Abstract:
The crucial problem of self-consciousness is how to account for knowing self-reference without launching into a regress or without presupposing self-consciousness rather than accounting for it (circle). In the literature we find two bottom-up proposals for solving the traditional problem: the postulation of nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness and the postulation of a pre-reflexive form of self-consciousness. However, none of them seems satisfactory for several reasons. In contrast, I believe that the only way of solving this traditional puzzle is to assume another bottom-up approach, namely the one that accepts Baker’s challenge to naturalism and provides a naturalist framework for self-consciousness; in Baker’s terms, to account for self-consciousness in non-intentional, non-semantic, and non-mental terms. That is the aim of this paper. My thesis rests on two claims. The first is the metaphysical claim that every creature enjoys a fundamental relation to itself, namely identity. The second is Dretske’s epistemological claim that representations do not require a Self, traditionally understood as the principle that spontaneously organizes mental activity and lies behind all intentional acts. Briefly, I argue for a naturalization of self-consciousness that postulates non-linguistic, naturalized, and selfless form of representation of the cognitive system based on the metaphysical, fundamental relation everyone has to himself, namely identity. Self-consciousness emerges when brain states are selflessly recruited through learning to represent the cognitive system itself as a subject.
Machine summary:
In contrast, I believe that the only way of solving this traditional puzzle is to assume another bottom-up approach, namely the one that accepts Baker’s challenge to naturalism and provides a naturalist framework for self-consciousness; in Baker’s terms, to account for self-consciousness in non-intentional, non-semantic, and non- mental terms.
However, the most striking feature of Kantian self-consciousness is the fact that its identity is stated as a condition of cognition and hence is always presupposed by cognition and can never be explained in terms of more basic concepts or representations of pain of circularity: “I can ascribe them (representations) to the identical self as my representations, and thus can grasp them together, as synthetically combined in an apperception, through the general expression I think.
I believe that the only way of solving this traditional puzzle is to assume another bottom-up approach, namely the one that accepts Baker’s challenge to naturalism (1998) and provides a naturalist framework for self-consciousness: to account for self-consciousness in non-intentional, non-semantic, and non- mental terms.
And in indirect speech (oratio obliqua), the canonical expression of such knowing self-reference is the use of the indirect reflexive pronoun of the third person (a quasi-indicator) itself * as Castañeda suggests (1966): I think that he* is depressed.
The Putative Nonconceptual Self-consciousness However, even if we assume that in sentence 1 with the first-pronoun used as a subject the question of self-identification is meaningless, the puzzle of knowing self-reference can be formulated in other terms.