About the "lack of self-awareness" label

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-aware ... m_disorder

I still don't get it though. Is it me, or is the article just not very clear?


I prefer olympiadis' explanation:

That's much clearer. But it seems weird that it's called self-awareness, it seems more like awareness of what one might look like to others. The label as it stands seems to imply that I don't exist when I am not being observed. Maybe "image-consciousness" would be better? This is all very strange. I've always been rather suspicious of people who bother about their image a lot.

Maybe they mean "self-consciousness" rather than "self-awareness," but since NTs consider their socially-obsessed ways of thinking to be somehow default, normal, or universal, they don't differentiate between an awareness of the self and an awareness of how other people perceive oneself, as if self-awareness isn't truly self-awareness unless it has other people's perspectives built into it.

This is what I was saying.

Most people don't seem to recognize that their interpretation of an observation is produced by software running in their brains and is therefore subjective.

An alien from space would also experience this lack of "self-awareness" because they would not be running the same software in their brains.
In this example you can more easily see that the alien isn't really lacking a cognitive ability at all. They only lack the current set of software that inhabits human brains.

I think a lot of us prefer interacting with animals, or imagine interacting with aliens specifically because of their lack of this current software I'm talking about.

Yeah. This is what I was going to say.

It's not a lack of self-awareness, it's difficulty figuring out what other people think.

If I get involved in a special interest I can become self unaware