Find out through internet and popular science articles whether animals other than man has self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness is nothing but awareness of one’s self. It is often thought as a trait unique to human race. But research suggests that it may be more common across animal kingdom. In fact some studies suggest that any animal capable of imagining future outcomes of their action must have primitive sense of self.It is measure of intelligence in the animal kingdom. Many animals other than human are believed to be self-conscious. Dolphins are the great example of self-conscious animals. They are highly intelligent. They also have sense of self and they do recognize themselves with others. Dolphins use whistles, tail-slapping and other body movements to communicate with each other. Like dolphins other animals like elephant, chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, orcas, and bonobos also have self-consciousness.So how self-awareness is identified? In humans we identify it by consciousness of our character, feelings, desires etc. For animal kingdom a mirror test is devised to find out about self-consciousness. It was developed in 1970 where experimenter marks the animal with the coloured dye. Then the animal is presented with mirror and their reaction is observed. Self-aware animals will turn and adjust their body to get a better view and touch the colored spot or try to remove it. Such behavior proves that the animal understands the reflection is its own. Whereas animals who fail this test, draw no correlation between the reflected movements and facial expression as their own.One of the drawback of this test is that it uses vision as a measure of self-consciousness and not all animals rely on sight as the predominant sense. For e.g. bat, which depends on sonar to get around, is self-conscious, but the sighted humans just don’t know how to formulate a test to measure this because we are visually oriented. Opinion: With consideration of all the facts mentioned above my opinion is that humans aren't the only animals who are self-conscious. Various research and studies have shown that animals other than man have self-consciousness.
