by Paul Singh
Damasio, Antonio. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Random House, 2010.
Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Penguin, 2014.
Dennett, Daniel. Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Friedenberg, Jay. Visual Attention and Consciousness. New York: Psychology Press, 2013.
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Hirstein, William. Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Koch, Christof. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Koch, Christof. The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Englewood, CO: Roberts and Company, 2004.
Northoff, Georg. Unlocking the Brain, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Perlovsky, Leonid, and Roman Ilin. “Brain. Conscious and Unconscious Mechanisms of Cognition, Emotions, and Language.” Brain Sciences 2 (2012): 790–834.
Pohl, Rüdiger. Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory. New York: Psychology Press, 2012.
Prinz, Jesse. The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Accepting the material truth that consciousness arises from the brain’s operations and that it can’t have its own existence apart from brains is the beginning of wisdom about one’s self. We can be consciously aware of ourselves as bodies in the world, something that some other animals can grasp too. We can also regard ourselves as individuals among other individuals of our own species, which appears to be a higher cognitive capacity shared among primates and many other species of mammals. What begins to separate us clearly from almost all other animals is an advanced ability to track the things that make us uniquely different. Only, humans, however, can additionally understand what they look like from the perspective of other people. This ability to see ourselves from the viewpoint of other people leads to seeing ourselves as unique selves.
The psychological and brain sciences have extended our knowledge of how the brain functions much further. The scientific account about the “self,” and where it comes from, doesn’t sound much like the stories told by traditional religions or outdated philosophies like those of Plato and Descartes. Depicting the self as something inexplicably transcendent—in the sense of not being dependent on the brain—can comfortably fit our expectation that our own self is supremely important. Science, however, denies any self-importance to being an individual person as it tries to understand our unique status among things in the world. The natural development of the self, thanks to the development of the brain during infancy and childhood, is all the more fascinating because it is so inter-connected and tightly related to everything around us.
Finding an Identity
Human individuality isn’t a given from birth. Although each of us is granted a living body by natural reproductive processes, our infancy isn’t a time of individuality. New-born babies are not individuals, even if adoring parents proudly discern signs of personality in the new member of the family. Babies can’t think of themselves as individuals and truly be individuals in the fully human sense, until after long stages of exploring and learning are accomplished.
Although having conscious feelings, emotions, desires, intentions, and ideas is quite natural for humans practically from the cradle, there is no innate mind or identity from birth. One can argue that babies have innate mental structure or the hardware that will eventually give rise to what we regard as mind, but becoming an individual mind, and then developing into a mind able to know itself, is a long and complicated process, a socially developmental process. Minds are not born, they are made.
Having individuality implies that one can conceive of one’s self as a self, as a unique individual with one’s own perspective on things. This is an advanced intellectual capacity that must be gradually learned among others in social situations. Only older people in societies can develop a “non-individual” infant into an individual through intense social interactions of increasing complexity. It is clear from brain research that sociality plays the predominant role and is overwhelmingly responsible for creating individuality. Individuals do not make societies; societies make individuals. Individuals who weren’t already highly social wouldn’t actually have any individuality in the first place. It’s no paradox to say that we are individuals thanks to our societies. It is only paradoxical to get trapped into falsely supposing that we think about ourselves first, and then start thinking about other people later. Quite the opposite is true, and there are many psychological and neurological ways to confirm this. The two most prominent ways both involve mirroring: the experimental “mirror test” and the recently discovered “mirror neurons.” To see ourselves, we first have to “see” through the perspective of someone else. It can’t be a coincidence that the extraordinary evolutionary path that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens was marked by an intensification of the sociability long possessed by primates.
At some point during the hominid evolutionary path from two million years ago to the emergence of Homo sapiens some 200,000 years ago the ability to take seriously what particular individuals think about their situations became extremely valuable. That ability may have mostly evolved with Homo erectus, because they evidently became very good at cooperating on joint projects, like tool making, hunting, and gathering resources. Later Erectus, still surviving after Sapiens came on the scene, had much larger brain sizes than early Erectus, getting almost as large as Sapiens. Having a large brain is surely helpful for developing individuality and intelligence. However, size isn’t the only crucial factor. Even more important than brain size is the intricate complexity of the brain itself.
Animal psychology has been carefully analyzed and classified for the kinds of sociality observed among species from aardvarks to zebras. A vast gulf separates species that are hardly social at all from those that are social. Members of species which live largely solitary lives, excepting only occasional episodes for mating or fighting, show no signs of individuality and their behavior is indistinguishable from others of their own species and gender. Being alone and becoming distinctive are two very different matters. Distinctiveness isn’t automatic among social species, either. Highly social species, such as sheep, are social in only a generic sense. Although sheep do like being around other sheep, just about any other sheep will do. A mother knows her offspring, and a sheep can tell another sheep apart by a particular scent, but sheep don’t appear to keep track of each other for any special purposes, such as maintaining a dominance hierarchy or remembering who likes who. There aren’t special social relationships among sheep beyond those of parenting. Hence, there is no need for any sheep to take any regard for themselves. This generic sociality is just as inhospitable to individuality as living a solitary life. Where everybody is expected to behave pretty much the same way, thinking about being different is impossible. Only in highly social species which rely on particular social relationships as well as generic sociality can individuality emerge.
One of the now classic behavioral tests for some minimal level of self-identity is the mirror test. An animal is kept in an area where it has the opportunity to look into a mirror and see itself. Without the animal noticing, a bright marking is applied somewhere on the front of its head, or the front of its body. The animal cannot find out about the marking without looking into the mirror and observing itself. Which kinds of animals discover the mark on themselves using the mirror? Most animals never even realize that the mirror is interesting, and they ignore what they may see in the reflection. Some species will react to the image in the mirror in the same way that they would react if a real animal of their species were before them. Dogs can often perceive another dog in the mirror, for example, and try to sniff it or bark at it, but no dog
has ever realized that the “other dog” in the mirror is itself. So dogs fail the mirror test.
A chimpanzee, on the other hand, usually figures out that the other chimpanzee in the mirror is actually itself, and the strange mark will be carefully examined in the mirror. The chimpanzee may also try to scratch at the place on its body where the mark is, even though the mark can only be observed through in the mirror. Chimpanzees easily pass the mirror test, and so do other great apes, such as orangutans and bonobos.1 Among lesser apes, some species of gibbon show signs of self-recognition as well. Human infants as young as 18 months can pass the mirror test. Only a few other species can pass this self-identification test. They include bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants, and one species of bird, the European magpie. Horses and cats cannot pass the mirror test. Pigs cannot pass the mirror test either, although their very high intelligence allows them to use mirrors to get access to food that they couldn’t otherwise see without the mirror.
Humans have very little company when it comes to being able to recognize themselves in a mirror. What distinguishes the self-identifying species from the rest? Each of the self-identifying species are not only very clever and highly social, but members of these species rely on particular relationships, both cooperative and antagonistic, with other members. They cooperate in all sorts of inventive ways, they work together to defend against predators, they typically forage or hunt together, and they enjoy long-term companionship with each other. Members of these species are also all capable of utilizing deceptive behavior to fool a competitor known to be watching them. They have complex forms of communication with each other, and they show signs of utilizing special kinds of signaling, depending on who is supposed to be the receiver of the signal. Furthermore, male parents share in the protection of the young, and hierarchies within families can be fairly stable over time. In short, they have to genuinely concern themselves with each other as specific individuals instead of as generic units. There are additional unusual behaviors displayed by these self-identifying species that are found in very few species. For example, all of these self-identifying species, including magpies, have been observed in the wild exhibiting respectful behavior in the presence of one of their dead.
In short, what these self-identifying species have in common is this: each one of them has to pay close attention to what another particular member of their own species is doing in response to what it is doing. Consider this analogy. Suppose I play the trumpet and I only play among other trumpet players, and we only play five songs. When we play, we all play in the same way. But now let us say that I play the trumpet in a jazz combo—and those players not only know hundreds of songs, but often craft new variations while playing those songs—now I have to think about far more than just which song is being played. I have to monitor what my other combo players are doing, and I have to be quite aware of how the other players are simultaneously monitoring my performance. Being a member of a highly social species is more like playing in that jazz combo. When performance matters and it especially matters to specific members of one’s species over time, then we can rightly speak of two individuals in an attentive relationship with other. That’s where the beginnings of individuality begin—with an animal having to keep track of the things about itself that other particular animals are paying attention to.
These highly intelligent animals that are capable of self-identification are not first thinking about themselves and then wondering what others think about them. Rather, they are first noticing how others are paying close attention to their own behavior, and then they are secondarily becoming able to think about their own behavior. In effect, one’s self-conception begins as an other-conception—what another animal sees while observing one’s own body. As soon as an animal can pay attention to how another animal is attentive to its own behavior, its own behavior can then itself become an object of attention. This is no less true of ourselves when we are infants than it is for these animals. We first see ourselves objectively through the perspective of another. In other words, we see ourselves as the other person sees us.
Going further, we should also say that we can’t even subjectively view our behavior until we attend to our objective behavior. The objective and the subjective are actually the same fundamental cognitive capacity. We can’t become subjects to ourselves until we are objects to others and realize how we are objects to others. Being an animal doesn’t automatically involve having a conception of what one is doing. Animals unable to pass the mirror test literally have no ideas about what they do, or ideas about themselves as they are behaving; they simply act towards their immediate goals, and their cognitive attention is entirely absorbed in guiding action, with nothing intellectual left over for thinking about what is being done. If animals could begin with a sense of subjectivity and self, then they’d all have a far easier time passing the mirror test. But most of them can’t, and never will. Only a few species are capable of seeing themselves as individuals, such as elephants and dolphins, the ones that also pass the mirror test.
Imitation Isn’t Just Flattery
The witty saying goes, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” We humans do flatter ourselves in that we can not only imitate, but surpass each other. And so we do. The achievements of the next generation should surpass those of past generations. Yet imitation isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it has been crucial for several species for developing a sense of self. Much of the intellectual progress hominids have been able to accomplish over the past few million years depends on imitation. And this dependence goes even deeper into our genealogical history. Among primates generally, imitation has proven to be a form of sociality.
Many kinds of large-brained animals can be observed to be purposively (and not just instinctively) imitating each other on occasion. Instincts surely guide very young animals towards the appropriate parental behaviors to be imitated, but after imitation acquires its own momentum, the learning curve rises quickly, and the young can imitate parental behaviors too complex for mere instinct to supply. The strong bonds between mother and offspring in the mammalian world are the obvious example, as a mother’s young will cautiously imitate her foraging or hunting skills. The playfulness of the young is another example of an exchange of imitative behaviors. The species which have been observed displaying the most complex and lasting kinds of imitative behaviors are among the large primates, especially rhesus monkeys, baboons, gibbons, and all the great ape species including humans. Not coincidentally, these are among the most social of mammals, and great apes can also pass the mirror test.
How does the developing brain’s structure permit imitation? If one relies on an older standard model of the brain, which supposed that the perceptual, intellectual, and motor abilities of the brain are divided and taken care of by separate parts of the brain, imitative behaviors can get explained. Perhaps a behavior is observed in another animal, and that information is passed on to a cognitive area where a decision to imitate is made, and that decision instigates the right sort of motor control over muscles needed to duplicate that same behavior. There’s no need to discard that general flow of brain processes for many complex behaviors. However, the evolutionary design of the brain can be a surprise to any general theory, especially when it is discovered that the brain actually uses a simpler process instead.
In the past twenty years, brain researchers discovered that monkey, ape, and human brains do rely on a short-cut to condense the neural processes involved with imitation. A key ingredient to that short-cut is the so-called mirror neurons.
The amount of attention given by researchers to mirror neurons has perhaps surprised even the discoverers of this neurological feature of primate brains. They were detected in rhesus (macaque) monkeys almost by accident while researchers were studying the parts of the brain that were activated during motor actions. Surprisingly, the ventral premotor region labeled F5 was activating while a monkey was watching a human researcher reaching for something, but the monkey wasn’t movin
g. That brain region prepares for taking an action, and no one expected it to be activated simply from visual observation of something else, since that region wasn’t part of the perceptual area of the brain. Nevertheless, that region was activated as if it were perceiving something.
Neuroscientist Marco Lacoboni summarizes this exploratory research:
[T]hese patterns of neural activity contradict the old idea that action and perception are completely independent processes confined to their separate boxes in the brain. In the real world, as it turns out, neither the monkey nor the human can observe someone else picking up an apple without also invoking in the brain the motor plans necessary to snatch that apple themselves (mirror neuron activation). Likewise, neither the monkey nor the human can even look at an apple without also invoking the motor plans necessary to grab it (canonical neuron activation). In short, the grasping actions and motor plans necessary to obtain and eat a piece of fruit are inherently linked to our very understanding of the fruit. . . . [P]erception and action are not separated in the brain.”2
It makes good sense to suppose that the ability of monkeys, apes, and humans to easily imitate other members of these species relies on some degree of overlap between observation and action, permitting an immediate relationship between them. In other words, it doesn’t require much cognitive effort to learn to enact simple imitation, and, indeed, there appears to be hardly any intermediate steps between understanding what another is doing and what one’s self can do too. Humans initiate imitation to a high degree. The same regions of the human brain are involved: the ventral premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobule, along with an additional area of the human brain, a posterior portion of the inferior frontal gyrus.
