Our Own Minds (Radu Bogdan)

I'm reminded once again that I'm a psychologist, not a philosopher. I'm fascinated by the workings of the mind. but I want to approach them empirically and don't have the patience for the fine-grained logical analysis philosophers do. So while I enjoyed the basic ideas put forward in Bogdan's work on the development of consciousness, I found myself skipping over some of the painstaking argument and semantic distinctions here. Here's that basic idea. Children are born with an external orientation (to the environment and especially other people). Their minds work furiously to figure out how what others are doing and why, and what this has to do with the events and objects in the world. They very quickly start internalizing some of this, in the sense of developing their own relationships with the world, including the world of other people, but they're still looking at their own minds and relationships more or less from the outside, and don't start to develop a truly internal view of themselves until after around age four. That's when they start to be able to perceive their own internal thoughts and motivations directly. This fits with what I've always thought of as the nature of our self-awareness. As social creatures, we have to try to understand and predict what others will do. Because humans are flexible in our responses to the environment, with very few specific behaviors controlled directly by biology, we needed to develop internal models of other people, figuring out their motivations and goals and preferences. This mental machinery, created to help us think of others, is then available for us to use to understand ourselves, and that's where we get our ability to think of our own motivations and goals and preferences. Makes sense to me.