There are a number of ways in which we differ from other apes and all other living and nonliving things. Ultimately, though, we can boil it all down to the term “self-awareness”. Human beings have the greatest capacity for self-awareness of any creatures in this world.
What do we mean by “self-awareness” here? We mean that human beings have the greatest capacity for choice and complex thought and feeling, as well as the greatest capacity for the recognition of the existence of other “I”’s, of any beings in this world.
Let’s break this down. First of all, (adult) human beings have the capacity for a kind of empathy that doesn’t merely involve putting ourselves in someone else’s external shoes—in someone else’s external physical situation—and seeing how we would feel if we were in that situation. It is a more developed kind of empathy wherein we are able to recognize how others are similar to us, and how they are different from us, in their thoughts and feelings and motivations, so that we can come to understand their true experience in some situation…and not merely what our internal experience would be in that situation.
This more developed kind of empathy is accomplished through abstract thought—through abstracting from our own experiences to piece together what someone else’s experience might be like. And so we realize here that humans have the greatest capacity for abstract and complex thought—and ultimately for imagining what isn’t—of all beings.
This leads us to choice. Through the ability to imagine what isn’t actually so, we are able not only to understand someone else’s experience even though it may be different from our own, but also to shape the world around us in new and different ways from the form in which it currently exists. We can choose the world that we shape for ourselves because we are able to imagine and anticipate the consequences of each possible action that we might take and then choose amongst these outcomes which we would like to create—which we would like to experience as our reality.
Notice here that the recognition of others besides the self—and other experiences besides that of the self—goes hand-in-hand with the recognition of the possibility for things to be different from the way they are. And only with such recognition are we able to create and shape our world more fully than any other creatures in this world. The capacity to use tools is greatest in human beings, for we use not only natural physical defense and offense mechanisms, but rather we use primarily our capacity for complex and abstract thought—to approach and solve problems in new ways, addressing our situation in life by making use of everything available to us in our internal and external worlds.
Further, because we are capable of recognizing that other “I”’s exist—other beings who are each looking out at the world through their own eyes and ears and nose and mouth, from their own situation in space and time, and through their own lens of thought and feeling and motivation—we are capable of connecting with those other “I”’s more intensely than any other beings in this world. Through the connection—through relating—with another being, we are capable of recognizing ourselves. As we come to understand and relate to others on an intimate level—and, by this, I mean far more than physical intimacy, including emotional and intellectual intimacy—we can come to understand our relation to our own thoughts and feelings and motivations.
We can come to understand what has led us to be the way we are, and we can come to understand who we truly are at our core—a core in which we and all other “I”’s are connected indivisibly. We are all united in our capacity for choice. And this capacity for choice is, as we have seen, wrapped up inextricably with our capacity for self-awareness. For it is the ability to imagine what isn’t—what isn’t within our internal and external experience of the world—that ties together the capacity for choice and the capacity for the recognition of the true experiences of other “I”’s—a recognition that allows us to recognize and become aware of ourselves and our relation to everything around us.
But all of this—all of what makes us uniquely us, different from all other beings in this world—is only a matter of degree of capacity. This does not mean that we all actualize this capacity, and this certainly does not mean that we all actualize this capacity to as great a degree as we can.
The development of all things is toward ever-greater self-awareness, toward the ever-greater exercise of self-aware choice in determining the shaping of experience. Humans are further along than other beings in this process of development. But even we are developing—from birth through childhood to adulthood, from infancy to maturity in the development of not only our physical bodies and brains but also our souls beyond this. In this progression toward ever greater self-awareness, we continue to march, as all things in this world do, toward this, our goal—our purpose in existence.
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