Self Awareness

Self awareness can be thought of as phenomenon that came about by gradual accumulation of cognitive abilities and sentience.

Think of object is a simulated world. The object can be designed to work a certain way with all other objects that make it's external world. Suppose the situated world is modeled to obey Newton's laws of motion. We can have a ball that can be bounced, tossed and rolled in any direction. The balls motion is prescribed by physical laws of dynamics. Suppose the ball is now given the properties such as it suffers damage it came into contact with sharp things in the simulated world. Say we attach an actuator controlled by electronic intelligence to one of the balls. The electronic brain has the capacity to direct the ballls movement. But it has no sentience and thus no desire to prevent damage to itself. It just does not experience pain or pleasure and has no goal setting agenda' Now if sensors were added to the ball to if it is given artificial intelligence, it has the capacity to avoid damage by means of computing the oncoming events.