Hanak: "Recognition of the self is a prerequisite and reference of comparison for recognition of the external. All animals possess a sense of self no matter at how rudimentary a level."
You may infer that, but obviously you do not know it from direct experience. (You have never experienced being a rove beetle, or experienced snailhood.) Therefore by your own criteria your statement does not refer to anything 'real.'
Hanak: "It is a requirement of survival to know what is one’s self in order protect oneself from inadvertent destruction by oneself or by others. Anything sensed as being not of the self is recognized as being external to the self without the need for inference."
Again, this is speculation. It's not observable, objective fact, eh? How do you know that a sea snail does not perceive it's wat'ry home as simply an extension of its own being? Perfectly possible, my good man, perfectly possible: one may design algorithms for sensory detection and response in completely unalive machines.
One can do it with springs, weights, and levers without even bothering to write a computer program. Such a system is inanimate -- yet it can act to preserve a condition or set of conditions just as a sea snail or bacterium seeks to preserve its living conditions, say, by avoiding excessive heat.
Point being, what you
suppose about sea snails is not necessarily 'real.' In the sense that your first posts insists upon.
Hanak: "Similarly the newborn human infant knows the difference between self and not self, between self and others, and between internal and external."
Maybe. However, I recall that some research suggests that newborns have to learn through experiment to between what is 'me' and what is 'not-me.'
----
Yes, indeed it is spring, and the cottonwoods are all resinous and perfumey. One is tempted to note that it must be the height of glorious unfettered Whitmanesque folly to set up a chain of speculative reasoning as an argument that speculative reasoning is wrong. But spring has done sproinged and the sky is fair to clear, so it's a good time for grass leaves, Whitman, and unfettered speculation.
