Is self-awareness possible?

           If I were to ask a human, say myself for instance, “Are you self aware?” I would act slightly puzzled, but answer with a more or less confident “yes”.  Then as time went on, I would begin repeating that question in my head asking myself, “Are you self-aware”, and from this questioning I would begin to ask who indeed was asking me this question. Is it I? Is it a part of me? Is it just my brain? Then I would surmise that I really wasn’t all that aware of myself. So I would begin to question what is myself? When comparing humans to apes and dolphins, we tend to believe that one distinct difference between them and us is the “fact” that we are self-aware. But what part of our anatomy (physical or spiritual) grants us self-awareness? Both dolphins and apes have memories and senses like us, and humans have even performed a mirror test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test) on them that supposedly tests for self-awareness on a perceptual level, and they have passed. So what makes humans so unique?

            Humans are obviously unique to some degree, since we are the only known species to have developed advanced civilizations that have experienced both peace and war. The way I think we currently view self-awareness is simple and would be more suitably called self-recognition.  As far as I know, what makes humans especially unique is our ability to recognize and question the fact that we will die. This is what I believe to be our current understanding of human self-awareness, but is recognizing the simple fact that we die enough to say that we are self-aware? I think not. For me, self-awareness would be the ability to truly understand and comprehend not only death, but also our entire existence.  

            In the film “Dark City”, the lead character, John Murdock, becomes aware that he is part of an artificially constructed world, in which aliens implant memories into their human subjects. The film shows that people mostly embody their memories and thoughts, with these thoughts and memories affecting their future actions. However, it also brings up the idea of the human soul as playing a part in who a person is, as some innate and irremovable part of them. This suggests that there may be an unidentifiable part of us that makes us human. The key word in the former sentence is unidentifiable. If the soul does exist than is it possible to embody the soul into a thought or memory, or in other words, could we in fact be aware of such a thing as the soul?

            As we currently exist we have thoughts, memory, and senses that are attached to a brain and a body, and when we die I believe we lose those. By this, I mean that if we possess this body and rely on it to interpret life and its surroundings, then when our body dies so does our brain’s ability to process our thoughts and memories. To be truly self-aware is to be beyond ourselves, so in this paradoxical way I view true uninhibited self-awareness as impossible. What I mean by self-awareness being beyond ourselves, is that true understanding of existence is not restricted to one individual’s existence, but is rather founded by the existence of everything. To truly understand a part it is necessary to understand the whole.

            Coming back to Dark City, in the end the woman John Murdock falls in love with during the story has her memories changed yet again and she does not have any memory of him. Oddly though, he still desires her and she seems to desire him as well. The idea that love transcends memories and thoughts is a strong one (anybody remember the Notebook?), and it begs the question even if we are not aware of our soul, does that mean we cannot still express it?