In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, October
2000, Nagoya
The Mimetic Origins of Self-Consciousness in Phylo-, Onto- and Robotogenesis
Jordan Zlatev
Department of Linguistics and Phonetics
Lund University, 223 62 Lund, Sweden
jordan.zlatev@ling.lu.se
Abstract
The paper presents and defends the mimetic hypothesis concerning the origin of selfconsciousness in three different kinds of development: hominid evolution, the mind of the child, and
the epigenesis of mind within an artificial autonomous system, a robot. The proposed crucial factor
for the emergence of self-consciousness is the ability to map between one’s own subjective bodyimage and those of others, supported by a partially innate ‘mirror system’ [1]. Combined with
social interaction, this gives rise to intersubjectivity and starts a developmental cycle of (a)
increased objectification of one’s body-image, (b) increased volitional control, (c) increased
understanding of the intentionality of others and (d) increased understanding of one’s own
intentionality. The hypothesis has far reaching theoretical implications: self-consciousness and
empathy are co-determined; language and tool-use are not causes, but rather consequences of
increased self-consciousness; most of the symptoms of autism can be accounted for as resulting
from an impairment of the mirror system. The implications are negative for non-representational
approaches to robotics [2] and in favor of approaches based on imitation/mimesis [3], [4].
My sense of myself grows by imitation of you and my sense of yourself grows in terms of
myself.
James Baldwin
1
Introduction
Self-consciousness is the awareness of oneself as a subject – as an individual thinking and feeling
being. This implies knowing that one possesses a body which is separate from the environment, as
well as mental states such as desires, beliefs and intentions. Other terms referring to this ability are
reflexivity, re-representation [5] and higher-order consciousness [6]. The latter term introduces an
explicit contrast with what Edelman calls ‘primary consciousness’, the ability to be aware of what
occurs in the present only. This ‘lower’ form of consciousness is probably available to all
mammals, and definitely to primates. But it is also possible that the latter possess a degree of selfconsciousness, considering their ability to pass mirror recognition tests [7]. Nevertheless, it is
hardly unduly anthropocentric to claim that the self-concept of human beings is considerably more
developed than that of even our closest relatives. The classical question is: Why is this so? And the
classical answer is because of the most obvious difference between us and other species: Our
possession, and their lack of language. Theories defending what may be called the linguistic
hypothesis of the origin of self-consciousness differ immensely on exactly what it is about language
that ‘causes’ self-consciousness – from crude nominalistic ones, extolling the power of words such
as me and I, to more sophisticated ones emphasizing the undoubtedly important cognitive role of
symbolic interaction [8] and symbolic memory [9]. But they share the common claim that (full)
self-consciousness is impossible without (a fully developed) language.
In this paper I present and defend an alternative explanation for the origins of self-consciousness,
the mimetic hypothesis. I follow the usage of the term mimesis by Merlin Donald [10] to refer to
conscious, purposive use of the human body for representational means, paradigm examples being
mimicking, gesture and ritual dance: “Mimetic skill or mimesis rests on the ability to produce
conscious, self-initiated, representational acts that are intentional but not linguistic” ibid: 168.
Donald argues persuasively that a mimetic stage in the evolution of our species (approximately
coinciding with Homo Erectus) intervened between the ‘episodic culture’ of apes and the languagebased culture of modern humans. The mimetic hypothesis goes a step further and proposes that
during this stage in evolution, and a parallel stage in individual development, human selfconsciousness arises through a process that is essentially captured by the quotation from Baldwin at
the onset of this paper. In other words, when social interaction is mediated through ‘mimetic
representations’ self-consciousness and empathy – which are outcomes of the same process –
naturally arise.
Thus, the linguistic and the mimetic hypothesis share the claim that social interaction is a sine
qua non for self-consciousness but they differ in that the mimetic hypothesis states that language
per se is not a necessary condition – pace Edelman, Dennett [11] and a host of other ‘language
philosophers’. In fact, the causal relationship between the two seems to be the reverse: selfconsciousness is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for language.
The content of this paper is the following: After spelling out the mimetic hypothesis in somewhat
more detail, I show that it coheres with evidence from e.g. primate research, neurobiology and
human development, normal and abnormal. Furthermore, I propose that the hypothesis applies to
three different domains: phylogenesis, ontogenesis and – somewhat provocatively – robotogenesis.
Indeed, if self-consciousness in an artifact can be achieved by endowing it with human-like preadaptations for mimetic representations and then leading it through a developmental progression
similar to that for human beings, that would be the strongest possible empirical validation for the
mimetic hypothesis.
2 The Mimetic Hypothesis
In the most general terms, the mimetic hypothesis for the emergence of self-consciousness can be
presented as follows.
For a creature to develop (normal) self-consciousness the following three conditions need to be
fulfilled: (a) it should have a coordinated (at least in part through experience) sensory-motor
system, including proprioception, (b) it should have an ‘innate’ system supporting the recognition
and imitation of actions of con-specifics and (c) it should participate in a complex social
organization requiring it to predict and evaluate its own and others’ behavior. Given these prerequisites, self-consciousness may develop along a developmental cycle that can be broken down in
the following steps.
Step 1. The establishment of a ‘bridge’ of pre-reflective intersubjectivity. Due to (b), a
correspondence between the actions of others and those of oneself is established. Initially, there is
no clear differentiation between ‘self’ and ‘other’ which sets up what can be compared to a bridge
for transferring properties between oneself and other members of the community.
Step 2. Increased objectification of one’s body. Even though (a) amounts to a kind of ‘body
image’ corresponding to what Neisser [12] calls an ‘ecological self’, it is too subjective to be the
object of reflection. However, through the ‘bridge of intersubjectivity’ the actions of the other are
mapped onto (possible) actions of oneself, and that provides a kind of ‘mirror view’ on one’s own
body which helps to objectify it.
Step 3. Increased volitional control. As a result of the objectified view of one’s own body,
attention can be focused both on the performing of certain actions, and on the body as a whole,
implying that with time one’s own body can be better brought under volitional control.
Step 4. Increased ‘theory of mind’ for others. But if one’s own body is under volitional control,
so must be those of others. That, along with the ecological pressure of having to predict the
behavior of the other members of the social group, would lead to the ‘discovery’ that their behavior
is mediated by mental states, i.e. that they are intentional agents.
Step 5. Increased ‘theory of mind’ for oneself. “But if others are intentional agents, and we are
(essentially) alike, then so am I”. With this realization comes an understanding of one’s own
subjectivity as separate from that of others, i.e. the understanding of oneself as possessing an
individual self-consciousness.
It is important to point out that he steps of this process do not correspond to ‘stages’ of
development. Steps 2 to 5 can occur many times in a loop, while Step 1 serves as general
background to this development, and is thus similar to the preconditions. Somewhat paradoxically,
however, it undermines itself – with the establishment of a ‘theory of mind’ for oneself and others,
the scope of intersubjectivity is limited. However, in a healthy consciousness it remains in the form
of empathy.
This presentation is perhaps unduly schematic, but its purpose is to clarify the general idea. I will
now concretize it, considering how it could apply to three different developmental domains: the
evolution of Homo, child development and the creation of an artificial person.
3 Phylogenesis
As mentioned before, there is robust evidence that chimpanzees and orangutans recognize their
own images spontaneously in a mirror [7], which indicates that they can correlate the external,
‘objective’ view of their bodies and the subjective, proprioceptive ‘image’ if it. There is further
evidence from experiments which approximate false-belief tasks for children, that at least our
closest relatives, the chimpanzees have some understanding that the kind of knowledge others
possess will influence their behavior [13]. Finally, it has been shown that chimpanzees who are
reared in isolation, apart from serious impairment in social behavior, also fail to pass the mirror
recognition task [14] – and most certainly will fail in false-belief tasks too. Combined, these facts
suggest strongly that chimpanzees have an edge over other animals and even over other primates
with respect to self-consciousness. How can we explain this, and at the same time, how can we
account for the fact that even without language (preverbal children, deaf mutes, the case of
“Brother John” described by Donald) human beings are (seemingly) more self-conscious than
chimpanzees?
The mimetic hypothesis suggests the following scenario. Like all mammals, chimpanzees have
the basis for a coordinated ‘body image’ (property ‘a’). With respect to property ‘b’, it has been
shown that the monkey brain (in the rostral part of the ventral premotor cortex, area F5) has neural
structures which respond equivalently to the animal’s own actions, and to identical actions
performed by another and only observed by the animal. Rizzolatti and Abrib [1] call these ‘mirror
neurons’. There are clear evolutionary advantages for such a mirror system for animals living in
groups of con-specifics. Since chimpanzees have the most complex animal societies we know of
(property ‘c’), it is likely that they have a mirror system which is still more developed than the
monkey’s. This development could have occurred through genetic assimilation of elements of the
developmental cycle presented in Section 2. The crucial change would have been an adaptation
which allowed increased volitional control of one’s body movement (Step 3), leading the mirror
system to be used not just for action recognition and simple imitation, but for something that
approaches mimesis. Since the onset of this increased volitional control of the body precedes toolmaking, the latter can not have been its major cause, and could possibly even be its result.
Donald [10] lists a number of properties of mimetic representation: intentionality (the ability to
attribute intention to the acts of another), generativity (the ability to ‘parse’ motor acts and to
recombine them creatively), reference (separation of signifier and signified), autocuing (voluntary
recall and execution) and communicability. To be able to perform such acts, attention has to be
carefully controlled so that it may shift between one’s own body as a signifier and whatever is
being signified. This clearly implies a reflective, objectified relation to one’s body, a ‘selfrepresentation’ equivalent to a basic self-consciousness: “Self-conscious action is thus the basis of
mimesis” (ibid: 193). I would suggest that the dexterity of the chimpanzee’s hand shows that it
stands somewhere at the gate of mimetic representation. This gate would have been passed by
Homo, with still more complex social life in the savanah, requiring the volitional use of the body
for making tools and for communication. This is identical with the hypothesis presented by
Rozzolatti and Arbib [1]:
We argue that (1) the mimetic capacity inherent in F5 and Broca’s area had the potential to
produce various types of closed systems [of gestural communication] … (2) the first open
system to evolve en route to human speech was a manual gestural system that exploited the
observation and execution system… A plausible hypothesis is that the transition from
australopithecines to the first forms of Homo coincided with the transition from a mirror
system, enlarged, but used only for action recognition, to a human-like mirror system used for
intentional communication. (ibid: 192-193)
But according to the mimetic hypothesis, pre-adaptations which increase volitional control of the
body and the understanding of others as intentional agents, also lead to increased understanding of
oneself as a subject, i.e. to self-consciousness.
4 Ontogenesis
Pre-adaptations serving self-consciousness directly or indirectly such as the hypothetical ‘mirror
system’ will function only in collaboration with social interaction over a course of individual
development. If this development is severely tempered with, the prediction would be that selfconsciousness would be negatively affected.
There are no unambiguous studies of children submitted to complete social deprivation – which
is of course an extremely unethical thing to do. Still, the sad story of Genie, who was strapped to a
potty in an isolated room, and whose father and brother barked at her like dogs and hit her on
attempted communication for over 10 years [15] would certainly qualify as a “crime against the
soul of Man” [16]. Her state of severe retardation when she was discovered and released from her
prison at the age of 13 can be interpreted as a lack of self-consciousness. This is certainly consistent
with the mimetic hypothesis, since the abnormal behavior of her father and brother would interrupt
the developmental cycle described in Section 2. But since her physical and linguistic interactions
were severely impaired as well, no certain conclusions may be drawn. Still, it is indicative that she
never completely caught up with her language, while she did quite soon with her general and social
cognition, suggesting a priority of the latter.
While the causes of developmental disorders such as autism (e.g. [16]) are different (internal as
opposed to external), their consequences are remarkably similar. This too can be explained from the
standpoint of the mimetic hypothesis. Consider what would happen if there was a disruption in the
activity of the mirror-system – either because a genetic, or acquired insult damages it directly, or
because it affects negatively something else, e.g. attention, which prevents the formation of a stable
correlation between one’s body-image and the body of the other. First, there would be a disruption
of ‘pre-reflective intersubjectivity’, most obviously observed in failures of imitation and joint
attention (Step 1). Furthermore, there would be deficiencies in volitional control (Step 2-3), or what
is often called ‘executive function”. That would result in theory-of-mind deficits (Step 4) and
ultimately in impaired self-consciousness (Step 5). All of these deficits are actually observed in
autism, and the mimetic hypothesis can help show why this is so. Dautenhaln [3] similarly sees a
disruption of empathy as the core problem and hypotheses that autistic people are “missing this
kind of bodily-re-experiencing (resonating) with others” (ibid: 16). The close connection between
empathy and mimesis is also pointed out by Wispe [17]: “Empathy refers to the attempt by one
self-aware self to comprehend unjudgementally the positive and negative experiences of another
self. It depends on imaginal and mimetic capacities.” This, however, seems to presuppose that a
self-aware Self precedes empathy, while the present hypothesis is that the two develop
simultaneously, having prereflective intersubjectivity as a precondition. Finally, as pointed out at
the end of Section 2, the developmental cycle presumed by the mimetic hypothesis is carried on
repetitively throughout the first years of development (and perhaps later) – better understanding of
others leads to better self-control and vice versa – leading to improved social cognition and selfconsciousness. Thus, as Tomasello [18] suggests, depending on when the insult occurs in
childhood, there will be a different degree of deficit, which would help explain why there is a wideranging autistic continuum.
Normal ontogenetic development seems to confirm this picture. For example, not only are
theory-of-mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) co-impaired in autism, but performing
successfully tasks involving one is a good predictor of performing successfully tasks involving the
other in a particular stage of development. Perner and Lang [19] review the evidence and conclude:
In summary, none of the available data provide serious evidence against either of the two
theories that postulate a functional dependence between ToM and EF. In fact, it is quite
plausible that both are right in the sense that ToM and EF development are interdependent. An
understanding of mental states as causally efficacious is required for executive inhibition, and
executive inhibition is a main exercise ground for a theory of mind at this stage of
development. (ibid: 342)
The temporal precedence of mimetic to linguistic development presents further indication that the
first is the primary source of self-consciousness. While beliefs are not understood until the age of 45 years, which has served as a basis to claim that there can be no theory-of-mind prior to the
acquisition of language, there is plenty of evidence that the onset of understanding mental life is
much earlier. Tomasello [18] proposes that this happens around 9 months, considering that joint
attention (looking where the caregiver is looking), social referencing (looking how the caregiver is
feeling toward a new person) and imitation learning (doing what the caregiver is doing with a novel
object) can be observed at this point in development. Even more indicative is the emergence of
intentional communication such as pointing:
Infants also at this time first direct intentional communicative gestures to adults, indicating
and expectation that adults are causal agents who can make things happen. All of these
behaviors indicate a kind of social-cognitive revolution: At 9 months of age infants begin to
understand that other people perceive the world and have intentions and feelings towards it;
they begin to understand them as intentional agents. (ibid: 175)
Finally, as would be predicted by the mimetic hypothesis, though somewhat later than expected,
between 15 and 21 months, children who are still largely pre-linguistic, recognize themselves in the
mirror [20].
In sum, a bulk of evidence from both normal and abnormal child development are consistent with
the mimetic hypothesis. In fact the cognition of pre-linguistic children, at least from 9 months on, is
so reminiscent of the ‘mimetic culture’ in hominid evolution proposed by Donald [10], that it is
warranted to speak of a ‘mimetic stage’ in ontogenesis [21]. If there was motivation to attribute
self-consciousness to pre-verbal Homo Erectus, there is even more so to the child of 12-18 months,
who imitates with an understanding of goals, communicates intentionally and displays selfrecognition, but has not yet entered language properly. Since language presupposes a shared
understanding of what words mean, which implies a reflexive process (I know that A means ‘a’ and
I know that he knows that I know that A means ‘a’), it follows that disruptions that lead to impaired
reflexivity (self-consciousness) will lead to disruptions in the semantics/pragmatics of language.
This kind of disruption is exactly what is observed in autism.
5 Robotogenesis
In [21] I argued that the necessary and sufficient conditions for an artificial autonomous system to
be capable of self-consciousness and language are (1) that it is able to participate in social
communicative practices on a par with other members of the community (situatedness), (2) that it
possesses bodily structures providing adequate causal support for physical, social and linguistic
interaction (embodiment) and (3) that it undergoes a stepwise development in its acquisition of
physical, social and linguistic skills (epigenesis). The first condition opposes the individualist
orientation of traditional AI, the second implies that the machine should be a humanoid robot and
the third that all higher cognition cannot be ‘programmed in’, but must be the result of a
developmental process, i.e. robotogenesis. These, however, are general conditions which do not
specify how to proceed in an actual effort to create a self-conscious robot. The makers of the wellknown robot Cog [22] make almost the same assumptions, as evident from the following project
description:
Our group has constructed an upper-torso humanoid robot, called Cog, in part to investigate
how to build intelligent robotic systems by following a developmental progression of skills
similar to that observed in human development. Just as a child learns social skills and
conventions through interactions with its parents, our robot will learn to interact with people
using natural social communication. [23].
In practice, however, Cog consists only of different purely reactive systems which do not even fit
together in a coherent whole, and the only kind of ‘social interaction’ it is capable of is to mimic
head-nodding and head-shaking. Since this is light-years away from even basic mammalian
cognition, any pretence that Cog will acquire anything resembling a human mind through
interaction is completely unjustified.
To reach that goal, I suggested that it is necessary for the robot to proceed through the same
developmental stages as the human child, which are also the stages Donald proposes for evolution:
episodic, mimetic and symbolic. However, I did not provide a clear reason for why this
recapitulation may be necessary – why couldn’t the robot achieve self-consciousness in some other
way? The mimetic hypothesis presented here offers a more specific answer. Assume that we have a
robot with all the complexity of a creature capable of an ‘ecological self’. This means that its
perception and motor systems form a co-ordinated network allowing it to explore its environment
and to distinguish its own body from it. Its motivational system sets its goals, and its internal value
system evaluates its performance. What is it, if anything, that can bootstrap such an artificial
creature into self-consciousness? From the present standpoint: its interaction with beings who are
themselves self-conscious (the ‘care-givers’) and an ability to identify with them bodily, possibly
resting on the equivalent of a mirror system. Once the ‘bridge of primary intersubjectivity’ is
established, the robot can proceed through the developmental cycle described in Section 2: external
view on its body, increased volitional control, increased understanding of others as intentional
agents, and increased understanding of itself as such. The behavioral signs that the robot is
progressing along the epigenetic route to self-consciousness would be that its imitation becomes
more ‘creative’ and displaced in time, its acts of joint attention more fine-tuned to the referents
which its social partners are attending to, and that its acts of communication (e.g. pointing) become
more and more intentional. That is, the same kind of criteria according to which an understanding
of intentionality is attributed to pre-verbal children. In a similar way, if the hypothetical epigenetic
robot eventually passes a mirror recognition test, it too can be plausibly accredited with basic selfconsciousness.
Such a possibility rises a host of tantalizing questions: Could we induce autism in such a robot?
Or would we be compelled to treat it as a person, thereby making it unethical to perform
“invasive” operations that would jeopardize its mind. Will the robot have an individuality? Will it
have subjective experience – the phenomenological dimension of consciousness – and if so, what
would it be like (to be robot)? An actual robot that can help us find answers to these questions is, of
course, still in the of realm of science-fiction. Still, unlike the hope that a robot like Cog will wake
up one day and say: “I think, therefore I am” it does not seem to be a theoretical impossibility.
Thus, our quest to understand ourselves (and perhaps our procreational instincts) will probably lead
us to it eventually.
6 Summary and conclusions
Perhaps the major problem with explaining the evolution of self-consciousness, like with
explaining the evolution of language (cf. [9]) is that it is multiply determined: there are many
plausible ‘just-so stories’ that could be used to explain why it would emerge (though unlike with
language, there are also stories ‘explaining’ why consciousness is actually an illusion…) What I
have presented in this paper could be regarded at least as one more such story, one in which
language and tool-use – two primary figures in other stories – do not play the major role. Social
interaction does, but simply to state that is far too general. What exactly about social interaction is
it that is crucial? By what sorts of mechanisms? And why does social interaction result in selfconsciousness in some creatures, but not in others?
The mimetic hypothesis provides answers to these questions. It is consistent with behavioral and
neurobiological data, and provides an account of how the imitation of others, volitional control of
one’s body, a theory of mind and self-consciousness might be related. The fact that all these
abilities are more or less severely affected in autism means that the hypothesis could possibly
provide the key to unraveling this enigmatic disorder. A robotic system developing as predicted by
the hypothesis would be the best possible validation.
The major implication of the mimetic hypothesis for AI is that an artificial self-conscious agent
requires a body (it must be a robot) and it must be ‘reared’ into an environment where other selfconscious agents (natural or artificial) interact with it in a way that will allow the robot to identify
with them first bodily, and then mentally. Through a loop such as that suggested by Baldwin, it
could be led to project both from the other to itself, and from itself to the other and thus to acquire
self-consciousness and empathy. Since the basis for such a development is a bodily-based, mimetic
self-representation, and the approach taken by Brooks and his associates [2], [22], [23] is a priori
non-representational, the latter will continue to have very limited success in creating human-like
intelligence. On the other hand, proposals based on imitation and ‘re-experiencing’ such as those of
Dautenhahn [3] and Kozima [4] are much more promising.
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