many people describe having a clear moment or even just an overall age when they WOKE UP into some sort of self-awareness & became a person the below is a dramatization, probably not typical. something re memory/continuity? self-other? I don't have one that stands out. do you?
Moments of waking up into self-awareness and theory of mind
7 tweets · January 2023 · 258 likes · 13 retweets · read on Twitter
it seems clear this is about developmental stages in a general sense, and maybe different people are actually referring to different shifts? because one was more salient? eg for one person it's about when they first decided that a memory was important; another theory of mind
in the comments on that video, some people are referring to the gained quality as sapience, sometimes translated as wisdom maybe it's meta-sapience though? ie the reason our they thought of calling our species "homo sapiens sapiens"
there's also a version of this same no-longer-on-autopilot thing that happens regularly throughout adulthood, and that accessing it regularly is part of the point of some spiritual practices. are people just referring to the first such version?
I reflected to my 11yo cousin that it was tough for me to experience his dad's parkinson's decline, though I was sure it just seemed normal for him up close and not knowing anything different he was like "huh, I hadn't ever thought what it would be like for someone else" 🤔⚙️🤯
but obv by age 11 he had standard "false belief" theory of mind—the kind tested with the change of location test was this just an unusual application of that? or new degree?
my guess is that theory of mind is a whole skill tree, with many unexplored paths