Regarding self-awareness:
@Constance you had noted that an organisms self-awareness is present in even the very "simplest" of living systems.
(I'm just thinking out loud) but there seem to be many "layers" of awareness. (As awareness is a mental/phenomenal thing, I think all layers of awareness constitute mind.) Is there a difference between phenomenal experience and awareness? I think there is.
There is the
affectual phenomenal experience (awareness?) that arises with physical living systems seeking homeostasis within the dynamic environment.
There is the phenomenal experience when an organism
internally represents the
external environment. Does this happen at the homeostatic level? Is the process of homeostasis the process of internally representing external reality?
It does some to me that consciousness -- phenomenal experience -- emerges from proto-consciousness when an organism (or system) is able to
internally, non-conceptually represent some aspect of
external reality. (Internal and external are just terms; it might be more accurate to say: phenomenal experience arises when physical system A creates a representation of physical system B.
A poor example might be when a cell is chemically arranged one way when it senses sunlight, and is chemically arranged a different way when it does not sense sunlight. That's horribly vague, but the idea is that when physical systems begin to dynamically arrange themselves in ways that "represent" the "non-them" environment.
We might say that systems able to do this are "aware" (of external/non-them) reality.
This is the most basic awareness.
I'm also wondering about the difference in awareness of the body self, the mental self, and awareness of awareness.
That is, an organism can have an affectual (homeostatic) awareness of the body self and the surrounding non-body self.
But an organism can have a
conceptual awareness of their body and their non-body.
An organism can have a conceptual awareness of their
awareness of their body and their non-body. This might be the
sense of self or self-awareness.
In other words, their is a
body self-awareness and then there is a
mental self-awareness.
Is mental
self-awareness the same as
awareness-awareness? We can be aware of the body, we can be aware that we are aware of the body, and we can be aware that we are aware that we are aware of the body. Or no?
Finally, one other idea I wanted to share:
In the beginning, a dynamic process began of physical reality differentiating (forming) into physical structures. Along with the formation of primitive physical structures were the formation of primitive informational structures. These primitive physical systems were inanimate, and thus the corresponding information systems were inanimate. These inanimate physical systems were slaves to causal, deterministic forces (although there was inherent randomness).
At some point, living physical systems/structures emerged and thus living informational systems/structures. The process of dynamic evolution continued.
Somewhere in this evolution of animate physical systems and corresponding informational systems (perhaps earlier than later), a "strange" thing began to happen. Whereas it had been that informational structures followed from physical structures, now informational structures (thoughts) began to exert
causal influence on physical structures (organisms).
The above thought may be (a) horrible flawed, or (b) articulated much better by someone else, but I just wanted to share it.
