#1080 - Pursuit of Wonder - The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness

Chris Williamson· Host0:00

Why is self-awareness a problem?

Robert Pantano· Guest0:02

Self-awareness is a problem... Well, first of all, I think it's important to recognize that we often think about self-awareness as a good thing. Um, we generally think about it as a gradient, so we, we might refer to somebody as being more or less self-aware than others, and, and more is, is typically assumed as better. When I'm referring to self-awareness, I'm referring to just the fact that we are aware of a self at all. And so the mere fact that we have a certain form of consciousness that provides us that sense of self is a problem for a, a number of reasons. Um, first and foremost, we've arrived with a sense of self-awareness, um, by a process of evolution that doesn't really care. Um, obviously care I'm using loosely there because evolution doesn't care at all about anything besides it's just continuation propagation. But the experience of consciousness and self-awareness from the first-person perspective is not central to the reason for why self-awareness and consciousness arrived in the form that humans experience it. And so we are often at odds with the fundamental nature of reality and existence by virtue of the self-awareness, in my view at least. A-and the, and the reason for that is as a self who is aware of that self, we attach to that self, we attach to the ideas of that self, we attach to people and things,