"Consciousness" is one of those loaded words that means a few different things in different contexts. When I say consciousness is about recursive theory of mind

"Consciousness" is one of those loaded words that means a few different things in different contexts. When I say consciousness is about recursive theory of mind, I'm not trying to say that when you're asleep you're unable to do social reasoning. That's a different use of the same word. I mean "conscious" in the sense of self-awareness or sentience. I'm also not ascribing any moral or cognitive superiority or inferiority to different levels of it. The fact that a cat might be less self-aware of its suffering because it think about how it would explain its pain to other cats does mean imply that I'm saying it should be OK to torture cats. I'm just interested in what is going in human brains when we "feel self-aware". What are we doing when we're thinking about what we're doing? Where does that sense of perceptual distance come from when we are aware of ourselves? And my pet theory is that the distance comes from imagining how we look through others' eyes and developed from our highly advanced social reasoning.