It is commonly argued that a serious right to life is grounded only in actual, relatively advanced psychological capacities a being has acquired. The moral permissibility of abortion is frequently argued for on these grounds. Increasingly it is being argued that such accounts also entail the permissibility of infanticide, with several proponents of these theories accepting this consequence. We show, however, that these accounts imply the permissibility of even more unpalatable acts than infanticide performed on infants: organ harvesting, live experimentation, (...) sexual interference, and discriminatory killing. The stronger intuitions against the permissibility of these ‘pre-personal acts’ allow us to re-establish a comprehensive and persuasive reductio against psychological accounts of persons. (shrink)

One of the central questions within contemporary debates about collective intentionality concerns the notion and status of the we. The question, however, is by no means new. At the beginning of the last century, it was already intensively discussed in phenomenology. Whereas Heidegger argued that a focus on empathy is detrimental to a proper understanding of the we, and that the latter is more fundamental than any dyadic interaction, other phenomenologists, such as Stein, Walther and Husserl, insisted on the importance (...) of empathy for proper we-experiences. In this paper, I will present some of the key moves in this debate and then discuss and assess Husserl’s specific proposal, according to which reciprocal empathy, second-person engagement and self-alienation are all important presuppositions for group-identification and we-identity. (shrink)

What are the roots of human normativity and when do children begin to behave according to standards and norms? Empirical observations demonstrate that we are born with built-in orientation toward what is predictable and of the same - henceforth what deviates from it -, what is the norm or the standard in the generic sense of the word. However, what develop in humans is self-consciousness, transforming norms from “should” to “ought” and making human normativity profoundly different from any other forms (...) expressed in infancy, other animals, or any smart machines. Self-consciousness is the ability to objectify oneself through the evaluative eyes of others. It sets us apart as a species and is at the roots of human normativity. A developmental blueprint capturing the progressive co-emergence of self-consciousness and normativity in the human child is proposed. (shrink)

In normal observers, gazing at one’s own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, triggers the perception of strange faces, a new visual illusion that has been named ‘strange-face in the mirror’. Individuals see huge distortions of their own faces, but they often see monstrous beings, archetypal faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and animals. In the experiment described here, strange-face illusions were perceived when two individuals, in a dimly lit room, gazed at each (...) other in the face. Inter-subjective gazing compared to mirror-gazing produced a higher number of different strange-faces. Inter-subjective strange-face illusions were always dissociative of the subject’s self and supported moderate feeling of their reality, indicating a temporary lost of self-agency. Unconscious synchronization of event-related responses to illusions was found between members in some pairs. Synchrony of illusions may indicate that unconscious response–coordination is caused by the illusion–conjunction of crossed dissociative strange-faces, which are perceived as projections into each other’s visual face of reciprocal embodied representations within the pair. Inter-subjective strange-face illusions may be explained by the subject’s embodied representations and the other’s visual face binding. Unconscious facial mimicry may promote inter-subjective illusion–conjunction, then unconscious joint-action and response–coordination. (shrink)

-/- Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves (...) as themselves; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such. -/- A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves. (shrink)

Most research on animal self-awareness focuses on the question of what self-awareness is, however, the present study addresses the question of what self-awareness is for. It is argued that different forms of self-awareness are needed for conspecific collaboration in different types of animal societies. In the order of the increasing level of fluidity in conspecific cooperation, animal societies are divided into three main types: caste society, individualized society, and alliance society. Accordingly, three forms of self-awareness are differentiated: awareness of one’s (...) kinship relations in the caste society, awareness of one’s ranking place in the individualized society, and awareness of one’s situational roles in the alliance society. Unlike the awareness of kinship and ranks, which is genetically or associatively determined, role awareness is a form of reflective self-awareness acquired by taking the perspectives of others for contingent collaboration with conspecifics in transient situations. (shrink)

In keeping with recent views of consciousness of self as represented in the body in action, empirical studies are reviewed that demonstrate a bottlenose dolphin’s conscious awareness of its own body and body parts, implying a representational “body image” system. Additional work reviewed demonstrates an advanced capability of dolphins for motor imitation of self-produced behaviors and of behaviors of others, including imitation of human actions, supporting hypotheses that dolphins have a sense of agency and ownership of their actions and may (...) implicitly attribute those levels of self-awareness to others. Possibly, a mirror-neuron system, or its functional equivalent to that described in monkeys and humans, may mediate both self-awareness and awareness of others. (shrink)

Philosophical preoccupation with the hard problem of self-consciousness often takes human becoming for granted. In archaeology, the opposite is the norm. The emphasis is on when and how we became human while the problem of self (how did the ability to think about one’s own self come about? ) is largely neglected. This article suggest that those two aspects of human becoming cannot be meaningfully disentangled: humans are both persons and members of a species. I argue that people are STRANGE. (...) I use the acronym STRANGE to describe the Situated TRANsactional and GEnerative process by which the human species (nature) and the human self (culture) become co-constituted in the lived space of material engagement. I propose that to study this middle space of self-becoming a synergy of enactive and situated perspectives from philosophy and archaeology is needed. Drawing on material engagement theory I sketch out my vision of what this synergy entails based on the notions of self-bounding, enactive in/dividuation, and the situated person perspective. I use the archaeological examples of stone knapping (toolmaking) and early body ornamentation to substantiate some of the main issues and methodological challenges. (shrink)

If we want to assess whether or not a naturalized phenomenology is a desideratum or a category mistake, we need to be clear on precisely what notion of phenomenology and what notion of naturalization we have in mind. In the article I distinguish various notions, and after criticizing one type of naturalized phenomenology, I sketch two alternative takes on what a naturalized phenomenology might amount to and propose that our appraisal of the desirability of such naturalization should be more positive, (...) if we opt for one or both of the latter alternatives. (shrink)

The ‘self’ is increasingly used as a variable in cognitive experiments and correlated with activity in particular areas in the brain. At first glance, this seems to transform the self from an ephemeral theoretical entity to something concrete and measurable. However, the transformation is by no means unproblematic. We trace the development of two important experimental paradigms in the study of the self, self-face recognition and the adjective self ascription task. We show how the experimental instrumentalization has gone hand in (...) hand with a simplification of the self-concept, and how more conceptual and theoretical reflections on the structure, function and nature of self have either disappeared altogether or receded into the background. We argue that this development impedes and complicates the interdisciplinary study of self. (shrink)

Visual self-recognition is often controversially cited as an indicator of self-awareness and assessed with the mirror-mark test. Great apes and humans, unlike small apes and monkeys, have repeatedly passed mirror tests, suggesting that the underlying brain processes are homologous and evolved 14-18 million years ago. However, neuroscientific, developmental, and clinical dissociations show that the medium used for self-recognition (mirror vs photograph vs video) significantly alters behavioral and brain responses, likely due to perceptual differences among the different media and prior experience. (...) On the basis of this evidence and evolutionary considerations, we argue that the visual self-recognition skills evident in humans and great apes are a byproduct of a general capacity to collate representations, and need not index other aspects of self-awareness. (shrink)

Based on the assumption that confrontation with one’s physical reflection can be aversive, we explored the appeal of possible “escape routes” when incidentally exposed to one’s mirror image. Compared to their no-exposure peers, individuals who felt less chronically “trapped” in their bodies showed increased interest in flow experiences and decreased interest in experiences involving low-level thinking or a subjective sense of meaning when exposed to their reflection. Mirror exposure also increased overall interest in “pure consciousness events,” wherein the transcendence of (...) space and time figures centrally. The aversive effects of even implicit confrontation with one’s reflection therefore seem more diverse than anticipated based on existing frameworks such as Objective Self-Awareness theory, so additional theoretical development seems warranted. (shrink)

The conclusions drawn from mirror self-recognition studies, in which nonhuman animals are tested for whether they detect a mark on their bodies which can be observed only in the mirror, are based on several presuppositions. These include that performance on the test is an indication of species wide rather than individual abilities, and that all the animals which pass the test are demonstrating the presence of the same psychological ability. However, further details about the results of the test indicate that (...) these presuppositions are false. Animals take the test as individuals, not as stand-ins for species, and members of different species rely on different cognitive mechanisms to pass the test. For nonhuman animals, passing the test seems to be a consequence of enculturation and practice. (shrink)

Self-awareness is viewed here as the phenotypic expression of an interaction between genes and the environment. Brain and behavioral development of fetuses and newborn infants are a rich source of information regarding what might constitute minimal self-awareness. Research indicates that newborns have feeling experience. Unlike automata, they do not just sense and respond to proximal stimulations. In light of the explosive brain growth that takes place inside and outside of the womb, first signs of feeling as opposed to sensing experience (...) are discussed. Feeling experience is considered as the necessary condition for having minimal self-awareness. Both would co-emerge in development. However, minimal self-awareness is rapidly supplemented with an awareness that is not just perceptual, but also conceptual and ethical, primarily defined in relation to and by others. (shrink)

Self-recognition by 86 children was assessed using the mirror mark test in two different social contexts. In the classic mirror task condition, only the child was marked prior to mirror exposure . In the social norm condition, the child, experimenter, and accompanying parent were marked prior to the child’s mirror exposure . Results indicate that in both conditions children pass the test in comparable proportion, with the same increase as a function of age. However, in the Norm condition, children displayed (...) significantly more hesitation while removing the mark, often touching it without removing it or, if so, promptly putting the mark back onto their forehead. In the Classic condition, only one child showed such hesitation. These results suggest that from the outset, mirror self-recognition can refer to social awareness. This link is interpreted as the trademark of human self-consciousness, a deeply rooted “looking glass” self-awareness. (shrink)