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            In response to Lyndsey’s last few lines, I think that the issue of whether or not other animals/organisms have consciousness, and, if so, to what degree they are aware of themselves and other individuals, is an intriguing one.  However, I don’t think that we will ever be able to find answers to this question, just as we will never be able to know what another human is thinking.             

           That said, I really enjoyed class on Thursday.  The “I-function” discussion gave me so many new things to think about, and I was surprised by the results of our finger-waving experiment.  Based on my experience, many people (outside of our class at least) seem to think that the “I”, or whatever it is we have inside of us that makes us aware of ourselves, and makes us identify ourselves as individuals…is sort of like the control center of behavior.  To put it in terms of our class model, the “I-function” is seen as the “all-mighty” box, capable of integrating the patterns of signals that we receive from all of our sensory neurons, and sending out signals to our motor neurons to generate behavior.  Some people in the forum have suggested that the “I-function” could be “the mind”.  However, I think that such descriptions tend to overstate the importance of the “I” box in relation to the other parts of the nervous system.  During our Christopher Reeve discussion, we decided that he was not able to move his foot because “He” was no longer connected to that foot.  To me, this seems to emphasize the fact that the foot’s function has been compromised by the severing of the spinal chord.  In reality, though, the “I-function” has more of a handicap than the limbs—while the limbs still retain their ability to react to many kinds of input, the “I” box can no longer send signals to the majority of the body.             

            The experiment that we performed in class (trying to create smooth eye movements without the aid of a visual stimulus) is another example of how the “I-function” needs input from other sources in order to take full advantage of the actions that the body is capable of performing.  When I tried to rotate my eyes smoothly simply by visualizing a smooth movement, it didn’t work.  However, when I started waving my finger back and forth in front of my face, my eyes moved smoothly.  The visual input was needed to make up for the shortcomings of the “I-function.” It may be true that 99% of the neurons in the body are interneurons.  However, sensory neurons are clearly still crucial, because “We” are evidently not very powerful without them.