An Alternative Derivation of Self-Consciousness

One standard theory of human experience begins with the awareness of either an object, such as a ball, or a quality, such as roundness, proceeds to discuss the accumulation of the data of consciousness, and, often, somewhere along the way, examines the awareness of that original awareness. Wittingly or otherwise, it is difficult for such a methodology to avoid arriving at the thesis that Consciousness is essentially a disembodied information-processor. A different starting point is the awareness of walking along and noticing a ball close ahead, a basic experience that might be familiar to any young child. Furthermore, the combination in awareness of leg motions and of visual operations can lead to either walking around the ball, or to kicking it. So, this methodology very easily helps establish that Consciousness is essentially embodied and homeostatic. The example also demonstrates how 'information' about the outer world has an essentially homeostatic meaning. For, it is not the case that we first are aware of something, and then incorporate it into our movements. Rather, that awareness is itself the incorporation, an integration into experience that is itself homeostatic, is itself as much the organism's adjustment to a novel stimulus as is its attempt to regain balance after having tripped over a ball. That some information might be categorized as 'useless' only confirms the primacy of 'usefulness', just as for Heidegger, 'Ready-to-Hand' is more fundamental than 'Present-at-Hand'. So, Synkinesis is the feeling of bodily movements as a whole that any introspection can reveal. An explicit bodily 'image' is a further refinement of that feeling. And, as Mead has shown, a lot of what we internalize, from the earliest age, are our images of others, which quite plainly has a homeostatic influence on our behavior. Reflection, that is, explicit Self-Consciousness, is arrived at when one internalizes an image of how one appears to others in general, that is, one self-objectifies, or, as Sartre puts it, one 'assumes' one's 'Being-for-Others'. In the Evolvemental scheme, this is the achievement of the awareness of one's particularity qua particularity, namely the emergence of one's Individuality.