The search for a theoretical peg on which to hang this paper led me, inevitably, to Homi Bhabha. Yet when I pulled out Nation and Narration in quest of an apt quote to use as an epigraph, the best I could come up with was actually a passage from Benedict Anderson, whom Bhabha himself quotes in his introduction. Anderson, through Bhabha, states: “What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The current research included two studies that assessed private as well as public self-consciousness and tested recognition memory of trait adjectives which participants had rated according to either private/ideal (Study 1) or public/ideal (Study 2) self-descriptiveness. Each study produced a pattern of false alarms (FA) that corresponded to predictions: Study 1 revealed that participants high ...

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 ...