Our eyes see everything around them, but cannot see themselves. To see themselves, they need a mirror. Scientists often use mirrors to study self-consciousness in animals. They place a mark on the animal’s face, and if the animal recognizes the mark while looking in the mirror, it suggests self-awareness.

We often believe we know ourselves directly and without doubt, unlike how we recognize our external appearance in a mirror. However, psychological science challenges this assumption. Our self-knowledge is prone to biases and gaps. Do we ever know ourselves directly, or is the “I” always built from signals, some from the body, some from the world outside?

The concept of self-consciousness is inherently paradoxical. When I am aware of something outside myself, I am the subject, and those things are the objects of my consciousness. However, when I turn myself into the object of my own consciousness, the subject and the object become one, which seems paradoxical [1].

Therefore, earlier thinkers proposed that the real self, which is aware of its own existence, must be distinct from the physical body. Thinkers like Descartes and his followers concluded that the root of the true self is immaterial and resides in the soul, which they believed was connected to the body through the pineal gland, thus resolving the paradox. Of course, accepting a self separate from the body introduces a new problem: What kind of separate substance is this, and how is it aware of itself? This reasoning suggests the possibility of yet another self beyond that substance, potentially leading to an infinite regress. Modern science, however, offers a different path out of this paradox, not by searching for a separate substance, but by looking deeper into the intimate conversation between the body and the brain.

Interoceptive sense is a new........

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