You exist. Even with your eyes closed, you are fully aware of yourself, in there, inside the body you inhabit. Seemingly in the head. Perhaps. When your eyes are closed—especially with your eyes closed, shutting out the distractions—you feel your own awareness, the awareness that is you, your aliveness—you experience the existence of your Self. You feel the distinction between your self—a conscious mind—and the body within which you exist, the body which houses you but is not You. No other certainty is quite like the certainty of knowing your own existence by experiencing your awareness of your Self. Be curious—try it this moment, see for yourself.

Knowing how certain this certainty feels within my self, I know it applies to you equally as to me because we humans are all—obviously—so much alike, even though we minds all exist separately in our separate bodies. Let us briefly pause to expand on this sort of very human knowing in a small exploration I titled Un-solipsizing:

 

I Already Know You

In my time I have known the feeling of great joy and satisfaction, and

knowing that you too have known the feeling of great joy and satisfaction,

I know that part of you.

 

I have known the feeling of sadness and loss, and

knowing that you too have felt sadness and loss, I know that part of you.

 

I have known the feeling of anger and frustration, and

knowing that you too have felt anger and frustration, I know that part of you.

 

I have known compassion and empathy when a fellow human was needlessly harmed,

and knowing that you too have felt compassion and empathy, I know that part of you.

 

All the rest is details. Of those places in your private mind which I have not yet met,

those I respect with anticipation of friendship yet to be nurtured, grown and shared,

as we sometimes walk a shared path together.

 

We learn much about each other from our shared feelings, you and I.

Feelings cannot be measured by science, but they are the true measure of us.

I am so glad to know you, to love you as One Unity, sharing our common humanity.

 

If you’ll think about it, you already know me too.

 

Only I can feel my own existence, as I know only you can feel your own existence. But I know that you feel existence as I do because I observe that we are so much alike—two not-quite-identical members of Homo sapiens, responding in comparable ways to our environments. We both know that the inside-oneself awarenesses described above apply to all our fellow members of Homo sapiens. That’s a lot of similar awareness, and it’s just our one species, not counting all those other evolving species who are not yet risen up quite as high in their yet-emerging versions of consciousness as have we humans so far risen up in our species’ yet-emerging version.

And it makes me wonder: how can so many of us so arrogantly presume to “know” that dogs and lemurs and fishes and crows don’t comparably feel their own kind of inside self-awareness too, given our knowing full well that what is being felt inside any other person or creature is unknowable by any other? It’s just as easy to presume pro as to presume con, and probability logically favors their feeling the same inside-self-knowing that I feel and know inside my self. Maybe it’s because we don’t look into their eyes often enough.

This may sound a lot like I think, therefore I am, but it differs in perspective and in kind. This inside-myself context invites permutations and nuances, far beyond a mere I think, by encasing one’s certainty in the utmost singularity of experiencing one’s own awareness, which is one’s Self—the unique self-identity with which each of us was born and lives a conscious lifetime.

Reasoning our sameness of human consciousness at this level, I can proceed to know you and me, both of us—actually every one of us humans—by exploring only myself. With eyes now opened I observe that the body I inhabit has two arms. By sheer force of personal willpower, I can tell one arm to lift itself, reach over, and touch the other arm. In doing so, I have just chosen to conduct a conscious act of free will, and I know that you can consciously do the same. Further ramifications of consciousness will be explored later under the label “image of God.”

This free-will thought experiment has expandable contexts wherein we may perceive three categories of conscious selfhood. One is My Self alone, as described in the first paragraph above—I can devote conscious attention to my mental awareness of being aware that I am aware. A second is My Self in relation to the body I am inhabiting—the body has arms, and a skull, but the arms and body parts are not me:  I am an awareness, not a body, and I am observing myself as such. The third context is my body and Me, as an integrated unit, in relation to everything else that is neither Me nor my body. Such everything-otherness begins as nearby as my clothing and the chair on which I sit…and ends way out in the end of time, at the farthest wispy edges of this enormous spherical universe.

I consciously exist and I have free will—both of which I think intrinsically significant. I can consciously direct my free will via my body, as I cause the body to move about in our local and off-center small segment of the universe. I also can consciously exert my free will toward my own invisible thoughts…commanding them to focus, pay attention, concentrate. You should be aware that there’s a cadre of otherwise intelligent people—both scientists and religionists—who believe, and will actually argue, that there is no such thing as free will. We’ll dismiss them later.  So far so good, but there’s quite a lot more meaning to “intrinsically significant.”

Consciousness pursuing science. Understanding what I’ve described in the last few paragraphs, I want to understand more. In fact, I want to understand it all. Consciously, I’d like to know everything there is to know. I’m especially curious about why things are as they are. What is one thing, and How is another, but seldom are either What or How as interesting as Why. I feel sure you and the rest of humanity do—or could—want this too. And even if I notice no discernible evidence that you do in fact want to know everything, I know my own self well enough to conclude that your conscious self probably explores many of the same questions as my conscious self does. So I/we want to know. And I/we also want to understand all that I/we think we know, because not really well understanding much of the stuff we think we know is perfectly normal and quite widespread. How many people do you know who openly wonder where the big bang came from—or, say: do our minds live on after bodily death? Many? A few? Why “few” versus “many,” given that both questions are really about the same thing?

An innate curiosity about being-ness seems built into us, and almost certainly it is—a fundamental aspect of our nature, a wanting-to-know that I have called The Yearning. Indeed, “built in” is precisely how it should be described. All creatures exhibit some measure of yearning to know and understand, from the worm with learned memory of its shortest path through a maze to mourning elephants gathered around one of their own that has died. We see documentaries of birds figuring out how to unlock a door between them and some tasty food; a fox stockstill and intensely alert, calculating precisely the geometry of where to divebomb the vole beneath the snow; an octopus leaving its tank for a clandestine midnight raid on the tasty fish in an aquarium far across the room; a teenager in general science class, wondering where the big bang came from—until distracted away by the sheer momentum of society’s avoidance of the question.

In many arenas, the yearning to know and understand must be seen as a refined level of curiosity that can be reached only after advanced evolutionary development of human consciousness. Virtually every living animal displays some measure of intelligent curiosity, and there is a growing body of evidence that plants do too. Ample evidence brought forth in recent years shows that hierarchies of consciousness exist among birds, fish and yes, insects, where, self evidently, some species are more highly attained than others. We Homo-mammals are keenly aware that chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans are intellectually more highly evolved than dogs and foxes and squirrels and cats who are more highly evolved than opossums who probably outclass aardvarks and sloths, but who really knows?

The only certainty here (and it is certain) is that we humans have reached a requisite high-evolutionary level of consciousness at which we attained the refined measure of curiosity that is not only self aware but yearns to know why it is self aware. Others among our little animal cousins and friends are well on their way here and, as best we can tell, a few of them are getting pretty close to a refined level of consciousness. But so far it’s only us. We got up here first.

Having done so raises our responsibility toward all living things by orders of magnitude.