Abstract
It is often claimed that a minimal form of self-awareness is constitutive of our conscious experience. Some have considered that such a claim is plausible for our ordinary experiences but false when considered unrestrictedly on the basis of the empirical evidence from altered states. In this paper I want to reject such a reasoning.
 This requires, first, a proper understanding of a minimal form of self-awareness – one that makes it plausible that minimal self-awareness is part of our ordinary experiences. I will argue that it should be understood as Perspectival First-Person Awareness (PFP-Awareness): a non-conceptual identification-free self-attribution that defines the first-person perspective for our conscious experience. I will offer a detailed characterization of PFP-Awareness in semantic and epistemological terms.
 With this tool in hand, I will review the empirical literature on altered states. I will focus on psychedelics, meditation and dreams, as they have been claimed to present the clearest cases in favor of a radical disruption of self-awareness. I will show that the rejection of the idea that minimal self-awareness is constitutive of our experience on the basis of this evidence is unfounded, for two main reasons. First, although there are good grounds to think that some forms of self-awareness that typically accompany our ordinary experiences are compromised, they do not support the claim that PFP-Awareness is absent. Secondly, the reports that could make us think of a radical disruption of self-awareness are most probably due to a confirmation bias – and hence we should mistrust them – derived from the expectations and metaphysical views of their subjects.
Highlights
In our daily life we are conscious of the objects around us, but we are conscious of ourselves
Gallagher (2000) distinguishes the narrative self, corresponding roughly to the idea that we and others have of ourselves – dependent on episodic and autobiographical memory, as well as on imagination related to the planned and expected future – from the minimal self. Those who defend the claim that self-consciousness is constitutive of our conscious life do not think of self-consciousness as consciousness of the narrative self but rather as involving a minimal sense of selfconsciousness: some have claimed that the unrestricted version (SCMIN) Consciousness entails a minimal form of self-consciousness
This seems to rather describe a typical case in psychedelic experience involving ego-dissolution in which there is a feeling of unity with one’s surroundings that is related to the disruption of ego-boundaries and irrelevant to Perspectival first-personal (PFP)-Awareness. It is from this disruption that the subject concludes that “Yet thought continued, so would it be proper to still speak of ‘I’ even as the notion of ‘I’ seemed palpably illusory?”. Millière interprets this as a total absence of first-person perspective, whereas I am suggesting that that the report reflects the perplexity of experiencing the dissolution of the subject-object duality, as a consequence of the feeling that the entity we identify ourselves with merges with the environment into “One.” This description is very close to the Hindu’s description of samadhi, and as we have seen it is fully compatible with the truth of SCMIN once the minimal form of self-consciousness is understood as PFP-Awareness
Summary
In our daily life we are conscious of the objects around us, but we are conscious of ourselves. Those who think that SCMIN is true hold that, in each of these cases, one is aware that one oneself is in a certain state, which is, in turn, responsible for the subjective aspect of experience In this sense consciousness is claimed to entail a minimal form of self-awareness. In such cases, my conscious experience does not merely convey to me the way the environment is, and that I relate in a certain way with such an environment; namely, that I am in a certain relational state – a visual one in this case – to the mug. Once the intended notion of minimal selfconsciousness is clarified, I discuss how PFP-Awareness relates to other notions that have been used to characterize minimal self-awareness (section 2.2), and how to make sense of the idea that one can be more or less self-conscious (section 2.3)
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