Corvids and the mystery of self-awareness

[Angelo Cannata]

I think that Western mentality, or at least some part of it, besides its defects, has an essential thing that it is able to point out to the world: self criticism. The history of science is a history of criticism and self-criticism and so it goes on in the present as well.

Eastern philosophy is often about deconstructing the "I", breaking it, seeing through it, which leads to "awakening".

Awakening is possible if something is very clear, able to be communicated clearly, able to be understood clearly. You cannot make anybody awake about something if it is already unclear to you. This means that what you call Eastern philosophy thinks that they have very clear ideas about what you said:

as an "Eastern" nondualist I've come to the conclusion that self-awareness, the organism mind and "THE consciousness/existence itself" are three different things

You also added that these things are sufficiently clear to you:

I think I sufficiently understand all these except the raw self-awareness part

You also wrote that

Western philosophy takes the "I" for granted, it doesn't look into it fundamentally, just deals with it on the surface level

It seems to me that you assume clarity and understanding about things that actually are far from being clear and understood, to Eastern philosophy first. In that case I suspect that perception of clarity and understanding means just ignoring criticism about the concepts of “I”, “mind”, “conscience”, “self-awareness”: these concepts are radically conditioned by languages, cultures, mentalities, philosophies. How can you say that you sufficiently understand all these, since they are so highly exposed to confusion, criticism, different definitions, absolute lack of clarity?

You even wrote

it can be said that four things coincide in the typical human mind: the "I", the self-awareness, the human organism mind, and "THE consciousness/existence itself"

This ability to determine one, three, four, or 1000 things, tells me again perception of clarity from your perspective, while instead it seems to me that the opposite happens: the more things you seem able to determine, one, three, four, the more confused they seem to me, in contradiction with the apparent growing clarity coming from seeing four components instead of one or three.

[Atla]

I think that Western mentality, or at least some part of it, besides its defects, has an essential thing that it is able to point out to the world: self criticism. The history of science is a history of criticism and self-criticism and so it goes on in the present as well.

Eastern philosophy is often about deconstructing the "I", breaking it, seeing through it, which leads to "awakening".

Awakening is possible if something is very clear, able to be communicated clearly, able to be understood clearly. You cannot make anybody awake about something if it is already unclear to you. This means that what you call Eastern philosophy thinks that they have very clear ideas about what you said:

as an "Eastern" nondualist I've come to the conclusion that self-awareness, the organism mind and "THE consciousness/existence itself" are three different things

You also added that these things are sufficiently clear to you:

I think I sufficiently understand all these except the raw self-awareness part

You also wrote that

Western philosophy takes the "I" for granted, it doesn't look into it fundamentally, just deals with it on the surface level

It seems to me that you assume clarity and understanding about things that actually are far from being clear and understood, to Eastern philosophy first. In that case I suspect that perception of clarity and understanding means just ignoring criticism about the concepts of “I”, “mind”, “conscience”, “self-awareness”: these concepts are radically conditioned by languages, cultures, mentalities, philosophies. How can you say that you sufficiently understand all these, since they are so highly exposed to confusion, criticism, different definitions, absolute lack of clarity?

You even wrote

it can be said that four things coincide in the typical human mind: the "I", the self-awareness, the human organism mind, and "THE consciousness/existence itself"

This ability to determine one, three, four, or 1000 things, tells me again perception of clarity from your perspective, while instead it seems to me that the opposite happens: the more things you seem able to determine, one, three, four, the more confused they seem to me, in contradiction with the apparent growing clarity coming from seeing four components instead of one or three.

I'm coming from the scientific and somewhat from the psychological angle, first I finished consuming all the scientific knowledge I deemed important/relevant, I finished that about 10-12 years ago. I only learned a few new things since then, I mostly just have to keep up-to-date with new discoveries.

Having a whole picture made me realize the shortcomings of Western philosophy, I'd say most of its basic ideas were refuted. So then I moved to the Eastern philosophies, and that did indeed take years to wade through all the confuson and misinformation. Most of Eastern philosophy is also nonsense, but their nondual awakening is genuine, and the only philosophy compatible with science is "Eastern" nondualism.

By now I've moved beyond both Eastern and Western philosophy.

[Angelo Cannata]

Perhaps we talk about different aspects when we say “Western philosophy”. As I said, for me an essential aspect of Western philosophy is criticism and self criticism. I wonder how criticism can be refuted, considering that criticism is the very action of refuting, independently from what is refuted and how. On the contrary, I wonder what is the meaning of “nondual awakening is genuine”: does it mean that it cannot be refuted, criticized? Is there anything immune from criticism in this world?

the only philosophy compatible with science is "Eastern" nondualism

Science is a method of knowledge based of experience, which means that, for anything claiming to be scientific, repeated measurement must be possible and falsifiable (Popper) whenever we want. What is falsifiable and measurable in Eastern nondualism?

[Atla]

Perhaps we talk about different aspects when we say “Western philosophy”. As I said, for me an essential aspect of Western philosophy is criticism and self criticism. I wonder how criticism can be refuted, considering that criticism is the very action of refuting, independently from what is refuted and how. On the contrary, I wonder what is the meaning of “nondual awakening is genuine”: does it mean that it cannot be refuted, criticized? Is there anything immune from criticism in this world?

I didn't imply that anything is immune from criticism, how did this come up? There is no absolute certainty for humans. It's simply that, based on available knowledge, and maybe applying Occam's razor, the nondual view is probably correct and the dualistic or "double-vision" views are probably wrong.

Science is a method of knowledge based of experience, which means that, for anything claiming to be scientific, repeated measurement must be possible and falsifiable (Popper) whenever we want. What is falsifiable and measurable in Eastern nondualism?

I mean we can check which philosophical ideas are consistent with known science, and which aren't. For example science seems to have refuted the ideas of fundamental separability and fundamental dualities. However, Western philosophies are based on these ideas, while Eastern nondualism is based on denying them.

For example we have these two tricky philosophies idealism and physicalism, which are "exclusionary" dualities masquerading as true monisms. As such they are based on a made-up separation, they are "double visions". Which leads to an the insoluble Hard problem.

[Atla]

Perhaps we talk about different aspects when we say “Western philosophy”. As I said, for me an essential aspect of Western philosophy is criticism and self criticism. I wonder how criticism can be refuted, considering that criticism is the very action of refuting, independently from what is refuted and how. On the contrary, I wonder what is the meaning of “nondual awakening is genuine”: does it mean that it cannot be refuted, criticized? Is there anything immune from criticism in this world?

the only philosophy compatible with science is "Eastern" nondualism

Science is a method of knowledge based of experience, which means that, for anything claiming to be scientific, repeated measurement must be possible and falsifiable (Popper) whenever we want. What is falsifiable and measurable in Eastern nondualism?

Another example is how Western phenomenologists like Heidegger seem to be studying the relationships between the objects appearing in the human consciousness.

A nondualist may immediately say to that the human consciousness is of course continuous because everything is. It's only the separateness-based human thinking that divides this fundamentally indivisible consciousness into objects. We usually do this automatically.
So we can only talk about actual objects appearing in consciousness sort of metaphorically, for all practical purposes, but we can't talk about it fundamentally. So really it makes no sense to be looking for fundamental relationships between such objects, when there are no objects.

[Angelo Cannata]

I think that science is unable to find anything fundamental. It just makes experiments and organizes their results by schemes, frames, ideas, understandable to us. Science is unable to find anything ultimate: it is a never ending exploration and reformation of schemes and ideas. Dualism and non-dualism are human mental frames that pretend to ultimately explain the fundamentals of reality, which is not science, this is metaphysics.

Let’s imagine a non dualistic frame in science, such as the idea that everything is made of waves, or we can say forces; let’s say “x”. Let’s say that x is the ultimate element that makes possible every scientifically measurable event, entity, phenomenon, matter, energy, everything, even the phenomenon of conscience, interactions between everything in this world, the phenomenons of “I”, self-awareness, mind and so on.

In this case, science would have been able to explain just certain perspectives on phenomenons, certain results, but it would still miss the essential, which is that element that I feel unable to express by words and that only vaguely, approximately, I express by saying “my feeling I”, “my consciousness”, “my mind” and so on. In other words, science is able to deal only with expressions on things, not with things themselves. For example, what science calls “light” is the supposed “something” the is the cause of certain phenomenons, such as colors, diffraction, reflection and so on. Science knows and measure effects, not reality. Science has no idea about what is behind any external expression of anything.

This applies specifically to the expressions that we trace back to what we call “I”, or “conscience”. Science can make the decision to group certain behaviours and refer them to something that science decides to call “conscience”. But this doesn’t mean that science has been able to understand anything about what conscience is. It has just built a frame, a system of ideas based on grouping certain external behaviours, but this doesn’t mean at all having understood anything about the “being” that is behind the behaviours.

So, we should be careful not to confuse our mental operation of grouping external expressions that we refer to what we decide to call “conscience” whith the illusion of having reached the nature of conscience itself.

The inexpressible part of my feeling “I” cannot be reached by any dualistic, nor non-dualistic, mental frame. It just cannot be expressed, so, any mental scheme fails in the attempt to understand it.

In other words, we need to be careful not to confuse metaphisics, meant as certainty on reality, with science. Science can make use of metaphysics if they are meant as hypotheses, not as certainties. In this case, any hypothesis is always to be considered limited and defective: it is impossible to make hypotheses able to entirely explain everything. This means that the non-dualistic mental frame to understand the world can be used as an hypothetical mental instrument, but it would be wrong to consider it as the faithful description of reality. Any description of reality must necessarily contain errors. A faithful description of reality is impossible, by principle.

[Atla]

I think that science is unable to find anything fundamental. It just makes experiments and organizes their results by schemes, frames, ideas, understandable to us. Science is unable to find anything ultimate: it is a never ending exploration and reformation of schemes and ideas. Dualism and non-dualism are human mental frames that pretend to ultimately explain the fundamentals of reality, which is not science, this is metaphysics.

Let’s imagine a non dualistic frame in science, such as the idea that everything is made of waves, or we can say forces; let’s say “x”. Let’s say that x is the ultimate element that makes possible every scientifically measurable event, entity, phenomenon, matter, energy, everything, even the phenomenon of conscience, interactions between everything in this world, the phenomenons of “I”, self-awareness, mind and so on.

In this case, science would have been able to explain just certain perspectives on phenomenons, certain results, but it would still miss the essential, which is that element that I feel unable to express by words and that only vaguely, approximately, I express by saying “my feeling I”, “my consciousness”, “my mind” and so on. In other words, science is able to deal only with expressions on things, not with things themselves. For example, what science calls “light” is the supposed “something” the is the cause of certain phenomenons, such as colors, diffraction, reflection and so on. Science knows and measure effects, not reality. Science has no idea about what is behind any external expression of anything.

This applies specifically to the expressions that we trace back to what we call “I”, or “conscience”. Science can make the decision to group certain behaviours and refer them to something that science decides to call “conscience”. But this doesn’t mean that science has been able to understand anything about what conscience is. It has just built a frame, a system of ideas based on grouping certain external behaviours, but this doesn’t mean at all having understood anything about the “being” that is behind the behaviours.

So, we should be careful not to confuse our mental operation of grouping external expressions that we refer to what we decide to call “conscience” whith the illusion of having reached the nature of conscience itself.

The inexpressible part of my feeling “I” cannot be reached by any dualistic, nor non-dualistic, mental frame. It just cannot be expressed, so, any mental scheme fails in the attempt to understand it.

In other words, we need to be careful not to confuse metaphisics, meant as certainty on reality, with science. Science can make use of metaphysics if they are meant as hypotheses, not as certainties. In this case, any hypothesis is always to be considered limited and defective: it is impossible to make hypotheses able to entirely explain everything. This means that the non-dualistic mental frame to understand the world can be used as an hypothetical mental instrument, but it would be wrong to consider it as the faithful description of reality. Any description of reality must necessarily contain errors. A faithful description of reality is impossible, by principle.

Yes but this is also largely irrelevant.

Science is just a third-person abstraction, description, a map of the territory - sure. But then the Western phenomenologists usually make the mistake of believing that just because phenomenology is directly first-person and qualitative, THEY can get down to the fundamentals.

A nondualist knows that there are no such fundamentals, Western phenomenologists are still chasing the illusion. All things, including the direct mental things, are void of inherent essence. Objectifying fundamental essence is just another misleading way of thinking.

[stevie]

Because your approach is not scientific.

I did say that some of this may just be my conjecture. But what do you think is more likely, that there is something to self-awareness or not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness

In my native culture "self-awareness" is used in everyday communications about one's human mentality, so I too use this expression in everyday communications but that's just a casual use of the expression to be able to talk about private/subjective appearances not accessible to public observation. Clinical psychology and psychotherapy would hardly be possible without hypothesizing "self-awareness".

[Leontiskos]

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.

I think you're overthinking most of this. Obviously the first thing that would need to be done would be to give a definition of self-awareness. You seem to be conflating self-awareness with the belief in a self-world dualism.

Awareness is easily reducible to a sensory phenomenon. The nondualist, Sadhguru, claims that self-awareness and the personal boundary is a function of physical sensation. Anything which elicits a physical sensation for us is something we consider part of ourselves, and is something we are aware of. There is nothing wrong with that explanation, and it also explains the way that animals have regard for their own bodies. Further, things like mourning the dead have no connection to self-world dualism. When a recognizable object that has previously provided us with aid and pleasurable sensation dies, we suffer. There is nothing mysterious about why an animal would suffer and show forth that suffering when one of its close kin dies.

The more interesting phenomenon--and the thing which you are perhaps inching towards--is the raw self-reflexivity of consciousness ("self-consciousness"). Materialists and Vedantists claim that it is an illusion, whereas Platonists and the Western philosophical tradition claim that it is not.

[Gertie]

Some of this may just be my conjecture, correct me if I'm wrong. From what I can tell, grown humans are somehow self-aware organisms (or at least most of them are, like with everything else, there seem to be exceptions).

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.

------------

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.

I don't know about corvids, sorry.

I don't think there's anything more to being a self than an experiential sense of being a discrete, unified bundle of experiencing. So being a self, a me, is itself a form of experience, rather than being An Experiencer (noun) who has experiences.

So for a human the sense of being a unified, discrete self involves the experience of being embodied in the world, moving through space and time, with a specific first person point of view. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, if we look at human brains. There are subsystems which are complexly inter-connected via neural patterns, apparently 'designed' for evolutionary utility. Without some mechanism for making all these billions of neural firings coherent and unified, it would be an over-whelming, chaotic cacophany, and useless. So we have a unified, coherent field of consciousness, with the ability to filter and shift focus, which models and makes sense of the world and 'myself' in useful ways.


What part of that is the self - all of it imo. The experiential self which is gertie is whatever gertie is experiencing in the moment. Sometimes this is 'self-reflecting' on this or that aspect of what the experience of being gertie is like. Rather than gertie being The Experiencer reflecting on her experience.


It's hard to guess what the experience of being a dog or chicken or beetle is like, but I suppose we could look at what goes on in human brains when we self-reflect and see if other species have similar brain structures. It seems unlikely other species like corvids have that thinky narrative voice in their heads which conceptualises notions like 'Me'. But I'd say that thinky voice is just another form of experience, a different 'flavour' amongst many, and just as ''raw'' as any other.

[Waysofbeing]

So, we should be careful not to confuse our mental operation of grouping external expressions that we refer to what we decide to call “conscience” whith the illusion of having reached the nature of conscience itself.

The inexpressible part of my feeling “I” cannot be reached by any dualistic, nor non-dualistic, mental frame. It just cannot be expressed, so, any mental scheme fails in the attempt to understand it.

Yes but this is also largely irrelevant.

Science is just a third-person abstraction, description, a map of the territory - sure. But then the Western phenomenologists usually make the mistake of believing that just because phenomenology is directly first-person and qualitative, THEY can get down to the fundamentals.

A nondualist knows that there are no such fundamentals, Western phenomenologists are still chasing the illusion. All things, including the direct mental things, are void of inherent essence. Objectifying fundamental essence is just another misleading way of thinking.

Both posters here appear to be falling into the trap of believing that they have the privilege of “truth”. Let us take the first. “Consciousness cannot be expressed”. This is from a subjective perspective and, wisely or mistakenly, the thrust of philosophy taken broadly to include science over the centuries has been to move from the subjective to the objective. But why should one preclude the other? Even if consciousness cannot be expressed, this does not mean it cannot be understood from an objective perspective. From a subjective perspective, what is there to understand? it just “is”. Whenever we try to understand it, we have to adopt an objective perspective.

On the one hand we have a fairly successful explanation of consciousness in terms of emergence in science from an objective perspective, and on the other, the impossibility of explanation from a subjective perspective, only of experience. This does not seem to me to be a problem, but simply a result.

Taking the second poster, “a non-dualist knows there are no such fundamentals”. How do we know, without falling into the same trap?

[Atla]

On the one hand we have a fairly successful explanation of consciousness in terms of emergence in science from an objective perspective, and on the other, the impossibility of explanation from a subjective perspective, only of experience. This does not seem to me to be a problem, but simply a result.

Which one?
We have a fairly successful objective perspective explanation for what human/organism consciousness is like, and this may correctly use soft emergence (the easy problems).
But we have zero explanation for why there is any consciousness in the first place (the hard problem). Some scientists proposed hard emergence, but that's just magic.

[Gertie]

Waysofbeing

Both posters here appear to be falling into the trap of believing that they have the privilege of “truth”. Let us take the first. “Consciousness cannot be expressed”. This is from a subjective perspective and, wisely or mistakenly, the thrust of philosophy taken broadly to include science over the centuries has been to move from the subjective to the objective. But why should one preclude the other? Even if consciousness cannot be expressed, this does not mean it cannot be understood from an objective perspective

I can express my consciousness - ''I feel happy'' ''I see a red apple''. What's the problem with that?

I can say ''You feel happy and see a red apple'' too and assume it means something similar to you as it does to me. There's not an issue of understanding there. But I can't know it's true, because experience is private/first person, so it's not third person objectively falsifiable. If you tell me you're happy when really you're sad, I don't have a consciousness-o-meter I can use to check for myself.

From a subjective perspective, what is there to understand? it just “is”. Whenever we try to understand it, we have to adopt an objective perspective.

We can understand conscious experience fine on its own subjective, directly known terms, in fact we can't be mistaken about what we consciously experience ourselves.

The problem arises when we try to explain experience in terms of our physicalist model of the world. Because physicalism relies on the scientific toolkit of observation, measurement and third person falsification, which can't be applied to private first person experience.

On the one hand we have a fairly successful explanation of consciousness in terms of emergence in science from an objective perspective

We do? I'd say we have an untestable place-holder we call ''emergence'' in lieu of a physicalist explanation. Or as Atla says ''magic''.

and on the other, the impossibility of explanation from a subjective perspective, only of experience. This does not seem to me to be a problem, but simply a result.

We can posit possible explanations for experience by expanding our physicalist model, to speculate experience is either fundamental in some way or emergent in some way, but there's no apparent way to test the hypotheses because the nature of experience noted above. Hence the Hard Problem.

Taking the second poster, “a non-dualist knows there are no such fundamentals”. How do we know, without falling into the same trap?

Yes it's another untestable hypothesis. But it might be that thinking in terms of fundamental and emergent isn't getting to the real nature of the the reality.

[Pattern-chaser]

This is from a subjective perspective and, wisely or mistakenly, the thrust of philosophy taken broadly to include science over the centuries has been to move from the subjective to the objective. But why should one preclude the other?

I don't think one ever has precluded the other. This is why I disagree - mildly - with the preceding statement. Has philosophy really been struggling to move from the subjective to the objective? Not that I have noticed. If you said that about science, I think you would be closer to the mark. But philosophy, I think, acknowledges the subjective and the objective, as it always has done.

[Atla]

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.

I think you're overthinking most of this. Obviously the first thing that would need to be done would be to give a definition of self-awareness. You seem to be conflating self-awareness with the belief in a self-world dualism.

Awareness is easily reducible to a sensory phenomenon. The nondualist, Sadhguru, claims that self-awareness and the personal boundary is a function of physical sensation. Anything which elicits a physical sensation for us is something we consider part of ourselves, and is something we are aware of. There is nothing wrong with that explanation, and it also explains the way that animals have regard for their own bodies. Further, things like mourning the dead have no connection to self-world dualism. When a recognizable object that has previously provided us with aid and pleasurable sensation dies, we suffer. There is nothing mysterious about why an animal would suffer and show forth that suffering when one of its close kin dies.

The more interesting phenomenon--and the thing which you are perhaps inching towards--is the raw self-reflexivity of consciousness ("self-consciousness"). Materialists and Vedantists claim that it is an illusion, whereas Platonists and the Western philosophical tradition claim that it is not.

I wasn't conflating it with self-world dualism, most advanced organisms seem to have that, not just a few.

I wasn't conflating it with self-consciousness either, I was talking about that which I think is behind self-consciousness. As I tried to express, I think self-consciousness or the "I" is born from this raw self-awareness.

Claiming that the "I" is a real entity, is profoundly delusional. Claiming that it's 100% an illusion is still very delusional. Most humans aren't good at being in touch with reality, so they've adopted one of these two positions.