Humans are certainly self conscious. Crabs are certainly conscious. Crystals certainly exist.
Where the boundaries are is an interesting question, but the categories certainly exist even if I can't draw a clean boundary around members.
What it is like? So you are comparing one entity experiencing something to another. Experiencing is a process that takes place inside the entity and among its component parts.
Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation.
Humans are self conscious.
Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.
Crystals do not have this knowledge or do not have a mechanism to act on it in a way that manipulates semantic symbols.
It's a bit more complicated. Self consciousness is the ability to contemplate mental states, some philosophers say. Crabs do not contemplate their own mental states, they simply act and feel.
So define the word contemplate.
But do you see how defining things and using the subject and object makes it hard to ask any of the major questions?
Sorry, but it was my first comment on the thread. You are confusing me with the guy that posted earlier. I apologize for entering in the middle of your conversation.
> So define the word contemplate.
Contemplate: to observe something and to entertain thoughts about it.
Imply that self preservation is an example of self consciousness is not sufficient for me. Plants too react to stimuli and they don't even have a nervous system (edit: neurons are not a sine qua non condition, obviously. I was only pointing to the fact that simpler organisms react to the environment, it is one of the most basic evolutionary strategies). It is necessary something more.
As the poster before me said, there are boundaries. They can be not clear, but they exist.
According to this definition, crabs are self conscious.
I guess my office building is self conscious then, as it has a sprinkler system.
"Know you are that thing - every thing is itself, if it has well defined boundaries. Knowing something is just having access to that information and good reasons to believe it to be correct. Here we have a tautology - that a thing is itself - so it doesn't require much to know that. What you are probably more interested in is a mechanism that can take advantge of that knowledge in various ways. Like self preservation."
This line of thought leads to the self-consciousness of buildings in exactly the same way as it leads to the self-consciousness of crabs.
Anyway my original point stands :)
'Crabs are self conscious too because they act with a purpose of self preservation, which requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them.'
I pointed out that this works equally well for the claim that buildings with sprinkler systems are self-conscious, a conclusion that you have tacitly agreed is ridiculous. There's no difficulty in seeing what flaw in reasoning led to this conclusion: it is in the claim '[self preservation] requires knowledge of what is them and what is not them', where, in fact, all it needs is a suitable response to a stimulus that may signal an existential threat. This claim is not in jjaredsimpson's definition of self-consciousness; it is an independent axiom that you inserted into the discussion.
If your original point is that any discussion can be stalled by the injection of bogus arguments over the definitions of words, then I would have to agree that you have proven it by example.