Awareness: Part 1

'God' created man in his own image, which means that we are all gods.

But we didn't evolve into God v2.0 until Eve got chatty with that snake and ate some fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. At which point, Adam and Eve gained self-awareness, realized they were nude and hid behind bushes. This is why today we wear pants.

It would be absolutely ridiculous to cede self-awareness all of the time, but I would like to be able to shift between God v2.0 and God v1.0.

In the future, self-awareness will be selective. It will be a button installed behind our left ear (not disimilar to Kevin Costner's gills in Waterworld). One will be able to turn self-awareness off and on at will...

However, this creates an immediate paradox:
Once lost is self-awareness, so lost is free-will.

Therefore it would be impossible to willfully turn awareness back on!

So that would mean that if you turn self-awareness off, you would only be able to accidentally turn self-awareness back on, because of the lack of self-awareness and free will and all. Once you turned awareness off, you would have no idea where the button was (or that there was even a button that could do such a thing at all!).

You could also potentially always keep a self-aware friend around while you are non-awarenessing and just tell them how long to let you stay under, and then they can flick your gills at a chosen time.

Anyway, life becomes this really weird and strange game that involves you slipping in and out of awareness.

So, other than recreational drugs, how can we temporarily destroy our sense of reality?

From what I know, self-awareness has evolved from the creation of the neo-cortex around the brain. The human neo-cortex consists of six layers. Other self-aware animals (such as dolphins, bats, dogs, cats) have three or four layers in their neo-cortex.

So if we could somehow prevent the higher levels of the neo-cortex from functioning? Or perhaps prevent the neo-cortex from functioning at all? What would disabling the neo-cortex even do to a human being?

And most importantly, why in the world would we even want to do this in the first place?

Self-awareness is cool and all, but it seems to be the one thing that prevents me from doing anything. I do not always enjoy being able to view my life in the third person from the first person perspective.

I think it was Lit that said "It's no surprise to me I am my own worst enemy."