KidLit Forum

Awareness of Self and Others

- Awareness of self is a central aspect of consciousness.
- Self-awareness= to be aware of one’s own feelings or emotions and to be conscious of pain.
- There were some people, like Descartes, for example, that considered animals like being machines, different by human machines only in complexity.
- Today most people believe that all vertebrates, at least feel pain. If invertebrates fell pain is a question.
- Some animal species may react to a painful stimulus by with-drawing from it without being conscious of that stimulus and without feeling pain
- Many invertebrates have quite complex nervous systems and perform complex behaviors, even if the acquisition of a backbone was an important step in evolution
- The awareness of pain was the first aspect of science to evolve and the next step was the awareness of emotional feelings
- Many Western counties introduced legislation to protect vertebrate animals
- By facial expressions, body posture and vocalization animals may express distress and pleasure. For example, the hen can interpret calls and responds to them. Even if many animals can express different emotions, the researchers don’t know if they are aware of them and if they can reflect on them.
Developing an awareness of self

- Humans develop a sense of self by accumulating experiences and then they rely on memories of those experiences
- The new born baby can react to stimuli from the environment and the ability to be aware of the self appears with the age
- The infant cannot perceive itself as separate from the surrounding environment. The environment includes: other individuals, especially the mother, as well as the physical environment
- The developing brain of the infant forms maps of the infant’s own body and of the world around
- It is not known when the infants became aware of their feelings and when they begin to develop a sense of self
- The psychological evidence indicates that the infants develop a concept of self from around to twelve to twenty-four months old
- By eighteen to twenty-four months they can recognize themselves in the mirror
- Between the age of three to five humans develop the ability to understand the notion of false belief and can attribute different mental states to other people.
- The five sensory systems ( sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell) come to function sequentially.
- Some senses can begin earlier than other, but they vary between species. The development of self awareness of feeling and emotions can begin with the perception of hunger, pain, pleasure, love and so on.
- At animals this process starts the same but stops before it is complete, depending on the species
- Learning and memory formation are essential to the development of self-awareness.
- Experiences provide the building blocks for the self. We learn from our own experiences and that’s why we are different.
- Self-awareness is being conscious of both the differences and similarities between ourselves one’s and others.
- Species with more complex nervous systems may form more detailed memories and use more complicated communication systems. For example, the domestic chick has at least fifteen recognizable calls and it possesses the characteristics essential for being an individual.
- The chick learns rapidly the visual characteristics of hen and it forms an attachment for it. It can recognize its siblings from the unfamiliar ones. Being put in a cage it can recognize its cagemate behind a transparent panel.
- The development of self-awareness depends on the social environment in which an animal is raised. For example, the gorilla Koko, raised by humans could recognize itself in the mirror.

Self -recognition in mirrors
- Most animals, when they see their image in the mirror, think that it is another member of their own species. They may attach the image, or they may look behind the mirror to see where is the rest of the body.
- Most animals don’t recognize themselves in the mirror even if they are exposed to it, except for chimpanzees which can recognize themselves after five to thirty minutes. They may use the mirror to see parts of their body that they aren’t able to see.
- Gordon Gallup attempted to see if a chimpanzee could recognize itself in the mirror by putting a spot of red dye on its forehead. He wanted to see if the chimpanzee did not see the image as self or it would touch the spot.
- He bought for chimpanzees born in the wild in his laboratory. He put each of them in separate cages with a mirror in them. At first, the chimpanzees treated the image as if there was another chimpanzee, but after three days recognized themselves in the mirror. He anaesthetised each chimpanzee and put a spot on its forehead. After four hours, without a mirror the chimps were back into their cages and they touched the spot, but not very often. When he put the mirror back, the number of touches was bigger. So, they were aware to recognize themselves in the mirror and were therefore self-aware. Anyway, the result was criticized by Celia Heyes, who said that there was no control of the anaesthetic.
- As a response to these critiques , another experiment was done and this time the spot was placed on the eyebrow and on the left ear. The amount of touching of both eyes and ears, marked and unmarked was scored. With the mirror, the touching of the marked eyebrow and ear increased
- Another researcher applied dye to the forehead of a chimpanzee when it was asleep, but when he awoke there was no increase in the touching of the spot. Maybe the anaesthetic has caused some misleading results in Gallup’s experiences.
- In this study only one of the chimpanzees displayed clear self-directed behavior in response to seeing the mark on its forehead
- So far there aren’t any completely convincing experiments with sufficient subjects and controls to permit a definite conclusion to be reached about self-recognition in mirrors by chimpanzees or any other species.