“In being conscious of myself as myself, I see myself as separate from what is not myself. In being conscious, a being reacts to the world with feeling, with pleasure and pain, and responds on the basis of felt needs. Self-consciousness, though, is something over and above the sensitivity and feeling implied by consciousness. As self-conscious, I do not simply have pleasures, pains, experiences, and needs and react to them: I am also aware that I have them, that there is an ‘I’ which is a subject of these experiences and which is a possessor of needs, experiences, beliefs, and dispositions. In being or becoming aware of experiences, dispositions, and beliefs as mine, I am at the same time aware that there is or might be something which is not me or mine, something which my experiences and beliefs are of, something towards which my dispositions are directed. And this essential contrast of my mental universe with a world which is not me and not mine immediately raises the question for me as to the adequacy of my mental universe as a representation of the world which is not me or mine.
A self-conscious person, then, does not simply have beliefs or dispositions, does not simply engage in practices of various sorts, does not just respond to or suffer the world. He or she is aware that he or she has beliefs, practices, dispositions, and the rest. It is this awareness of myself as a subject of experience, as a holder of beliefs, and an engager in practices which constitutes my self-consciousness. A conscious animal might be a knower, and we might extend the epithet ‘knower’ to machines if they receive information from the world and modify their responses accordingly. But only a self-conscious being knows that he is a knower.”
~ Anthony O'Hear, Beyond Evolution: Human Nature and the Limits of Evolutionary Explanation (1999)
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