Aniseed Balls

I have a problem with how the mirror self-recognition test is popularly portrayed as a test for self-awareness. I’ll leave aside the thorny issue of how exactly we might define self-awareness and tentatively assume that we could agree on enough for my present purpose. I’m talking about conscious introspective knowledge of self. Suppose an animal notices a foreign body on its skin and reacts to it. That doesn’t demonstrate self-awareness: even plants do that. Being able to interpret a surface reflection certainly shows a degree of sophistication, but it’s not evidence of self-awareness: the observer may not even be in the reflection! Some fish can interpret images refracted at the air-water interface well enough to hunt flying insects, and there is no obvious reason why reflection might not also be used, though I don’t know an example. So, reacting to a real object rather than its reflection doesn’t demonstrate self-awareness, and neither does reacting to an object on one’s ow...

In the early 1990s I had an experience that I haven’t told many people about. I woke alone in the middle of the night and immediately felt a presence in the room. My heart was racing, my stomach churning, and I had those uncontrollable waves of goosebumps surging down my body that you only get with something awe inspiring. I expected it to subside but instead it worsened, and I became intimately aware that the presence was God and he was speaking to me. It wasn’t talking, but direct communication, and he was giving me a chance to accept his existence or die there and then. I was terrified, and my heart started racing more and more and I realized I might die of a heart attack. I was completely overwhelmed with the idea that this was a stark challenge to professed reason that I could only pass at the expense of my life, and my heart was bursting, and I seemed to be struggling for ages to regain rational control with no success, and … Well eventually I calmed down and lived to tell ...