The Terrible Paradox of Self-Awareness - Robert Pantano - #1080

Why is self-awareness a problem? 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. 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. First and foremost, we've arrived with a sense of self-awareness by a process of evolution that doesn't really care. 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 in existence by virtue of the self-awareness, in my view at least. And 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, and our desire to make sense of our perception and understanding through all of the concepts that we form by nature of having that degree of of awareness.

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