Introspection, Self-Awareness Not Unique to Just Humans

by Monica Joshi

What a marvelous thing it is just knowing that you are alive? Descartes, Locke and Nietzsche questioned their self-awareness and all came to different conclusions about it. The ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from other individuals and the environment was thought of as a uniquely human feature for a long time. A new study adds to the growing list of research that proves otherwise.

The new research from the University of Warwick has found that humans are unlikely to be the only animal capable of self-awareness. The findings suggest that any animal capable of mentally simulating environments must have some form of self-awareness.

On the research, Professor Thomas Hills, study co-author from Warwick’s Department of Psychology, commented that:

“The study’s key insight is that those animals capable of simulating their future actions must be able to distinguish between their imagined actions and those that are actually experienced.”

The researchers, from the University of Warwick’s Departments of Psychology and Philosophy, used thought experiments to first identify which capabilities animals must have in order to mentally simulate their environment. The researchers were inspired by work conducted in the 1950s on maze navigation in rats.

In this work, it was observed that rats in the maze would often stop to think when they were required to make decisions about what to do next. At the very least they appeared to deliberate over their next moves.

Recent neuroscience research has confirmed the hypothesis. It has found that at these ‘choice points', both rats and other vertebrates activate regions of their hippocampus that appear to simulate choices and their potential outcomes. As the hippocampus is responsible for memory and long-term memory, this shows a direct relationship between choices presented and the neurological process in the decision-making of the rats.

For the current research, Professor Hills and Professor Stephen Butterfill, from Warwick’s Department of Philosophy, created different descriptive models to explain the process behind the rat’s deliberation at the ‘choice points’.

One of the models used was the Naive Model. This model assumed that animals inhibit action during simulation. However, this model created false memories because the animal would be unable to tell the differences between real and imagined actions.

The second, the Self-Actuating Model, was able to solve this problem by ‘tagging’ real versus imagined experience. Hills and Butterfill called this tagging the ‘primal self’.

Professor Hills noted that:

“The study answers a very old question: do animals have a sense of self? Our first aim was to understand the recent neural evidence that animals can project themselves into the future. What we wound up understanding is that, in order to do so, they must have a primal sense of self.”

This research comes at a time when we are continually debating the abilities of animals and other inorganic creatures, such as AI, to be self-aware. This research could be the starting point in showing that humans are not the only animals capable of self-awareness. Moreover, it is possible that robots could eventually become capable of imagining themselves doing what they haven't done yet. As we are quick to play the “self-awareness” card to justify treating other nonhuman animals as subordinate, this research might be yet another reason to check our intuitions.