Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects or sensory patterns. In this level of consciousness, sense data can be confirmed by an observer without necessarily implying understanding. More broadly, it is the state or quality of being aware of something. In biological psychology, awareness is defined as a human's or an animal's perception and cognitive reaction to a condition or event. - Wikipedia
That being said, what is the state of human awareness? Sure we are all aware of our daily lives and those surrounding us, even things we do not necessarily want to be aware of thanks to social networking sites. With that in mind, what are we aware of? Things that deserve our attention or other things that distract us? I think that there are too many levels of awareness in the current state of things...not saying that that is a bad thing, it just happens that way. For example, did you know that on a Brown Dwarf that it rains iron? Yes, I am a fan of 'The Universe.' Also, the core of Jupiter is liquid metallic hydrogen. Amazing stuff when you're aware of it.
As a human race, we are not very aware of that great big thing above us called space or the universe. It's amazing that in our solar system, we are the only found intelligent life form and we as a society don't value this observation. There are many things on many levels that the society as a whole is not aware of that goes on beyond our naked visual sight. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it is a bad thing, or even an avoidable thing. There are so many people here living so many types of lives, that the big picture escapes most of us. People throw away important things over money, religious beliefs, personal beliefs, etc. and are not aware of the bigger picture so to speak. The point I'm getting at is that there are many things that deserve our awareness, it is up to us to decide as a society what those are. Hopefully our focus will one day turn to studying those things that deserve our attention and allow us to lead our personal lives. I am not wanting an autonomic society doing one thing and only one thing for the benefit of human knowledge and survival, but rather individuals contributing awareness to things that are deserving as a society, and on a personal level. Thanks for your time.
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14 years ago
Okay, I’ve been musing on this for the past few days.
ReplyDeleteI’m going to nick one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite people in the world: Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” The way I interpret that statement (and I could be totally wrong, of course) is as an interesting answer to the big “why do we exist?” question-- we exist so that we can experience everything that exists, and we experience it through our awareness of it.
To get seriously geeky on you, I think of awareness like one of the quantum superposition thought experiments-- just like the theory that you can change an outcome by observing it, you can change the makeup of the universe by being aware of it. Ten minutes ago I didn’t know what the core of Jupiter was-- maybe it was igneous rock, maybe it was mozzarella cheese. Because I didn’t know, Jupiter actually existed as both of those things in a possible tentative version of the universe. Now I have that awareness, so therefore, the core of Jupiter exists as it does. I just built some concrete universe! Sweet!
This is where your second point comes in, though. Most of my friends would think this is awesome, and if I help them build their perception of the universe by telling them about Jupiter, they’d exclaim, “Liquid metallic hydrogen? Holy fuck!” and we’d all look up at the stars and feel a giddy rush of joy at just how awesome that was. But we all know people that just Do. Not. Care. And if I tell them about Jupiter, they won’t look up at the stars, and they won’t build Jupiter to make it exist. And that’s okay, because I need people to build things that I don’t particularly care about, like mortgage amortizations or American Idol.
So, yeah. The picture in my head: me and all the other humans have vastly different priorities, different things on which to focus our awareness, and by focusing our awareness we’re stringing a thread through the universe. I’m holding this thread of Jupiter’s geology, and I can hear somebody outside my office is holding a thread of Egypt, and somebody down the hall is apparently holding a thread of Jennifer Connelly’s career... up close it seems like we’re all a big smooshy mess with all these different threads, but if you back up, way back, the threads turn out to be a really intricate interconnected spiderweb, and we can all bounce on it together like a trampoline. You just can’t do that shit with parallel lines.
Sorry if this is totally not at all what you were getting at... I hesitated commenting at all, but I dig this little salon discussion thing you’ve got going on, and I hope you continue to encourage a rockin’ dialogue. Be a whole lot easier if we could all just meet up for beers.