The difference between man and animal is that when describing man you can put “self-consciously” as an adverb for almost every action— while with an animal— you can never.

We can describe many things as “seemingly self-conscious”— that’s what poetry does

“The sky is seemingly self-consciously saying to me that it understands my sorrow & reflects it to me with rain”

We see “self-conscious seeming” things everywhere— because we are the only self-conscious thing in the world— & so we habituate ourselves to this loneliness by “humanizing” everything.

The hermit is he who is “comfortable communicating with the semblance of self-consciousness in the non human world.”

The tree laughs— the cat is proud— the wind is angry— the world is self-conscious

We create rituals to “communicate” with the world by pretending it has self-consciousness— “please rain, don’t fall, I promise I’ll water the garden myself later” etc

We do this to domesticate it— this is how we conquered “nature”— we said “nature has laws & language”— then we invented its laws and languages. & then we felt more “at home”

The development of culture is our growing self-consciousness of the fact of the uniqueness of our self-consciousness— the “death of God” is the the final blow against the “self-conscious world” — now we even doubt out own self-consciousness.

Now people imagine aliens— to fill the world— to make it so we are not “alone” in our self-consciousness.

Partially this is due to the world being “overdetermined” by self-consciousness now— we are drowning in out own reflections of self-consciousness— people have started “domesticating” artifices— “Alexa, tell me, is this pareidolia?”

The dream of AI is that we will be able to eliminate our self-consciousness & become animals— offloading that faculty to a machine— that we can have as a new God.