On Awareness

Assumptions:
Awareness is a significant part of reality.
Self-awareness is defined as the ability to recognize oneself as an object, and to be conscious of this recognition.

An often pondered question (yet perhaps not so often pondered as the meaning of life) regards the idea of awareness, or more specifically self-awareness. The main debate lies in whether or not one entity can be more aware than another. We ask ourselves what it means to be self-aware, whether we could possibly be more self-aware, and whether we are the only creatures that are truly self-aware. For example, is a dog aware that it is a dog? Is a pebble aware that it is a pebble? Is the Earth aware that it's the Earth? Is your neighbor even aware that he is a human being? Or are you reading this now perhaps the only one in the universe who is actually self-aware?

Indeed most people would agree that humans are much more self-aware than rocks or rivers or blades of grass. However, this perception stems primarily from intuition. Perhaps a basic rationale does exist, as neither rocks nor rivers nor grass blades have brains as part of their anatomical structure, and through various scientific experiments, we certainly can reason that the brain plays a key part in the thinking process for humans. Still, this is no more than an inductive line of thought, and there is no way we can prove in this manner that pebbles aren't thinking and judging us as we speak. As odd and counter-intuitive the notion of rocks thinking may seem, the point here lies in the fact that without deductive reasoning, we can't logically dispel this possibility. We cannot logically prove that a rhododendron, for example, is not aware that it is a rhododendron simply because we can never experience what it is like to be a rhododendron. Sure, we can imagine blooming up from the ground or sapping up sunlight for food or being sniffed by passersby, but we can never truly state what that experience feels like to the rhododendron itself. As far as concrete evidence is concerned, every plant may well be quite aware of its own existence, whether we like it or not. However, what we can do is legitimately reason that the chances of this are slim. Now, it may seem awfully silly to attempt to prove that rocks can't think, but the reason for presenting this argument brings us back to our original quest for understanding awareness. With a fuller understanding of the properties of awareness on the most fundamental level, we can bring ourselves closer to an understanding of conscious reality.

As stated earlier, it is impossible for one of us to occupy the existence of two independent entities in space. I cannot be a man and a flower at the same time; neither can I alternate between existing as each. However, it is possible to occupy the existence of two independent entities in time. Namely, you occupy your body and mind right now, yet you occupied a different mind and body ten years ago. Surely, at least to my knowledge, I am much more self-aware than I was ten years ago. Ten years ago I did not know that every piece of matter in the observable universe, including me, was made up of elementary particles, whose very existence is often completely unpredictable. I was just me, and these thoughts seldom crossed my mind. A few years ago, however, I began a slightly more driven search for self, and though I am of course far from reaching my destination, I can at least hope that I am slightly closer to it than I was ten years ago. In other words, I am slightly more aware now of my own existence and place in the cosmos than I was in the past. Likely, you as well are slightly more self-aware than you were in the past (even if you felt more aware of yourself ten years ago, the idea is that you have still gotten a taste of two differing levels of awareness). The proof lies in your memories. You actually experienced being less self-aware and you actually experienced being more self-aware. Therefore, without any scientific experiments or measurements of brain activity, you have proof than one entity can in fact be more aware than another!

This brings us back to pebbles. Are pebbles aware of their existence or not, and how can we rationalize one way or the other? From the above argument, we have proved, or at least reasoned that different levels of awareness certainly exist within reality. Therefore it makes sense to assume that if different entities in time can possess different levels of awareness, then different entities in space probably can as well (even Einstein proved that time and space are inseparable). So, it is overwhelmingly likely that certain entities in this universe are very aware, and that some are not aware at all.

As of yet we have simply illuminated the idea that self-awareness exists in different varieties, but we have not examined its true nature. This topic, because of its deep intricacy, deserves many pages on its own, and therefore I shall not discuss it presently in detail, but rather return to it on a later occasion. However, I ought to mention one of its more intriguing perplexities. If consciousness is simply an evolutionary effect, which has arisen solely because of chance and long periods of time (though continues to reproduce itself as time goes by), then it should follow that with the right technologies and patience, it should be possible to hypothetically "build" a conscious being. For example, let's say that scientists decide to assemble a conscious creature one atom at a time. If consciousness indeed stems from the interactions between neurons and electrical signals within the body, then there should logically be some exact, measurable and detectable point at which the scientists' creation becomes conscious; there would have to exist some specific nth atom, without which the "being" would not be self-aware, yet with which the creature would suddenly be able to recognize its own existence. Whether or not this is true, it seems incredibly exceptional that whole existence of consciousness could be governed by an arbitrary number of atoms in an arbitrary arrangement.

A second conclusion, though, could be that consciousness slowly grows as the entity is constructed; as atoms are added to the creation, it sluggishly but surely becomes more aware of itself. In this case, it would follow that the consciousness would slowly decrease as well if the entity were to be deconstructed one atom at a time. As it became less and less conscious and aware, it would either reach another arbitrary point in which its consciousness suddenly evaporated, or else its level of consciousness would constantly approach zero, but never in fact reach it. If true, the latter scenario would imply that each individual atom actually embodied a miniscule portion of the creature's total consciousness, and thereby that each individual atom in our universe actually embodied a tiny bit of consciousness.

Again, though both of these conclusions seem "far-out," so-to-speak, and they are likely not the only conclusions that could be drawn from this "build-a-human" thought experiment, the point is simply to show that both consciousness and awareness are quite complex abstractions whose true nature is far from being well understood. However, I believe it is reasonable to assume that, according to either of the above possibilities, awareness is certainly strongly related to the complexity of the interactions among the fundamental constituents of each entity being examined. In other words, the more complex an entity, the more likely it is to be self-aware. Thus, we can rationally justify that though we as humans are self-aware, it is highly probable that many of the simpler entities in the universe are not as self-aware as are we.

Our universe therefore teems with various levels of consciousness and of awareness, and we as humans are lucky to be among the few types of entities complex enough to realize it.