Day of the Whale, 46th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): I heard the other day that child psychologists propose that children first develop a sense of self identity by watching their parents. They see their parents looking at something in the room, and come to understand that their parents are considering that thing. It could be the other parent, or some other person in the room, or the pet, or a piece of furniture, or, more and more often these days, a phone. 

At some point, they see the parent looking at them, and a mental model emerges that not only are they the thing the parent is looking at, and by extension, that they are a "thing." This preverbal realization that they are one of the things in the room, a potential subject of Mom or Dad's attention, is the start of a sense of identity, and of ego, self, and separateness.

I cannot confirm that, not having raised a child from infancy myself. But I know my cat, Eliot, has made a lifelong project of studying me, as his feeding and very survival depend on me. He's created a conceptual model of me in his mind, I believe, and understands that I perceive the world mostly through my eyes, and that the locus of my perception is in my face. When he's trying to interact with me, he's up in my face, trying to put himself into my field of vision. He can tell or assumes that I'm not paying attention to him when my eyes are trained on the television, or the computer, or a book, or more and more often these days, a phone.

But when I look directly at him, he knows that he's got my attention. I can tell this because I can elicit a "meow" from him simply by turning my head and staring at him. "Meow," might be cat-speak for "yes, I'm right here" or "whatcha looking at, motherfucker?," but in any case, he knows it's him I'm looking at.

And if he knows it's "him," he most likely has some concept of himself as a "thing," a living entity separate from all other living entities. He must have some level of awareness of something like an ego-self. I think this must be true of all social animals that rely on interacting with other members of their own or other species to survive.

To be sure, his self identity is very different than mine. While he knows that he is a separate and distinct entity from me, or from his late brother, Izzy, for that matter, and while he certainly has memory, I don't think he has a sense of a narrative biography. I don't think he recounts a tale of once being a feral cat at large in an urban neighborhood, and then being taken in at one particular house. Or of having a "brother" (actually, another stray that got taken in) and then losing that brother to old age and death. Without language, such narratives are difficult to create and maintain. When we visit the vet, he's familiar with the surroundings and isn't surprised by the activities, so obviously he remembers past visits, but I don't believe he thinks back to the last time we were there, or anticipates the next time we return.

Thomas Nagel asked "what's it like to be a bat?" If it's "like" something, then that something must have subjective experience and is therefore conscious. It's had to imagine what being a bat is like, but for many years now, I've been studying what it's like to be a cat, and one thing I've learned it that part of what that's like is wondering what it's like to be a human.