The Upper Bound of the Self

The View from Oregon – 340: Friday 09 May 2025

In several previous newsletters I’ve explored the question of the upper and lower bounds of social formations, and this past week suggested the problem of the upper and lower bounds of the self, which we can think of as the “terminal unit” (to use the language of Geoffrey West) of all social formations, from the family up through the civilization. The problem of the upper and lower bounds of the self was suggested to me when I was thinking about the familiar theme of the evolutionary development of the brain, starting with the reptilian hindbrain, the mammalian limbic system built on top of this, and then the cerebral cortex built on top of that. The function of the brain, then, or what we can also call the function of cognition, begins with sensation, which we can call sentient consciousness, then involves emotion, which we can call emotive consciousness (but also prior sentient consciousness), and then becomes fully explicit analytical cognition.

We sometimes think of fully explicit cognition as being self-awareness, but sometimes the epithet of self-awareness is attached to lower grades of consciousness. Granted that a biological being can be conscious without being self-conscious, or self-aware, sentient consciousness can be conscious without being self-conscious, and emotive consciousness can be conscious without being self-conscious. That is to say, a conscious being may have sensory experience without being self-aware, and a conscious being may have emotive experience without being self-aware. But can we ascend to fully explicit analytical cognition without being self-conscious? What do I mean by fully explicit analytical cognition? Referring to my starting point in the evolution of the brain, I could say that this is cognition that engages the cerebral cortex. Perhaps a better way to identify fully explicit analytical cognition would be the ability to form a concept of anything, i.e., concept formation. However, I could say that a further distinction could be made between implicit concept formation (and use) and explicit concept formation, i.e., consciously framing a concept in order to put it to work in our cognition.

If concept formation can be implicit, then the kind of consciousness capable of concept formation may still be below the threshold of self-awareness. However, if this is the case, then there is a concept that such a consciousness can’t form, or hasn’t yet formed, and that is the concept of the self as applied to itself. If, on the other hand, concept formation must be explicit, then concepts are formed consciously, and this implies self-awareness, at least of the concept formation process. So does self-awareness require the conceptualization of the self as a necessary condition?

One way out of this impasse is to recognize grades of the self, and grades of self-awareness, with the ability of consciousness to form a concept of itself and to apply it to itself reflexively as a higher grade of self-awareness, which does not necessarily exclude lesser grades of self-awareness. There is some evidence that some mammal species (other than human beings) may be self-aware; there have been some experiments designed specifically to test this, but on an anecdotal level we can observe the different responses on the part of other species to seeing themselves in a mirror, and sometimes we get to see the moment when they “figure it out” that the other in the mirror is in fact themselves. I suspect that there are grades of self-awareness from the rudimentary and simple to the complex and sophisticated, and it’s this suspicion that the self itself may develop even as consciousness of that self develops that poses the question of the upper boundary of the self. Can the self continue to become more complex and sophisticated and subtle, or is there an upper limit to this development?

The brain development with which I began goes back hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. The outermost layer of the human cerebral cortex, and therefore the most recent to evolve and to be pasted on top of the previous layers of brain development, has a distinctive kind of neuron not found in other species. Even cetaceans, for all their cleverness, don’t have the same kind of neurons in the outermost layer of their cerebral cortex. It could be argued that the kind of neurons they do have in their outermost cerebral cortex layer represent an alternative pathway to intelligence and self-awareness, but I will leave that aside for the moment. At present, the question is when these distinctively human neurons evolved. If they are coincident with the speciation of Homo sapiens, then they are only a few hundred thousand years old. If, on the other hand, they were also possessed by human ancestors prior to the speciation of Homo sapiens, they could be older. But one of the major aspects of the evolution of hominids has been the rapid evolution (“rapid” in terms of a biological time scale) of the brain, so we don’t need to posit these distinctive human neurons all the way back to the first successor to the last common ancestor of human beings and chimpanzees; they may have evolved much later in this sequence, but still earlier than the speciation of Homo sapiens.

Given further selection pressure, other mammals could evolve a distinctive new layer on their cerebral cortex, or human beings could evolve further layers or further forms of cortical complexity. Again, given the proper boundary conditions for intellectual development, we or another species could still become “smarter” or capable of forms of selfhood, and attendant forms of self-awareness of this selfhood, as a result of further brain development. This could take the form of a being already in possession of self-awareness, which undergoes some evolutionary change that expands the scope or scale of consciousness, ushering in a new form of selfhood, the reflective realization of which endows that being with a new form of self-awareness. The question I began with today is whether this sequence has any upper bound. Are there intrinsic limitations of selfhood, and therefore to forms of self-awareness? Many interesting questions appear as we pursue this question. For example, might there be no limit on the development of the self, and forms of selfhood, while there is a limit on concept formation for forms of selfhood, so that a form of selfhood may obtain that concept formation cannot follow? Say, for example, that a later or higher form of selfhood involves paradoxes of reflextivity that render any concept of such a self self-contradictory, and therefore incapable of being the object of coherent concept formation—is this a self that cannot be conceptualized? And is a self that cannot be explicitly conceptualized a self that is intrinsically greater than the self of self-awareness possessed by the conscious self in question?

If intelligence manages at some point in the history of the universe to escape from its gravity well of origin and to project itself out into the universe (whether this is our human intelligence or some other intelligence), the self that enacts this intelligence could grow seemingly without limit, as Kardashev postulated for supercivilizations (and which I discussed in newsletter no. 337). There could be a correspondence between evolving intelligence and evolving civilization, so that superintelligence coincides with supercivilization. While not phrased in these terms, I think this is sometimes a presupposition of SETI research; we stand in need of a explicit statement of this presupposition, much as Freeman Dyson explicitly formulated what he called the Philosophical Discourse Dogma, which is the idea that civilizations communicating by radio over interstellar distances would be free to engage in a purely philosophical discourse because there would be no danger of a kinetic encounter in which things might go terribly wrong. Dyson ridiculed this idea, and his idea of technosignature searches focused on finding large scale energy use by beings who had no interest whatsoever in communicating their presence, much less discussing philosophical issues. Kardashev, on the other hand, seems to have been all-in on the philosophical discourse dogma, though I’m not aware that he ever took up Dyson’s critique of this.

I mention Dyson here because as soon as I had formulated for myself the problem of the upper bound of the self I thought of Dysons’ eternal intelligences, which is one of the most fantastic of all conceptions of intelligence in the far future of the universe. Dyson postulated the possibility of beings who exist in the far future of a much colder universe, who conserve their energy and are able to communicate with each other over vast periods of time, and who can form and communicate actually infinite thoughts. This is something that I’ve thought about a lot, and which I’ve written some blog posts about, specifically, Who Will Read the Encyclopedia Galactica? Would Dyson’s eternal intelligences have a sense of self? Would they be selves? What they be self-aware? At some point you enter into a sorites paradox and it becomes a question of whether you should continue to use the same terminology (and the same concepts) or whether circumstances have changed sufficiently that it is worthwhile to introduce a new term and a new concept. We saw this also with Kardashev’s supercivilizations: are they are really supersized civilizations, or are they something else entirely that we should call something other than “civilization” and make the object of a novel concept, if our facility for concept formation extends this far?

The possibility of the selfhood of eternal intelligence points to the role of embodiment of intelligence. I started out today’s newsletter with brain evolution, which is, as far as we know, a highly specific evolutionary development without our own biosphere. Even in our own biosphere, brains have developed on different pathways. Cephalopods, which have impressive intelligence for invertebrates, have a brain, but a very different brain structure than land animals. Our common ancestor with cephalopods goes way down the evolutionary tree, hundreds of millions of years ago. There are some interesting studies of cephalopod cognition, not a few intriguing books (I think I’ve previously discussed Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness), and there is of course the surprisingly popular film My Octopus Teacher. Presumably, the radically different embodiment of the octopus results in a radically different sense of self, if any octopus has crossed the threshold of self-awareness. Eternal intelligence would be even more radically distinct in its embodiment from any biological being in the terrestrial biosphere, and it may be the case that any self-awareness of eternal intelligence would be radically different from human self-awareness. Recent philosophers of mind have discussed the embodiment of mind in great detail, and this work may be applicable to the sense of self in self-awareness.

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