How do you define a relative self?

[Xonas Pitfall]

To clarify, I'm talking about the relative self (lowercase self), not the total Self or total consciousness.

I feel like there's a lot of debate around questions such as: "Is a fetus conscious?" "Are animals conscious?" "Could AI develop consciousness? If not through electronic hardware, what about AI built using organoids or biological neurons (wetware)?", "When does a baby or child become conscious?" "When was the first time you felt your relative self or ego forming?"

When would you say a relative self, ego, or sense of "I" forms, and why/how?

Is it dependent on specific areas of the human brain, or is it more about higher-order complexity, information processing, and the capacity for self-reflection?

For example, let's say you could connect a fly's brain to a second brain that significantly increases its processing power, memory, and capacity for self-reflection. Would the fly then develop a sense of "I"? Would it become self-aware in a way it wasn't before?

How would you even create, define, or measure that?

I'd be really curious to hear people's thoughts on this! 

[integral]

AI is a P-zombie. 

It's behaviorally identical to a human but completely lacks phenomenal experience.

A calculator does not experience 2+2 = 4 when you hit enter.

I suspect human experience is the brain drawing all of its senses onto a screen And it uses tricks of memory to create continuity, object permanence and time. 

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For example, let's say you could connect a fly's brain to a second brain that significantly increases its processing power, memory, and capacity for self-reflection. Would the fly then develop a sense of "I"? Would it become self-aware in a way it wasn't before?

The fly is experiencing something. Self awareness is not necessary for experience.

Edited 14 hours ago by integral

[cetus]

21 minutes ago, Xonas Pitfall said:

When would you say a relative self, ego, or sense of "I" forms, and why/how?

You could write a book on that one. But I will say, of course, it doesn't happen overnight.

Why? Self-preservation. Survival. Natural instinct.

[kavaris]

The relative is the total self. Thats why the paradox is possible, thats why everything feels this way of like, a rise in some more complex. We are communicating, tlkin, tryina conjure up wtf this is, and we are mistaking complexity of nature w/ The Self (Period... or wat weve imagined it to be....) Alas, that is what gives it a sense of like "Why is life like this, why am i the thing looking out at the thing", Like... That is itself *what it is*. Its a freaky self thing. The fact that we interact w/ things comes w/ perception as the main thing, and not "a primary self, a secondary nature, etc, etc" Like its all just Self, period. The complexity happens within the self. Nature is just what Complexity w/ a /C/ happens to be lookin like right now.

Edited 10 hours ago by kavaris

[kavaris]

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How would you even create, define...

Exactly. Id say dont try it, as youd be imaginging *what measuring is* and then predicating the nature of everything on the ability to measure and receive results. Like, its a world of reimagining is all, and thats the question id go to first for practicality, like "what is it then to imagine" typeve things. Or just "What is imagination", not that its the best place to jump off from, but its the best least best least or whatever.

Edited 10 hours ago by kavaris

[Carl-Richard]

Meta-awareness is the ability to self-reflect on experience. This happens around 3 years old in humans. You'll notice that this is often where your first memories are from. It's the first time you have gathered a coherent sense of locus of autobiographical memory that you can start to self-reflect on it (i.e. recall it and say to yourself "this is indeed this thing" implicitly).

Sentience seems to arise before reflecting on it. You didn't start feeling your ass only when you focused on it and said "I'm indeed experiencing sitting on my ass right now". You just focused on it and re-represented it. Meta-awareness is a re-representing of contents in sentience. And the core of sentience seems to be about representing the boundaries of our bodily vehicle.

We may extrapolate the primacy of sentience of our experience as illustrated above evolutionarily, in that we evolutionarily started to feel things before re-representing them. And where do we draw that "boundary"? Perhaps at the existence of bodily boundaries. And if you look at the evolution (and ontogenesis) of multicellular life, it all starts at a single cell dividing. So where does the boundary of inside vs outside start to be defined? Perhaps the boundary of the cell membrane.

And as the organism grows into a multicelluar one, perhaps at the bodily boundaries of that organism. Because the cells grow out from each other and work together in a coordinated organic fashion. And they all act to maintain the same bodily boundary. In fact, it might even be more accurate to think of it as a single cell differentiating itself "inwards", rather than multiple cells growing outwards. You can even see this visually when a cell is diving in an animal embryo. Although it becomes murky for some earlier forms of multicellular life where the cooperation between cells is less coordinated.

Also some colony lifeforms, e.g. slime molds, fuse individual cells (dissolving the cell membrane and keeping the nuclei) into a single big cell and operate in a coordinate unit. You could imagine that the individual selves dissolved/sacrificed themselves and became a part of a larger whole.