What is self awareness?

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Same for me.

+1
I think we process "real" things in real time, and batch all the "unreal" stuff as a simulation.

All identity and identity type thinking is 100% imaginary, so I've had to learn to fabricate simulations to run in order to predict outcomes.

Imagine you are you, but inside a fish costume, and in the ocean with a large group of schooling fish. To fit in you have to pretend to be them. You are unable to accurately predict their behavior because it is guided by a larger system intelligence that you cannot connect to. To you their movements seem to be coming from their imaginations, or intuitively. Since you cannot read the minds of the other fish, or intuitively gain access to this information, all you can do is create a simulation in your head based on how the fish "seem" to be behaving.
Since this is only a simulation, you will always be a step or two behind and make mistakes often.

When a fish on the far side of the school senses a danger, you do not instantly feel that input, but the other fish do, and they react. You will copy their movements but never really understand why they happened.

You are an individual intelligence.
The other fish are part of a larger system intelligence.

I think most people misuse the term "self aware".
I think they most often mean "system aware" instead.

Mindfullness is important to good mental health. It is the ability to experience the present moment.
So many people live in the past. They think about regrets that they have about what they did, or what they could have done.
The issue is that people that live in the past cannot live in the present. They are stuck going around and around.

Mindfullness exercises may help such a person to "Let Go". To Let Go of things they cannot change. To live for today, rather than live a life of regret & remorse.

This youtube video is also very useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikjT3829sZ0

This is a very clear explanation to what I have been wondering about. Thank you.
Do you really mean, that the NTs react to a signal system, that is foreign to us?
I´m socially good now, but I definitely felt like your fish - even into adulthood.

A signal of some kind yes. Some special way or ways that information is transmitted and processed at the system level.
It is very common in nature with fish, bees, ants, termites, other insects, migrating birds, herding animals...

The information seems to come into the brain via intuition, and not the conscious thought process.
A schooling fish raised separate in a lab from an egg could be introduced to a school on the other side of the world and instantly become part of the school.
I suspect there is something specific about the DNA molecule that allows this to happen.

If you could find a NT that was incredibly metacognitive, then they might be able to at least partially explain the mechanism.

OK, It may be the same, that Jung called "the shared subconcious", a function, that makes us store knowledge, some of it on cell-level, and react as a group in order to preserve our species. It´s a little more philosophical expression for the same thing, I believe.

I´ll try to find an NT

This notion of seeing yourself in the ?third person? seems quite interesting. It could imply that you:
a) have the capability to see yourself from your own ?subjective? point of view or
b) have the capability to see yourself from some ?objective? point of view or
c) have the capability to see yourself from the point of view of others or
d) something else?

While I had never thought about it before, I am now thinking that I have NO self awareness. While I can see myself from my own ?subjective? point of view, I imagine that this point of view is quite jaded. And possibly does not jibe with how others see me (which by the way I am oblivious to).

System intelligence of this type is supposed to preserve a species, but as with any other evolving characteristic in evolution, most of them fail, and the evolutionary branch gets pruned back to the last known working code.
I am personally 100% positive that this is what is currently happening to humanity.

I think the primary reason it is off-track and unsustainable is in the nature of how the system intelligence is evolving. It is in memetics, or the evolution of ideas, which is contained completely within the human imagination, separated from the real environment. The process is no longer directly bound by the normal laws of physics. The rate of development of ideas in the imagination far outpaces genetic physical changes, and so an out-of-balance state can be realized very quickly before nature can adjust for equilibrium.

It is said that humanity is unique in that he is a creature who can create his environment instead of being completely subject to it. Creating is a real physical process, like building shelter, or making a farm. Memetics is not real.

An example here is that over 98% of the Earth's population has given up farming. There are many more bankers or lawyers, but you can't eat money or law. They only survive because the majority of other humans share similar memetics, or imagination.
I think everyone would realize that memetics is very volatile. What is a great idea one day can be horrible the next day. This creates an unsustainable situation.

I asked a psychologist and he said self-awareness is "consciously aware of one's internal experience". I will have to ask him more questions. Maybe it is Alexithymia (sub-clinical inability to identify and describe emotions in the self).

I think self awareness is knowing what your disability is and being able to explain to someone what problems you have because of it and the good things that come from it.
Before i really knew about autism I went to the camp for people with developmental disabilities and the other kids in this place called cerebral palsy of Westchester were very aware of the disabilities. Although at the time I was not.

Seems like the perfect tool for the current zeitgeist.

Can?t face your true, grim reflection? Wipe it out!

I have some self awareness but as a kid growing up, I hardly had any. It was my mother who saw something wrong with me and I felt fine, including sensory issues and balance. I just assumed people were used to it or dealt with it better and I assumed I just needed more practice at something. I had enough self awareness to know I was different and know I was bothered by things other kids didn't seem to care about. I wouldn't be able to tell someone how AS affects me or my anxiety or how depression affected me growing up or OCD. I can't even say how my disability exactly affects me and my learning. But others seem to have self awareness about their condition because they can describe what their symptoms are and how it affects them and how they know it's an AS thing they do than a normal thing or a personality thing. Then when I was ten, I think I got more because I recognized I was treated different and I didn't like it. I used to say "what's wrong with me?' and I used to say I wish I could trade my brain for another brain. I didn't realize then my brain is what makes me be me and I control my body and if they took my brain out of this body and put it in a different body, I would have a different body instead and that other person would be in my body.

Self awareness isn't just for ASD, it's for everyone. Even NTs lack self awareness they may not be aware of their own limitations or be aware they are stressed out and can't handle it.