There was a discussion a while back on my journal which digressed rapidly from the original subject (my distaste at handling my own faeces) to the nature of self-awareness and the use of language therein.  The main topic I recall was a disagreement between myself and thishardenedarm as to whether it was possible to experience things without parsing them through our language filter.  He said no, I said that it was possible to _experience_ them, but you couldn't think about them, which was why when people "lost themselves" in an action they tended to not have any significant memory of what they'd been doing.

Being the kind of smug person who doesn't like leaving an argument open just because they don't have any evidence to hand it was a delight to bump into this today, which says that the prefrontal cortex is pretty much entirely switched off when people are enjoying music/images on a purely emotional level.  The best quote is:

"We propose that the role of self-related cortex is not in enabling perceptual awareness, but rather in allowing the individual to reflect upon sensory experiences, to judge their possible significance to the self, and, not less importantly for consciousness research, to allow the individual to report about the occurrence of his or her sensory experience to the outside world.

To conclude, the picture that emerges from the present results is that, during intense perceptual engagement, all neuronal resources are focused on sensory cortex, and the distracting self-related cortex is inactive. Thus, the term "losing yourself" receives here a clear neuronal correlate. This theme has a tantalizing echoing in Eastern philosophies such as Zen teachings, which emphasize the need to enter into a 'mindless,' selfless mental state to achieve a true sense of reality."

Being, for the most part, stuff what came up in conversation with Ed, who is halfway through "The Mind Made Flesh: Frontiers of Psychology and Evolution".  Which brought up questions about different levels of intelligence.  Most of this is just based on stuff I've picked up over the years, but I was explaining what I thought to Ed, and so thought I'd jot it down.

1) Pure chemical reaction - No processing whatsoever, just mechanical action/reaction.
2) Simple brain reactions - complex reactions with no real memory, but the ability to produce different reactions to more complex (but still simple) situations.  No central nervous system (and therefore no brain).  Still a basically action/reaction system, but more complex. 
3) Learning.  Even without a central nervous system a simple neural net can self-tune from simple pain/reward stimuli.
4) Memory.  With the development of a central nervous system/brain it becomes possible to store information over a long period.  This may still not be conscious, but just a more complex form of action/reaction, allowing more efficient tuning of these reactions. 
5) Modelling.  With a central nervous system/brain the creation of internal models is possible, and these can be built on and retained over time.  This can vary from the very simple (This is food, this is not) upwards to models of how other people 'work'. 
6) Self-Modelling.  When the stage is reached of building models of other people, an understanding of self-as-object is possible, and true self-awareness occurs.  Complex plans involving other people's reactions to our reactions to other people (and so on) become feasible.  An understanding of subjectivity and how our nature affects all of the above is possible.

Placing what goes where on this chart is the tricky part.  Plants and microbes are stage 1.  Jellyfish/Worms are stage 2-3.  Insects have definitely hit stage 4, but I don't know if the smarter ones have hit stage 5 or not.  Mammals are definitely stage 5, but some primates (at least) are also capable of the basic bits of stage 6 (although there are still people out there that put them at stage 4 (which I consider insane, and evidence that they haven't spent much time around them).  People are stage 6, but it frequently seems to me that people mostly spend time at stage 5, only occasionally really aware of themselves.

Still thinking about lots of this, obviously, and any reading you can throw in my directin will be appreciated (if read rather slowly)