Humans are Really Pretty Damn Smart

The human mind is really an incredible marvel of nature. We as a species are incredibly intelligent when it comes to understanding and predicting the world around us. No other creature on the planet can come close to our level of understanding of what forces are acting upon us, how those forces work, and how those forces will act in the future.

Humans' ability to model their world is often mind-boggling. Be it a verbal prediction of what's to come, a formal mathematical formula for the movement of planets, or any other kind of modeling system, that's a high-level function near the top of our ability to think.

But I think that's not quite the top. Our ability to recognize ourselves and our place in those models, to me, is the truly amazing part of that. That's why I find self-referential or metafictional works so cool: we're able to predict the future; that's cool and all, but a computer can do that for us. What a computer can't do is conceive of a model of the world that takes into account the computer's modeling of the world—which, in turn, would take into account the modeling of the world itself, instantly creating an infinitely complex system of recognizing that one is recognizing one's role in that system.

How cool is that?

It's difficult to verbalize, but the concept, to me, is endlessly intriguing. As you sit there reading this, think about the fact that you're conscious of yourself as a being sitting there reading some text. And you're also conscious of the fact that you can recognize yourself as being a conscious being. And you're conscious of the fact that you can recognize yourself as recognizing yourself as a conscious being...and so on, ad infinitum. That ability to step back from oneself and view oneself from a detached point of view, all while being cognizant of the fact that you're doing it, is enormously complex and, to me, absolutely amazing.

Sure, humans are brutal, callous animals who destroy each other at the first hint of an opportunity to get ahead; but when baser animal instincts are ignored in favor of embracing our truly astonishing mental capacity, we can accomplish some pretty incredible things. We can predict the future...and our role in it.

--The Almeister