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Can an animal have qualia without self awareness? I understand that many animals are said to have qualia but not self awareness (perhaps not the great apes).

In particular, I'm having a hard time thinking of how I could be acquainted with a quale, like the taste of mint or a patch of red, without having self awareness -- and so what the latter is meant to be in addition to the former. I do e.g. recognize my face in the mirror, but am not always doing so or thinking coherently about myself, yet am presumably always self aware.

What is self awareness except my embodiment? Don't I need to be embodied for me to have the experience of qualia? Why not generalize that from me to animal minds?

You don't distinguish types of self-perception. What you seem to talking about is passing the mirror test, a degree of mental sophistication that allows a being to picture itself in the world clearly enough to recognise another being from a reflection. It's likely this involves brain bicamerality, a cortex that can suppress instinctive 'other' responses in terms of higher order information, and specialised 'mirror' neurons. These seem to be more abundant in monkeys that raise their young collectively, than great apes that don't.

Anyway. When we look at the neural connectome of nematode c. elegans, with 302 neurons total, we find a specific neuron tasked with distinguishing between it's own body and other things. The analogy is with human proprioception. More widely, the work-space model of awareness sees this as one of the inputs, given various levels of prioritising by neural networks, to enter into the mental models of self and world which form the basis for action.

The only good model I know of for qualia is that of strange loops. In this view tangled hierarchies are key to the emergence of minds. True conscious awareness involves having a complex model of the self, as a component in the tangled hierarchy, that is not just self-reference but self-reflection, theory of mind as manifested in the stages of human development, with the stages of impulse-controlling neocortex development.

I have never encountered any other midel of qualia that is coherent, and always seen it as reducible, though in a sense unique in relation to an individuals worldline self-memories in the hierarchy, in this way.