Self from Within: The Introspective Self 307“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to HumanityBut here, mind starts to lose its immediacy. For example, when my wife
has an attack of migraine headache, she may not show it in her facial
expression, and frequently I have to rely on verbal communication to
know it. The same situation applies to people not in my household but
whom I meet every day, such as my colleagues. When it comes to people
that I have never met in person but have seen their images on television
and heard their voices on radio, such as the President of the United
States, I also have no doubt of their minds, but here the immediacy
recedes further back. I also assign consciousness, with a fair degree of
confidence, to historical figures — Plato, Beethoven and Kandinsky —
who are not my contemporaries, but who through their writing and cre-
ative work I have a mental rapport with. Next come my household pets.
Most pet owners treat their own dogs and cats like family members,
imbuing them with a mind, but (ironically) the same persons might treat
other people’s pets as if they have no consciousness. I once owned a dog
and we got along well by tacitly respecting each other’s mind — tem-
perament, idiosyncrasies, habits, likes, and dislikes. My dog understood
twenty some spoken words but not sentences. She had some rudimen-
tary reasoning. I assumed she had a mind, but it stayed at a level of a
two-year-old child. Once I met a bonobo (a species of chimpanzee with
a high level of intelligence) who was proficient in using computer icons
in communicating with humans, and who also learned how to make and
use tools.^22 I believe its mental capacity is higher than that of the dog
but still lower than that of a grown–up man. How about the inverte-
brates — the bees, ants, and scorpions? They have very limited reason-
ing, depending highly on impulses driven by instincts and pheromones,
but I am inclined to take them as conscious, as they respond quickly
to stimulus from the environment. How about the unicellular eukary-
otes, those that can only be seen under the microscope — the amoe-
bas, the parameciums, and the stentors? Under observation, amoebas
seem to “know” what they are doing. Some biologists like H.S. Jennings
(see Chapter 4) think they are conscious. I simply do not know; only
an amoeba knows, if only it has a mind to know. When we go down to