The Face in the Mirror : The Search for the Origins of Consciousness

Rating:
Summary: book lost my confidence after 80 pages
Review: I regret I lost confidence in this book because the authors (and apparently all the scientists whose experiments they discuss) don't address what strikes me to be a serious problem with the inference they draw that because people or chimps recognize that their images in a mirror are images of themselves, this indicates a mental ability to be "self aware." Now I happen to think that people, chimps, & others ARE self aware, but the mirror test neither confirms it nor rebuts it. What appears to be going on is that people, chimps, and perhaps some other animals are mentally able to conceive that a mirror is presenting them a copy image of objects in the immediate environment around them -- one of which objects happens to be the body of the person or chimp that is doing the viewing. Other animals mentally are simply incapable of conceiving of a "copy" of an object that is near them being displayed nearby. Now, why is it that a chimp recognizes him/herself in a mirror if he/she has never before seen his/her own face? Simply because he/she knows what his/her own arms & legs & torso look like, which he/she sees in the mirror to be the same objects as seen directly; and this is confirmed by the duplicate motions of arms etc. The chimp then makes the connection, by touching his/her own face and seeing the arm in the image touch a face, and feeling his/her own hand touching her/his face, that the mirror is displaying other parts of the body as well that due to their position in relation to the eye are not directly visible by eye. All this is simply object recognition. The chimp is recognizing that the mirror is showing other sides of objects, some of which sides the chimp has never seen before. The interesting test experiment that needs to be done, but is not discussed in the book, is to confirm whether chimps can use mirrors (or live video monitor) to show a view into a box with a treat, a box that they cannot see into but can reach into. If by using the mirror or video image they can catch the treat, then you know they are using object recognition. Another test might be to apply the anecdote Darwin relates (see page 58 of the book) where his 6-month-old baby knew that if he saw the father suddenly appear in the mirror, he needed to turn around to look at his father in person. Obviously what Darwin's baby did was recognize that the mirror was showing him the image of a person who was elsewhere in the room. By definition this is not self-awareness; the baby is not the father. The process by which the baby recognizes the father, and recognizes that the image of the father is telling him that the real father is elsehere in the room (not in the glass) is the same process as that by which the baby recognizes himself: the baby comprehends that the mirror has duplicated the image of an object. Nor does it make any difference that the baby knows his own body; innumerable animals, perhaps all, know their own bodies; many groom themselves. If body grooming is self awareness then every cat and hamster is self-aware ipso-facto. (A possible flaw in the dot-on-the-face experiments is that they trigger a natural grooming response, which tells us less than if the experiment somehow called for behavior that was uncharacteristic of the animal's normal behavior). Lastly, the authors need to speak with more precision. To say that an animal (the viewing animal) that fails the mirror test is responding as if the image in the mirror is another animal means that the viewing animal thinks there is another animal in the apparent location where the mirror displays the image. It is not accurate to say (and the authors do not mean to say) that the viewing animal realizes that the mirror is presenting a copy image but mistakenly thinks the copy image is of some other animal located elsewhere in the room (the source animal). If the viewing animal understood that the mirror image was a copy, such that the viewing animal's confusion stemmed from the source of the image, the viewing animal would not respond directly at the mirror image, it would start looking elsewhere around the room to find the animal that was the source of the image. But of course, no animal engages on such a puzzling and fruitless search for that nonexistent source animal. That proves that the viewing animal's problem is an inability understand that the image is a copy, not that the animal knows it is a copy but is confused about the source of the copy image. In short, animals fail the mirror test due to a mental inability to conceive of the concept of copying an object as an image -- just like the old Aesop fable of the dog with a bone crossing a bridge, who looks down, sees the image of a dog with a bone reflected in the water, and opens his own mouth in an attempt to grab the bone of the "other dog" (and so loses his own bone). Repeatedly the authors refer to the chimp recognizing "himself" in the mirror, when to be more precise the chimp is recognizing one of many objects in the environment, that object happening to be the chimp himself. The fact that the chimp may spend more time looking at his own body in the mirror than at other objects also duplicated as images in the mirror merely derives from the fact that all animals are most interested in their own bodies; the bodies cause feelings of comfort or discomfort and are the key to survival. In short, the mirror test appears to me to test only the ability to conceive that objects around one can be duplicated in image form, but does not test self awareness or consciousness. These objections seem to me to be so obvious, and so telling against the theories that are the premise of this book, that I would have liked to see these issues addressed within the first 50 pages if in fact any of these scientists have addressed them. I stopped reading because these issues weren't addressed early-on and because, based on the table of contents, it did not appear that this book would ever address these issues.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Read
Review: Imagine what it must be like to not recognize your "self." How would you put on makeup? Shave? Get an eyelash out of your eye? When you are walking by a department store window and see a person out of the corner of your eye, how do you know the reflection you are looking at is "you"?

Dr. Julian Keenan, Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory and Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at Montclair State University, had similar questions and many more during his study of self-awareness. The Face in the Mirror is sort of a summary of that work and the documented research relating to it. Keenan states the "purpose of this book is to tell the story of self-awareness".

Keenan discusses the definition of self-awareness, what it means to us and how to measure it scientifically. Self recognition and Theory of Mind are thoroughly described with wonderful examples to help laymen comprehend them. He details previous studies spanning hundreds of years.

A major portion of The Face in the Mirror discusses where in the brain these areas exist. Keenan believes the right hemisphere (generally ignored) holds the key to our self-recognition and self-awareness and he discusses numerous studies he feels proves it.

This book is not only for the scholarly, which was what I was expecting. Keenan's writing style is understandable and surprisingly light. He made numerous attempts to lighten the content with personal anecdotes, analogies and humor which also provide a better understanding.

The Face in the Mirror forces us to think and question how we see ourselves. It also makes us wonder about the skills we have and often take for granted. While it cannot change our basic construct, it helps us to understand why we are the way we are and shows what, in one researcher's opinion, "identifies us as fully human." The Face in the Mirror is successful in explaining its purpose and its arguments are effective and persuasive. An interesting read.

Review Originally Posted at http://www.linearreflections.com

Rating:
Summary: Better than most
Review: Sometimes funny and amusing, this book serves up the brain and the state of the art of consciousness. Enjoyable to the science reader. A nice read for anyone interested in the brain and the self.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but limited
Review: This is a good book, a good read and interesting too. One gets a little of anthropology, and a little of functional brain imaging. All of it, of course, involving self-awareness. Keenan mantains that to be self-consicous one must pass the mirror test-in short- to be able to recognize the image in a mirror as yourself and not as another individual. Most higher apes, it turns out pass the test. Children at about the age of 2 or 3 do too. Some autistic children do not, and autism is sometimes refered to as a problem with theory of mind or self-awareness. It seems then that self-consciousness is something some systems have and others do not. Keenan then reviews the literature on the functional imaging of several interesting tasks that seem to require self-awareness, and concludes that the right cerebral lobe is involved, possibly with the cingulate and prefrontal cortex more centrally related. So far so good.

But for Keenan to have entered into such an interdiciplinary debate, he seem to have forgotten that philosophically, his ideas would at most rest on shaky grounds. Let me elaborate. First, he seems to equate self-consicousness with self-recognition. Now the first thing I would ask is if self-recognition is sufficient for self-awareness}. That is, would a computer programmed to respond to internal signals in an appropiate way be self-awarë? I would say not. But Keenan tries to avoid these objections by holding that self-recognition is an ability one gains by vitrtue of being self-aware. (since self-recognition appears to be correlated with other self related cogniitve abilities). But then Keenan wrote a book about an ability one gains after being self-aware, not a book on self-awareness. Writing a book about visual discrimination is not the same as writinga book about vision, even when I can only discriminate between 2 visual stimuli if I can see in the first place. It is obvious that one can still see, but not discriminate between two stimuli (think of prosopagnosia- loss of face-recognition), and it is equally plausible that one can not recognize himself in a mirror but still be self-aware. This example is interesting, because Keenan would claim that there is a difference between not recognizing yourself because you are not self-aware that because you have a visual impairment. But the point is that although correlated-that is- self-awareness usually comes with self-recognition, it is only that, a correlation. It is then unclear why the mirror test should be so special. It may have positives, but I imagine it has many false negatives.

This can be applied to the neuroscience too: maybe the abilities that one gains by virtue of being self-aware are located on the right hemisphere, but this does not mean it is the location of self-consicousness too. Language is located on the left hemisphere, but the cognitive resources (whatever they are; conceptual information, grammar, memory, mental relations, ideas)and the anatomical resources (mouth, tounge, lips) do not have to be located there too. Of course Keenan simply argues that the right might be dominant for self-awareness, but not the only location of a self-awareness module. In that case, self-awareness seems to be a much more suubtle phenomenon that just the collection of all the self-related abilities.

Now it seems to me that Keenan missed the point from the beggining. He tries to separate self-awareness from awareness itself, when it is not clear this can be done. Maybe self-awareness is just regular awareness but with a self-content, instead of a visual-content or a object-content. In that case, what Keenan theorizes about are the properties, cerebral correlates, and species variations of self-contents, but not of self-awareness itself, just like vison research studies the location of object representations in the brain and not the awareness of objects itself. (For an alternative, check out Thomas Metzingers book, The self-model theory of subjectivity, where in order to write about the self, he first wrote 350 pages on a theory of what makes representations consicous. Now that is an investigation of self-AWARENESS)

Keenans speculations on the functions of self-awareness are quite interesting and plausible. In my opinion,at the end he only succeeds in studying cognitive self-processing, but not self-awareness itself. However meanly I reviewed his book, it still seems to me a good read, a good adition into a neuroscientists library, and a thought inspiring discussion of soome very interesting concepts.