1. After conception, first we start out as any other organism, we are fully automatic beings.
2. But then as we get old enough, maybe a few months or 1-2 years old, or maybe even prior to that? It somehow happens, something switches on, we are somehow suddenly "there". Some may call it "being conscious", "having a presence", "being". It's a general sensation of existing, of being there. We just start to exist.
3. And then not much time later, maybe a few months or a year later, but still in early childhood, this general raw self-awareness is channeled into a focal point (in men) or focal points (in women? not sure how it works for them). And that's what we call the "I". Eastern philosophy calls it the "ego" (not to be confused with Western meaning of ego, two different things). This focus mechanism seems to be identification itself, apart from being capable of being a control mechanism. Identification is born out of the raw self-awareness.
The history of humanity has been the history of "I", and now humans are born into an environment where all the adults around them are completely in this "I" mode of existence, "ego"-ic mode of existence. Our culture, our language, the world we built are all reflecting this. So unless someone has rather serious brain issues, it seems rather unavoidable that children develop the ego. And then from that point on, that's who and what they think they are.
4. Western philosophy takes the "I" for granted, it doesn't look into it fundamentally, just deals with it on the surface level. Eastern philosophy is often about deconstructing the "I", breaking it, seeing through it, which leads to "awakening".
But even if we've been through this process, the "I" will pop up again and again. Because even though we've cracked it (cracked "ourselves"), that doesn't make the raw-self awareness also disappear, that the "I" is born from. We would probably have to literally remove a part of our brain for that, not a good idea.
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Now what the hell is raw self-awareness, how did we get from 1. to 2.? People fantasize about building self-aware machines, and maybe one day they will (conscious machines). It seems to be some kind of soft emergence in the organism brain, maybe it's the best example of actual soft emergence. In the vast majority of organisms it doesn't seem to happen, in a few it does seem to happen. But so far they don't seem to have been able to connect it to any particular brain regions, it's like the ghost in the organism or machine. I think it's the hardest problem from Chalmers's "Easy problems" category.
So previously I assumed that it's probably some kind of soft emergence, which can only happen when a brain is large enough and maybe shaped in particular ways.
The best approach they've found so far is the mirror test. Great apes, elephants, dolphins and orcas I'd say seem to have raw self-awareness, and we can also tell that from their behaviour aside from mirror-tests. I'd certainly add whales to the list. Actually I think that elephants and whales seem to be the most self-aware organisms on the planet, aside from humans. When I listen to the song of whales, I can't help but wonder that maybe they even possess more raw self-awareness than we humans do.
And these species all have big brains. I thought the "limit" was maybe around 10-50 billion neurons. I've come to the conclusion that cats and dogs, no matter how much they live with us and no matter how tricky they are, and no matter what kind of personality they have, aren't self-aware.
But there is one more big candidate for self-awareness, ravens crows and other corvids. They have very small brains compared to the others, so I dismissed this finding as a fluke. But the more I watch their behaviour, the more I think that yeah they seem to be somehow self-aware. That's fascinating. The problem-solving, the tool-usage, just how they carry themselves like they were little entities, they seem to mourn their dead. Some even think that they might have some rudimentary form of shared telepathy (like their self-aware minds were linked on a higher organizational level of the universe).
If corvid self-awareness is true, then nature has given us a big clue, a big opportunity. Future studies will have to compare the corvid brain to all the other bird brains, and try to find the big difference. If someone has already looked into this and knows what the difference could be, please present it.
Otherwise, we would have really found the solution to the problem.
