This confuses 'levels', or what exactly is the intelligent 'agent'. The idiot-savant is not generally intelligent. Depending on what you mean by "complex mathe

This confuses 'levels', or what exactly is the intelligent 'agent'. The idiot-savant is not generally intelligent. Depending on what you mean by "complex mathematical problems" even the neural components actually responsible for solving the problems might not be intelligent. In the case of actual idiot-savants, I'd suspect those components aren't 'intelligent'; they're too simple. The alien in Blindsight, if it really "runs entirely on instinct", then I'd expect it to do badly in novel situations, unless it's version of "instincts" basically "bake in extremely complex behaviors" that make it functionally equivalent or similar to a human – at the level we're used to dealing with as humans. Also note that most of your examples are fictional, i.e. not actual evidence beyond maybe extremely weak plausibility. AFAIK, every "high intelligence" of which actual people have actual strong evidence is self aware. That seems like it should be an important fact! Also, you're conflating self-awareness with the ability to (verbally) explain, i.e. communicate, thoughts to others. By "self-awareness", I was thinking of an 'intelligent system' including some sub-model of itself in whatever the relevant domain it is we're considering. For a 'general-purpose reproductive-fitness-maximizing-strategy executor' that's intelligent, e.g. us, it seems pretty unlikely that they don't, generally, model themselves. We should probably taboo "self-awareness" as it's pretty obviously too slippery and ambiguous.