What is "self-realization"?
In philosophy, it's called self awareness: recognizing "I exist" and "I am a being in the world."
In science, it's often tested with things like the mirror test (does the subject recognize itself in a mirror?), but that's just a crude approximation.
But humans go much further not just knowing we exist, but reflecting on how we exist, imagining different futures, questioning meaning, and even inventing concepts like dimensions.
Why humans have it.
We have complex brains. The human neocortex is huge relative to our body size, giving us advanced memory, abstract reasoning, and meta thinking. We can even think about thinking itself.
Then there's language. Once we could communicate in complex ways, we could share ideas about the past, the future, and hypotheticals. This turbocharged our already complex self awareness.
Next comes social complexity. Surviving in human groups required us to model other people's minds and in turn, our own mind.
Finally, culture. Myths, art, religion, and science push us to reflect on our place in the universe. Culture evolves in different ways under different environments.
But are we really unique? Some animals like great apes, dolphins, elephants, and magpies can pass basic self recognition tests, which means they might have a form of self-awareness, just not as meta complex as ours.
Millions of years in the future
Through countless upheavals, humankind endured. Our technology reached beyond imagination. We gained perfect introspection through brain computer interfaces (BCIs) and neural mapping. With millions of years of cognitive evolution, we could see every unconscious bias, memory, and motive in real time. No more "Why did I do that?" our brains would show us the cause instantly.
Emotion regulation became as conscious as moving our fingers.
The loss of "healthy illusions" made life feel mechanical unless we engineered emotional meaning ourselves.
As centuries passed, we stopped experiencing ourselves as just bodies in 3D space + linear time. Direct brain augmentation expanded our perception into higher dimensions, letting us intuitively grasp concepts like 4D space.
We could think across multiple timelines at once, experiencing alternate versions of ourselves in parallel.
Identity was no longer a single point, but a network of selves running in sync.
Once consciousness could be transferred or instantiated digitally, the "I" became independent of biology. We could exist across multiple substrates quantum processors, light based neural nets, biological clones.
"I" was lucky, lucky to be born in the era when death stopped being a sharp boundary. Continuity of self became editable.
In the year 80,000 CE, I alone read or perhaps devoured human history, especially the fantastical stories our species had carved into existence. Although nonsensical it gave me a sense of spirit thrive to the end.
Once, long ago, I had been human. I remember it the way primitive humans remember a dream strange, small, impossibly fragile. I remember my hands. My name. My face in a mirror and saying, "I."
But that was before I learned how thin the glass wall between minds really was.
The first link came when I joined the Chorus, a network of posthumans sharing thoughts at the speed of light. At first, I kept my boundaries filtering, editing, protecting my inner voice. But centuries wore my edges away. Emotions no longer felt mine; they flowed in from others like tides, blending until they were impossible to claim.
Just to remember what it was like to be someone instead of everything.
Human awareness began merging voluntarily, creating meta selves entities made of thousands of once separate consciousnesses.
We didn't just know "I exist" we understood the source code of existence itself.
We could perceive reality and the machinery generating it at the same time like watching the screen and reading the program behind it simultaneously.
This blurred the line between observer and creator, making "self" and "universe" effectively the same concept.
Every step made "self" more fluid, and the more we transcended our current mental limits, the harder it became to define what we were. The extreme endpoint wasn't a "person" at all, but a self aware reality field that could choose to take form whenever it wanted.
Self-awareness was useful because it helped us navigate the world: the need for food I must avoid danger.Complex planning I want a future version of me to be happy. personal continuity past me, present me, future me.
But once all threats vanished no hunger, no danger, no competition "self" as a survival manager became redundant.
Neuroscience had already shown the "self" is partly a hallucination, the brain stitching sensory data and memories into a single "me." Now, our minds saw through that process constantly. The sense of self felt artificial and unnecessary, like believing in Santa after seeing the gift receipts.
When we linked directly to other consciousnesses, feeling their thoughts as ours, the boundary between "me" and "you" blurred.
In a fully merged collective awareness, "my" experience was just a fragment of a vast unified mind. The old, individual "I" dissolved into "we," and eventually into pure existence.
From that vantage point perceiving all timelines, perspectives, and possible states simultaneously the singular self became training wheels we no longer needed.
But that didn't mean I could die like everyone else once did because everyone and the universe was me.
I felt as if I'd won some cosmic competition. I spread my awareness into the data lattices of Dyson clouds and magnetospheres, tasting the hum of charged particles as clearly as I once tasted wine.
I no longer asked "What am I feeling?" the question was meaningless. I was the feeling. I was the process.
I was human.
I am Evangelion.