But it's ADDING letters ....
Although I agree with you that one can not distinguish the self without comparing it to an "other", where I disagree is that this necessarily implies self-aware people are less rational, if we are taking the word "rational" to mean what the dictionary defines it as:
"Having or exercising the ability to reason, of sound mind; sane, consistent with or based on reason; logical: rational behavior."
I cannot speak for Raithere, but I'm under the impression that the rational/irrational notion that we're undertaking has largely to do with the observable versus the assumed, such as addressed in the attack on irrationality.
An instinctive animal operates according to specific criteria. A self-aware animal such as a human operates according to comparative criteria. The priority awarded those criteria is entirely subjective. It is objective in the sense that it is empirical, but that array is no more expressible than the notion of God; it is, in short, one's entire life, and the more subtle and therefore hard to identify the influence, the more influential.
To consider the dictionary definition only begs a question:
Upon what principle do we weigh what factors?
Why, for instance, women and children first? Well, technically, it's in the interest of the species. Why no tattoos in the Old Testament? Because you're in the desert. Infection really isn't what you need to bring to the camp. But what, by the dictionary definition, is rational about, say, the American military operation in Afghanistan? What is rational about child labor? What is rational about the humanitarian argument against child labor? What is rational about the pacifist argument against the Afghani-Bush War?
To generalize in order to be specific:
Why is any one factor any more important than any other?
I hardly think anyone in the modern day proposes utilitarianism, but it is what, in the end, we expect of ourselves. Unless, of course, we choose an irrational stopping point. That is, an arbitrary or satisfactory--a subjective--stopping point.
Humankind responds to so many irrational factors in its rational, living process, that it is an operative observation that self-awareness leads to irrationality.
What is so irrational about recognizing that you are not the only being in the entire universe?
I can't imagine.
To the other, I find it absurd to imagine one the only real thing in the Universe.
Like my little story above, based on my own experiences with other people and their accents, I used reason to distingish the fact that people speak differently and that this is often based on where they live. I grew in self awareness, seeing more clearly how I used language and how it is not a perment feature of my personality, but can change or be influenced through enviornmental factors. (yes, after 16 years in Atlanta, I now say "you all", but will fight to the death before saying "ya'll"
By and large I have no real problem with accents in general. You'll notice that most of them compress words. A friend and I were actually talking today about the accent in the western US, specifically in Seattle. It seems the predominating characteristic is a lack of dimension. Where it starts sounding unique is not in letters stressed but in words melted together. Imagine a bunch of stuffy Lutherans and Episcopalians whose kids all got high. But the most defining aspect about common speech in Seattle seems to be that we all sound a little like we've been drinking.
But most accents blend letters together and eliminate certain phoenetics from words. There is no "r" anywhere in the word Washington, so it seems odd to me to add a letter. Let's put it this way: we put up with "Puyallup" and "Calapoola" on a regular basis, so I well appreciate the elimination of of letters (
P'yall'p and
Calap'la--seriously; it just hit me that for
Juan de Fuca we prefer foo-ka to fyew-ka because it's actually
less work to say). Communication is data, and there's no reason to be sticking extraneous data into communication.
Thing is, I can't figure out where "Warshington" comes from. Where warshing the car, warshing the laundry, warshing your hands ... I can't figure out
where this peculiarity of speech comes from. I'm the same way with extraneous syllables. I swear people try to augment their lexical power by using nonexistent words like
disorientated. Don't get me started on the annexing of words.
Transition is not a verb. The word is
transfer. If it was a necessary evolution of the language, I wouldn't care. But when it's arbitrary and unnecessary to boot, it bugs me.
thanx,
Tiassa