My main objection (or one of my main objections) to the position is that I don’t think I’m self-aware to the level of passing something like the mirror test or attributing mental states to myself or others during most of my conscious experiences, so the bar for self-reflection seems set too high. My self-representations may be involved, but not to the point of recognizing my perceptions as “mine”, or at least the “me” here is often only a fragment of my self-concept. My perceptions could even be integrated into my fuller self-concept, but without my awareness. The kinds of self-reflection involved when mice suffer from the rubber hand (tail) illusion or when dogs recognize their own bodies as being in the way or when (I think) animals learn to communicate their emotions generally in different trainer-selected ways (point 5 here) seem like enough to match many of my everyday consciousness experiences, if any self-reflection is required at all.
It also wouldn’t be necessary for the self-representations to be fully unified across all senses or over time, since local integration is global with respect to the stuff being integrated; animals could have somewhat separate self-representations. Still, I do think mammals and birds (and plausibly most vertebrates) do integrate their senses to a large extent, and I think many invertebrates probably do to some extent, too, given, for example, evidence for tradeoffs and prioritization between pain and other perceptions in some crustaceans, as well as for cross-modal learning in bees. I know less about any possible self-reflection in invertebrates, and I’ve seen papers arguing that they lack it, at least with respect to pain processing.
My main objection (or one of my main objections) to the position is that I don’t think I’m self-aware to the level of passing something like the mirror test or attributing mental states to myself or others during most of my conscious experiences, so the bar for self-reflection seems set too high. My self-representations may be involved, but not to the point of recognizing my perceptions as “mine”, or at least the “me” here is often only a fragment of my self-concept. My perceptions could even be integrated into my fuller self-concept, but without my awareness. The kinds of self-reflection involved when mice suffer from the rubber hand (tail) illusion or when dogs recognize their own bodies as being in the way or when (I think) animals learn to communicate their emotions generally in different trainer-selected ways (point 5 here) seem like enough to match many of my everyday consciousness experiences, if any self-reflection is required at all.
It also wouldn’t be necessary for the self-representations to be fully unified across all senses or over time, since local integration is global with respect to the stuff being integrated; animals could have somewhat separate self-representations. Still, I do think mammals and birds (and plausibly most vertebrates) do integrate their senses to a large extent, and I think many invertebrates probably do to some extent, too, given, for example, evidence for tradeoffs and prioritization between pain and other perceptions in some crustaceans, as well as for cross-modal learning in bees. I know less about any possible self-reflection in invertebrates, and I’ve seen papers arguing that they lack it, at least with respect to pain processing.