Posted: Apr 06, 2012 12:20 pm
UndercoverElephant wrote:
Because there is no non-circular way to define either "self" or "awareness". "Self-awareness" is exactly the same as "consciousness." It could only be "defined" via a Wittgenstein-busting "private ostensive definition", and that's no use if you want to reduce the thing to matter.
There seems to be some promising ideas outlined here;
'THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS'
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramacha ... index.html
Ramachandran is a self-declared neutral monist. He doesn't believe consciousness is physical or can be reduced to physical things. He thinks both physical and mental things can be reduced to something else which is neither.
OK, let's forget the philosophy for the moment, I'm not particularly interested in Ramachandran's metaphysical leanings.
If self awareness can be measured in some sort of experiment (drawing on monkey faces or whatever..) and we suspect that mirror neurons enable this, then an experiment can be performed to demonstrate whether or not self awareness can be reduced to the function of mirror neurons.
I can't see the scientific problem here.