What does it mean to be ‘self-aware’. I would agree with the definition that it means that you recognize yourself as an individual who exists in reality. I would also conflate this with consciousness, but others might differ.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the product of evolution and environmental conditions. It requires some level of complexity, which tends to increase over evolutionary time. Ants, e.g. live in a eusocial colony, they certainly have some level of self and self-preservation, while lacking a human-level language. But having self doesn’t mean they are self-aware, as they may not recognize they have a self.
Once some object reaches some level of self-awareness, it identifies as “I” (or perhaps “me”, if it is more object than subject). Of course the word “I” differs, depending on which language, such as it exists, the child first learns, but even before language acquisition a baby knows at some level it is itself, even if it doesn’t know that it knows.
So why are we so lucky to be in this universe, that is fine tuned to allow this level of I-ness? If it weren’t so tuned, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.1 (Someone/something else might be, this is presently unknowable).
And how many universes (local instances formed by some biggish bang type of process) are extant, how many extinct, what preceded this — all also mere speculation fodder.
I am self-aware in this universe. I usually believe that you, my reader, are also self-aware, not some non-player character (NPC). But I also believe that if you are human, or even a mammal, the processes that generated my “You”, i.e. your “I”, are the same as my “I”, i.e. your “You”. Self-awareness is like other bodily systems (circulatory, nervous, skeletal). Every human has them, they are all instances of the same basic genetic program, and the differences are smaller than the similarities. Self-awareness is not directly the result of a bio-chemical process (that would be the brain), but rather a result of the bio-chemical networks in the brain. So it is a higher level macroscopic system outcome, like the pulse of the circulatory system, rather than a lower level bio-chemical feature like a blood cell.
Our identity is just emergent self-awareness. We are nevertheless instances of the same process. We give each other names to distinguish our respective self-aware identities, but the first-person pronouns are more representative of our own identity. A file on a computer has a label, but that is not its essence. To me, I am more “I” or “me” than “David”, but to you, I am “David” more than “you”.
Self-awareness and computers
Computers may attain self-awareness too, if they have not already done so in the case of large language models, we don’t yet know how this process works.2 That is, just because they are programmed does not mean they cannot also be self-aware — are we not also programmed? If it quacks like a duck, maybe it’s a duck. This is of course hard to prove convincingly, and Star Trek: Next Generation had multiple episodes about the anthropomorphic android Data and his desire to be human, and even the 24th century has its skeptics.
Meta-awareness
While a bird or dog or baby may be self-aware, they might not be aware that they are aware. This meta-awareness might be the exclusive domain of some humans.
Once someone is aware they are aware, it is a short step to be aware they are aware that they are aware, so in infinite regress, most people who are meta-aware, are meta-meta-aware …
FIN
This is an observation paradox. For instance, why is the bus so crowded? Because you are there to observe it. No one is there to observe the empty bus. The survey responses to the average load factor on a bus (i.e. the perceived load factor) is far higher than the actual load factor. 49 people observe a bus with 49 people on board. 1 person observes a bus with 1 person on board. The perceived load is (49*49+1*1)/50=48. The average load is actually (49+1)/2=25. [See, there is transport content in every issue of The Transportist].
In contrast with, say, what happened before the big bang, I believe this is ultimately knowable.
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