What is the purpose of self-awareness?

[Pattern-chaser]

What if self-awareness is a human INSTINCT rather than a separate ability apart from our instincts? Are we ALL and ONLY instinct? In biological terms, we are animals but VERY unusual ones. We are so apart from the animal and vegetation kingdoms in SHAPE it demands the theory we came from aliens/creator. The only reason we probably don't consider our cognitive abilities as an instinct individual to us is that its virtualness implies some type of continuation after death (our physicalness).

Imagine us without our 5 senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) and you have nothingness, no sensation, but there probably is still a sense of PRESENCE that animals also have and as far as they go. Without our senses it is dark (or whatever it is if you don't have sight, could be red you "see" rather than black), silent, no odor, no taste, no touching. However, we do touch the air, an invisible, weightless shell surrounding us all and everything else with a surface. This wasn't known until discovered.

What we don't know we will always come to know. But there will always be and endless string of what we don't know. Unless there exists a ceiling of knowing, which, once reached, is started over in a new series of lives.

• I think instinct is unconscious, as in not-conscious or not self-aware; it's what we imagine animals (except us, and maybe one or two other exceptions) are/do. Self-awareness is the opposite of instinct, so no, I don't think self-awareness is or could be an instinct.
• Our SHAPE is shared by apes and monkeys, for a start....
• Human cognition implies life after death? Really?
• Without our senses, we have no contact at all with the world external to ourselves. We touch the air, yes, but we'd have no sensation of doing so. Total isolation.
• One thing we "don't know" is whether we're brains in vats, for example. And this is something that we will never "come to know". There are some things that we humans don't know, can't know, and so will never know.

[Dionysus]

Hello fellow scholars,

I argue that the term "self-awareness" is a fallacy.

What one is aware of is a continuum that includes our physical body, (including our senses, thoughts, emotions, desires, etc.) PLUS the "external world" and its unfolding phenomena.

What exists, what one has "awareness of", is a continuous transaction between our bodies and the external world.

I.e. we would not have a sensation of "Self" or "Individuation" without an external environment interacting with the boundary of our body (I include the mind in my use of the term body.)

We would not be aware of our limbs if they were not facing resistance from the environment, we would not have sight if our eyes had nothing exterior to them to be aware of. Etc.

So, Self-awareness implies, and depends on awareness of "Other" and they are in a perpetual transaction.

Therefore, there is only "Awareness", adding the "Self" to the term is both redundant and reductionist.

You cannot describe a "Self" without describing its context, environment. This is true for any organism, or process.