In this reply I make explicit how the research to which he has drawn attention meshes with my account of primitive self-consciousness. I had relatively little to say about the neural dimension of primitive self-consciousness. Clearly, there is a parallel Implementation Constraint, to the effect that no satisfactory account of a cognitive capacity should make it mysterious how that capacity could be neurobiologically implemented. In the following I make a very tentative assessment of some of the possible neural bases of primitive self-consciousness. The optic array contains information about the self as well as information about the environment.
Visual proprioception is present at birth and appears early on in evolution.
The perception of affordances is a form of self-perception. It is the pick-up of environmental information about one's own possibilities for action and reaction. The central claim here is that affordances are themselves part of the content of what is perceived. The animal does not work out his own possibilities for action by analysing what he sees. He just sees what he can and cannot do in a particular environment.