# Self-Awareness **Entity class:** Event or historical development ## Definition **Self-Awareness** is a system's capacity to represent itself as the subject or object of its own perception, memory, evaluation, and action. ## Relationships **Related concepts:** [[wiki/Choice vs Loop|Choice vs Loop]] · [[wiki/Operational Representation|Operational Representation]] · [[wiki/Runtime Coherence|Runtime Coherence]] · [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]] **Collections:** [[collections/Consciousness Continuity|Consciousness Continuity]] · [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] · [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]] **Canonical source article:** [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]] These links record conceptual dependencies and contrasts. Institutional control, technology transfer, and empirical continuity are tracked as separate relationship types. <!-- BEGIN HUMANIZED RELATIONSHIPS 2026-09-11 --> This entry's documented connections are expressed in its definition and related-work routes, with provenance retained in the source-linked material. <!-- END HUMANIZED RELATIONSHIPS 2026-09-11 --> - **Edge source route:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] connects this topic to exact Annual Question passages promoted into the Simple Reminders archive. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "Could a machine feel torn like Aida, or even moved like the rest of us when we see her beg the gods to pity her suffering?" > **— Eldar Shafir**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Can Machines Feel Torn or Moved by Eldar Shafir|Can Machines Feel Torn or Moved by Eldar Shafir]] > "Any software or robot can pronounce the words "I am intelligent" or "I am conscious," but those are not proofs of intelligence." > **— Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Claiming Consciousness Does Not Prove It by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran|Claiming Consciousness Does Not Prove It by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran]] > "As recently as the 17th century, René Descartes proclaimed "cogito ergo sum," implying that thinking is a uniquely human faculty, as is consciousness." > **— Maria Popova**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Consciousness Was Once Claimed as Uniquely Human by Maria Popova|Consciousness Was Once Claimed as Uniquely Human by Maria Popova]] > "Perhaps individual machines may never "think" in a way that resembles individual human consciousness as we understand it." > **— Rebecca MacKinnon**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Machines May Never Think Like Human Consciousness by Rebecca MacKinnon|Machines May Never Think Like Human Consciousness by Rebecca MacKinnon]] > "A machine may be able to self-monitor what decisions it has made, but it may never attain human-like self awareness and consciousness." > **— Bruce Parker**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Self-Monitoring May Never Become Self-Awareness by Bruce Parker|Self-Monitoring May Never Become Self-Awareness by Bruce Parker]] > “In the same way, the neural code is unlikely to resolve the mind-body problem to everyone's satisfaction. When it comes to consciousness, many of us seek not an explanation but a revelation, which dispels mystery like sun burning off a morning fog. And yet we will embrace a neural-code theory of mind if it works — that is, if it helps us predict, heal and enhance ourselves. If we can control our minds, who cares if we still cannot comprehend them?” > **— John Horgan**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Neural Interfaces/Changing My Mind About the Mind-body Problem by John Horgan|Changing My Mind About the Mind-body Problem by John Horgan]] > “Today, the biggest challenge is to explain our powers of thinking and imagination, our abilities to represent and report our thoughts: the very means by which we engage in scientific theorising. The final triumph of the natural sciences over supernaturalism will be an account of nature of conscious experience. The cognitive and brain sciences have done much to make that project clearer but we are still a long way from a fully satisfying theory.” > **— Barry C. Smith**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Dangerous Idea?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Conscious Experience Is the Final Frontier of Natural Science by Barry C. Smith|Conscious Experience Is the Final Frontier of Natural Science by Barry C. Smith]] > “There are no moral facts. Moral sentences have no truth-values. The world itself is silent, it just doesn’t speak to us in normative affairs — nothing in the physical universe tells us what makes an action a good action or a specific brain-state a desirable one. Sure, we all would like to know what a good neurophenomenological configuration really is, and how we should optimize our conscious minds in the future. But it looks like, in a more rigorous and serious sense, there is just no ethical knowledge to be had. We are alone. And if that is true, all we have to go by are the contingent moral intuitions evolution has hard-wired into our emotional self-model. If we choose to simply go by what feels good, then our future is easy to predict: It will be primitive hedonism and organized religion.” > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2008, Edge Annual Question, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Evolution Cannot Give Us Moral Facts by Thomas Metzinger|Evolution Cannot Give Us Moral Facts by Thomas Metzinger]] > “If matter is but one of the humbler products of consciousness, then we should expect that consciousness itself cannot be theoretically derived from matter. The mind-body problem will be to physicalist ontology what black-body radiation was to classical mechanics: first a goad to its heroic defense, later the provenance of its final supersession.” > **— Donald D. Hoffman**, *2005, Edge Annual Question, “What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Cannot Prove It?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/If Matter Is a Product of Consciousness Physicalism May Fail by Donald D. Hoffman|If Matter Is a Product of Consciousness Physicalism May Fail by Donald D. Hoffman]] > “The Internet is also itself a metaphor for the emerging paradigm of thought in which systems are conceived as networks of relationships. To the extent that a Web page can be defined only by what links to it and what it links to, it is analogous to one of Leibniz's monads. But Web pages still have content, and so are not purely relational. Imagine a virtual world abstracted from the Internet by deleting all the content so that all that remained was the links. This is an image of the universe according to relational theories of space and time, it is also an image of the neural network in the brain. The content corresponds to what is missing in those model, it corresponds to what physicists and computer scientists have yet to understand about the difference between a mathematical model and an animated world or conscious mind.” > **— Lee Smolin**, *2010, Edge Annual Question, “How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?”* [[reminders/AI Control/The Internet Exposes What Our Models Still Miss About Conscious Minds by Lee Smolin|The Internet Exposes What Our Models Still Miss About Conscious Minds by Lee Smolin]] > “The film A.I. and the idea contained within it that robots could someday become conscious is another case in which our wishes exceed reality. Despite enormous advances in artificial intelligence, no computer is able to experience a pin prick like a simple frog, or get hungry like a rat, or become happy or sad like all of us carbon-based units. But why is this the case? It is my conjecture that this is because there are some features of being alive that makes mind, consciousness, and feelings possible. That is, only living things are capable of the markers of mind such as intentionality, subjectivity, and self-awareness. But the important question of the link between life and the creation of consciousness remains a great scientific mystery, and the answer will go a long way toward our understanding of what a mind actually is.” > **— Todd E. Feinberg**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “What Is Your Question? ... Why?”* [[reminders/AI Control/What Is the Relationship Between Being Alive and Having a Mind by Todd E. Feinberg|What Is the Relationship Between Being Alive and Having a Mind by Todd E. Feinberg]] > “Will a machine ever be able to feel what an organism feels?” > **— Joshua Bongard**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Can a Machine Feel What an Organism Feels by Joshua Bongard|Can a Machine Feel What an Organism Feels by Joshua Bongard]] > “I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away. But what happens? People say I'm lying! They say it's impossible and so I must be deluding myself to preserve my theory. And what can I do or say to challenge them? I have no idea—other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is. When the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises—will the decisions be morally acceptable? Here I have made a great leap of faith (or the memes and genes and world have done so). It seems that when people throw out the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds—but this too I cannot prove.” > **— Susan Blackmore**, *2005, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”* [[reminders/Identity/Decisions Can Happen Without a Self Feeling It Made Them by Susan Blackmore|Decisions Can Happen Without a Self Feeling It Made Them by Susan Blackmore]] > “For hundreds of years the pattern in science has been to overturn folk concepts, and it seems to me the brain may be the next field for such a conceptual revolution. It may be that in a hundred years people will speak of free will, or the unconscious, or emotion, in the way that we now speak of "sunrise" or "forever" — words that serve for day-to-day talk, but don't map reality. We know the sun doesn't rise because it is the earth that moves and we know that humanity and its planet and the universe itself won't last forever. I see signs that concepts of the mind are due for the same sort of revision. And so that's the question I keep returning to.” > **— David Berreby**, *2002, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR QUESTION? ... WHY?”* [[reminders/Identity/Free Will and Emotion May Become Folk Concepts That No Longer Map Reality by David Berreby|Free Will and Emotion May Become Folk Concepts That No Longer Map Reality by David Berreby]] > “How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover the unwitting teamwork that turns that dynamic clump into a person who can love, notice, wonder, and keep a promise?” > **— Daniel C. Dennett**, *2018, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS THE LAST QUESTION?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/How Do Trillions of Cells Become a Person by Daniel C. Dennett|How Do Trillions of Cells Become a Person by Daniel C. Dennett]] > “Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely observing the electrical activity of the brain, Libet could predict what a person would do before the person was actually aware of having decided to do it.” > **— Eric R. Kandel**, *2006, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?”* [[reminders/Identity/The Brain Can Reveal a Decision Before the Self Knows It Has Decided by Eric R. Kandel|The Brain Can Reveal a Decision Before the Self Knows It Has Decided by Eric R. Kandel]] > “Recent studies in the booming research field of Mind Wandering show that we spend roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time zoning out—daydreaming, lost in fantasies, autobiographical planning, inner narratives or depressive rumination. Depending on the study, 30-50% of our waking life is occupied by spontaneously occurring stimulus and task-unrelated thought. Mind Wandering probably has positive aspects too, because it is associated with creativity, careful future planning, or the encoding of long-term memories.” > **— Thomas Metzinger**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?”* [[reminders/Identity/The Conscious Self Repeatedly Loses Inner Autonomy by Thomas Metzinger|The Conscious Self Repeatedly Loses Inner Autonomy by Thomas Metzinger]] > “Yet, the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die. It crops up again and again in recent theories of decision-making as an entity with free will that can be depleted. It re-appears as an interpreter in cognitive neuroscience as capable on integrating parallel streams of information arising from separable neural substrates. Even if these appearances of the self are understood to be convenient ways of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes, students of the mind continue to implicitly endorse that there is a decision-maker, an experiencer, a point of origin.” > **— Bruce Hood**, *2014, Edge Annual Question, “WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?”* [[reminders/Identity/The Self May Be an Emergent Output Mistaken for a Decision-Maker by Bruce Hood|The Self May Be an Emergent Output Mistaken for a Decision-Maker by Bruce Hood]] > “98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every year. 98 percent! Water molecules stays in your body for two weeks (and for an even shorter time in a hot climate), the atoms in your bones stays there for a few months. Some atoms stay for years. But almost not one single atom stay with you in your body from cradle to grave.” > **— Tor Nørretranders**, *2008, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?”* [[reminders/Identity/Almost No Atom Stays With You From Cradle to Grave by Tor Nørretranders|Almost No Atom Stays With You From Cradle to Grave by Tor Nørretranders]] > “Once the internal connectivity of a system exceeds a threshold, it begins to be dominated by self-sustained, reverberating states of activity. I believe that the human workspace system has passed this threshold, and has gained a considerable autonomy relative to the outside world.” > **— Stanislas Dehaene**, *2005, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Past a Connectivity Threshold a System Begins to Run Itself by Stanislas Dehaene|Past a Connectivity Threshold a System Begins to Run Itself by Stanislas Dehaene]] > “Conscious awareness is a sliver of the machine that is human intelligence but it's the only aspect we experience and hence the only aspect we come to believe exists.” > **— Mahzarin Banaji**, *2006, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/Consciousness Is a Sliver of the Machine We Call Intelligence by Mahzarin Banaji|Consciousness Is a Sliver of the Machine We Call Intelligence by Mahzarin Banaji]] > “The old assumption that fitter perceptions are truer perceptions is deeply woven into our conception of science. The funeral of this assumption will not be snubbed with a back-page obituary, but heralded with regime change.” > **— Donald D. Hoffman**, *2014, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT SCIENTIFIC IDEA IS READY FOR RETIREMENT?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/The Funeral of Truer Perception Will Bring Regime Change by Donald D. Hoffman|The Funeral of Truer Perception Will Bring Regime Change by Donald D. Hoffman]] > “The mysterians argue that the human mind may be incapable of understanding itself, that we will never understand how consciousness works. But if mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general.” > **— Nicholas G. Carr**, *2017, Edge Annual Question: “WHAT SCIENTIFIC TERM OR CONCEPT OUGHT TO BE MORE WIDELY KNOWN?”* [[reminders/Consciousness/If the Mind Cannot Understand Itself Nothing Is Fully Intelligible by Nicholas G. Carr|If the Mind Cannot Understand Itself Nothing Is Fully Intelligible by Nicholas G. Carr]]