>????????did you have to go there?
I feel as though George Lucas has raped my childhood and ruined two of the best movie trilogies of all time. First star wars, and now Indian Jones.
Archive for May, 2008
“I used to be so convinced that happiness was the goal, yet all those years I was chasing after it, I was unhappy in the pursuit. Maybe the goal really should be a life that values honor, duty, good work, friends and family.”
- Robert Downey Jr.
In the midst of a conversation yesterday, the topic of self-awareness arose with the claim that certain animals are self-aware, in the context of our conversation, to be more specific, chimps are supposedly self-aware.
For the past few days, I’ve been reading the book, “Stumbling on Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert, and in it he claims that Humans are the only animals that think about the future, and he makes a strong case in support of his point (which I’m not going to duplicate here) by differentiating between the concept he calls “nexting” whereby animals and machines alike can take present information, and match it with past information, to “predict” some immediate future information/event, (e.g. I smell X, the last time I smelled X something really bad happened, thus something bad is probably going to happen) and the concept of calculated predictions about the future value of the dollar, etc. The key here is that other animals and machines can do the former, but not the latter, which is unique to humans.
That all having been said, I fail to see how its possible to be “self aware” if you’re not able to place yourself in the world temporally. Isn’t the concept of self-awareness inextricably linked to the concept of time?
