Being Aware

Think of how we experience ourselves, that is, how we think we sound and appear to others, from "within" ourselves, from "inside" our eyes and ears and viscera. We probably have an internal constructed expectation of how we sound, look, move, etc. But then we see ourselves in recordings and are, perhaps, surprised by our appearance, by the way we look and move and sound. The disparity between what we feel (and thus believe) about ourselves from within as we are talking or moving and how we appear to others (the recording) can be a strong shock. But often the effect is negligible for others, who can never experience the "inside" view we have. All anyone else can know of us is the view from outside, the view on the recording. (Needless to say, I'm speaking about my own experience, but other people have reported similar things, such as how odd or different their voice sounds to them on a recording than what they experience when they speak. It took me a long time to get used to how my voice sounded on tape; as for pictures, I was mostly unhappy with my weight, not so much with general appearance or gestures.)

With the notable exceptions of the sun, moon, and the occasional meteor, I cannot begin to fathom how people can see celestial movements. Yet even the ancients could do that. They looked up at "the dome of the heavens" and saw ... a dome, the inside of a sphere, in fact, the inside of concentric spheres. They recognized the wandering stars (in Greek, planets), they tracked repeated motions and could infer predictable events like eclipses with surprising accuracy, and they even had the imaginative flexibility to construct elaborate theories, such as Ptolemy's epicycles, to explain the retrograde motions of the outer planets, which they thought orbited the Earth. The analogy that I see in this marvel of perception and interpretation is to how we discuss consciousness and self-awareness (which, btw, are different but closely related notions).

Consciousness is a creature's functional awareness of its integral body, and self-awareness is the creature's awareness of being aware of itself. As far as we know, only humans have self-awareness—the ability to invent and use the pronoun "I," although perhaps some other species may also be able to form threshold mental constructions of self-awareness. Most animals have the awareness of their own bodies, of their location in space and their sensations of existence--or so we understand (and I think this is a pretty uncontroversial assertion).

Again, this is an analogy, my imaginative projection of a similar attempt to grasp some phenomenon from within its operations. In this analogy, consciousness corresponds to seeing the celestial movements, and self-awareness to recognizing that those motions are a construct that we devise to describe the spatial relationships of celestial bodies.

I remember any number of times, in my youth and later as an adult, when I'd stand outside with another person at night and I would make a remark about a star. "Which star?" "That one,” I would answer and point to the sky. "Which one?" "The bright one there." "Which one? They aren't that bright, and there are a lot of them." "Here," sticking out my arm along my friend's line of sight, "that one next to the three little stars." "I see four or five little stars. Is it one of them?" "No, no, it's next to them. And there are only three. I don't think you're looking at the right place." "I'm trying to see where you pointed." Etc. etc.