptions based on observations. 

[Craig[
But if my cats are "self-conscious", it's analogous to the self-consciousness
of an infant, except that it's not increasing.

[Arlo]
Just out of curiousity, would you say the consciousness of mosquitos are
analogous to an infant as well? I'd agree that human infants have a
consciousness equal to many primates. And here's where the language gets
trickier (and we'll likely disagree). I'd say that human infants share an
analogous consciousness to "socialized" primates. Indeed, my point is that
self-consciousness begins with socialization, so anything "with"
self-consciousness is (by my reckoning) a socialized organism. Your cat...
maybe I could see that cats exhibit some form of social awareness (albeit much
less than primates, and certainly much less than humans).

[Craig]
(Koko was closer to a toddler & improved with each increase in language
ability.)

[Arlo]
If I recall, no amount of instruction or socialization would ever make Koko
skilled beyond what her neurobiology would allow. This is why I think that,
stepping even further down, self-consciousness only is possible in organisms
with a sufficiently complex neurobiology to allow the kind of "processing" that
self-consciousness requires.

[Craig]
The same:  They distinguish themselves from other things.   
Different: They don't worry about immortality, responsibility, etc.  

[Arlo]
The former is not what I'd call "self-consciousness". A mosquito knows the food
it is ingestion is "not it", but I don't think it has any sense of "who I am".
The former derives simply from biological sensations and biological experience.
The latter, where self-consciousness begins, draws from a symbolically mediated
understanding of "who I am". 

Self-reference via a "name", for example, is what I'd look for as a first sign
of self-consciousness. 

[Craig]
I'm with Ham on this one. Cats that know what's "not them", ipso facto know 
>what IS them. 

[Arlo]
Again, I think this has nothing to do with "self-consciousness" but only
(only!) the response to biological sensation and experience. 

[Craig]
I think the root of our disagreement is that I think self-consciousness is
biological.

[Arlo]
You're not alone. Many people think this. One certainly can't deny that brain
damage, or birth defects limiting neural development play a causal role in an
undeveloped self-consciousness. But my opinion is that while the hardware is
certainly necessary, it itself is not enough. 

I point to studies with feral children (not many, agree), and the
self-reflections of Helen Keller (who says that her "birth" was the moment she
realized that the biological sensations she was experiencing on her hand (being
drawn their by her caregive) was a symbol for the wet-stuff she'd take into her
mouth (water). In THAT moment, Keller wrote, when she had her first "word" she
was "born". 

[Craig]
As a paid-up member of the human race, I am part of all levels. For instance, I
am a citizen of a country.  But my self-consciousness doesn't depend on my
being aware that I am a citizen.

[Arlo]
It does depend on you being somehow socialized, to assimilate a social
language, to engage socially with other humans. But, no, it does not depend on
you being a "citizen" of any "country". 

[Craig]
Sorry, I thought your position was that self-consciousness originates in an
"Aha!" moment. 

[Arlo]
Yeah, I guess when I think of the "Aha!" moment when shared attention launched
the social level, I think of a moment when (to reduce it to two primates),
neither primate new what was happening, maybe I'd call this "mutual Aha!"
(mutual of omAHA?... the shared buddhist moment?)

Infants certainly, like Helen Keller, experience an "Aha!" of their own as the
realize that the words and sounds and sights they see are symbolic
representations of their world, and that by using those symbols the power of a
social world opens up to them. But this is very orchestrated "Aha!, so I guess
I wasn't thinking of it the same way.

So if I could revise my statement, I'd say that, yes, "Aha!" moments of
recognizing shared attention happen in all infants, and they are the beginning
of that infants development of consciousness. But these "Aha!" moments are
merely following in the footsteps of the first "Aha!" moment which launched the
entirety of the social level. Parents expect their children to develop
socially, those first primates had no idea what their activity would lead to.