Robert was a well-built, fair-haired boy of twelve years of age. Calm, composed and self-sufficient, he seemed to hold himself somewhat aloof from those about him. He was an unusual boy in that he possessed that extraordinary combination of intelligence, a pleasing personality and physical attractiveness. His frank, winning smile captivated the class immediately. Not at all self-conscious, he c...

Humans and some animals are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. This ability has been taken as a demonstration of self-consciousness. Consequently, it has been proposed that the self-recognition in the mirror image, the mirror test, could also be used to determine the potential self-consciousness of cognitive machines. It is shown that very simple machinery is able to pass the mirror test...

1. In thinking about the sources of self-consciousness we need to separate out two dimensions of the problem. There is, first, a genetic dimension. One might wonder about the origins of the capacity to think full-fledged self-conscious thoughts. That is to say, one might be asking about where this capacity comes from. How does it emerge in the normal course of human development? What are the ge...

One of the major topics towards robot consciousness is to give a robot the capabilities of self-consciousness. We claim that robot self-consciousness is based on higher order perception of the robot, in the sense that first order robot perception is the immediate perception of the outer world, while higher order perception is the perception of the inner world of the robot. We summarize our cogn...

This paper aims to analyse egocentric indexicals 'I', 'now', and 'here' as different aspects of the same self-conscious or self-referential act emphasising underlying phenomenological structure essential indexical 'I'. What makes an is not its indexicality but mental state indicated by use. Therefore, interpreting them only in confines language severely limits scope investigation. First, I will...

Rocco J. Gennaro Indiana State University [final version in Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2002] Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness entails self-consciousness, or, even more strongly, that consciousness is self-consciousness. As Kathleen Wider puts it in her terrific book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, “...all consciousness is, by its ...

Dan Zahavi has argued persuasively that some versions of selfrepresentationalism are implausible on phenomenological and dialectical grounds: they fail to make sense of primitive self-knowledge and lead to an infinite regress. Zahavi proposes an alternative view of ubiquitous prereflective self-consciousness—the phenomenological datum upon which Zahavi and self-representationalists agree—accord...

Quite a few recent models are rapidly introducing new concepts describing different levels of consciousness. This situation is getting confusing because some theorists formulate their models without making reference to existing views, redundantly adding complexity to an already difficult problem. In this paper, I present and compare nine neurocognitive models to highlight points of convergence ...

We highlight the latest research on body perception and self-consciousness, but argue that despite these achievements, central aspects have remained unexplored, namely, global aspects of bodily self-consciousness. Researchers investigated central representations of body parts and actions involving these, but neglected the global and unitary character of self-consciousness, the 'I' of experience...