Self Aware

I'm going to take a break from blogging about events in my day to day life and try to take a step outside the box. So without further ado...

So, I was reading this Neuroscience textbook on Monday just for general interest and ended up reading some sections completely unrelated to my research. One of the sections had to do with the theory of sleep, dreams and how they affect our brain. The other had to do with emotions and how people respond to them. However, the section I found the most fascinating was a small section about self-awareness and how it makes humans unique.

The section posed the idea that humans are clearly different from both animals (though we have no way of knowing this) and machines (we know this for sure) in that humans are self aware. More specifically, if I was to look in the mirror I can recognize and realize that the person staring back at me is...physically who I am and what others see me as. I have the very special ability to recognize myself and recognize the fact that I do exist. Whatever "existing" really means.

I believe that this is perhaps one of the only ways humans are really fundamentally different from machines. The more I read about neuroscience the more the brain seems like a biological computer. Albeit, a very complex computer which operates in a way that we can't understand or really compare that fully to how modern computers operate. But it pretty much seems like neurons process inputs and generate outputs to other neurons through means of electrical/chemical signals. Really, while I think the brain is complicated and how it functions is mysterious I don't think it makes humans special. If we really are special.

Anyway, back to why we are different from machines. A machine does not really know it's a machine, it does not know if it exists or why it exists for the function that it does. All it does is "do". Humans, for better or for worse, have the ability to question ALL that we do. What I really want to get into is something that both angers and saddens me about people sometime. That people sometimes seem to forgo perhaps the one attribute which makes us unique just for the sake of simplicity. Of course, I'm talking about self awareness.

I recently read "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut. This basic plot of this book is that a man goes crazy because he gets the idea that everyone else around him is really a machine and that he is the only one who can really "think". As such, he has no problem killing or hurting other people because he simply sees them as just machines. Now, apart of the violence, I believe this is a very interesting premise. In a depressing sense, it seems like too many people nowadays are simply too focused on just moving forward in life, but they aren't taking the time to step back and really THINK about WHY. They aren't taking a step back to look at themselves in a mirror in a both figurative and possibly even literal sense. I see inklings of this trait in people all the time (even in myself), people so caught up in things for no reason other than the sake of having something to be "caught up" in. This could extend to so many areas - school, religion, relationships. It's depressing almost. It's depressing that sometimes society tries to strip us of the one thing that could possibly make humans unique in exchange for cooperation and conformity.

To whoever is reading this, including myself, I urge that perhaps you take some time to step back and look outside the box. Way outside the box. Think of WHY the things you think are important are really important. And if they should be important. Of course, I realize this kind of thinking is bad for you to an extent. There are those rare times where this state of thinking makes me feel much like the man in that Kurt Vonnegut novel I was just talking about. I sometimes feel like everyone else around me is just caught up in trivial things that have no real significance to well...anything, but perhaps some selfish part of their character. Then I invariably think about my own life, and the things I hold dear to me. Even they seem quite pointless as well. But pointless compared to what? Maybe I mean pointless compared to the capacity in which we have to think and imagine.

In a way, I think the ability of self awareness is humanity's most damning trait. For those who don't recognize it, they are missing out on what could make the human experience unique and might be simply stuck in a rut. For those who do embrace it and think about it occasionally they realize that maybe nothing in life will be good enough to compete with this fundamental idea of knowing we exist. It's a real catch 22 and the ultimate way life has found to troll us all. It's almost like giving someone the gift of being able to see colors but forcing them to live in a world that is predominantly monochrome (black and white). Of course, they know there's A BIT of color (blues, greens, reds etc) out there...but its so scarce some people would rather just pretend they only know about black and white. But for those who DO accept other colors are out there, they might never find them or never find enough of them. That's how I see the world, at least.

But I don't think I'll turn back, and I hope I never fall back into things which I think are pointless. I'd rather take nothing than something. Really, this might not even be a choice at all. Perhaps nothing was all there ever was.