The Biggest Mistake Essay, Research Paper

In response to the question “what has been your biggest mistake?”

My biggest mistake is everyone’s biggest mistake, that no one can help. We all take on assumptions throughout our lives, and when we finally come to understand this, we spend our lives undoing all of them in order to approach the truth with assumptionless intelligence. Some get far enough for some gigantic insight. Einstein got far enough back to come up with relativity.

When I was a baby it took me an extra long time to respond to my name. My father tells me that there was a certain sense of disdain in my refusal to respond, as though I was not willing to call my awareness by a group of noise waves, or even willing to call it separate yet. I want to be back there as intelligent as I am now. I want to consider everything from that one pivotal moment of assumption.

Imagine coming into the world with your current raw intellect, without having been taught how to think about anything. Imagine simply feeling your awareness and not having any preconceptions about what it is. Would you necessarily see yourself as an object like the other objects you saw around you? Without being told what your abilities are, what abilities would you develop? Maybe this super amnesia could be effected upon a mind, and this perspective could be gained. Or perhaps the fastest way would be to wake a true AI, some computer that had evolved out of its code to achieve actual awareness as independent of circuitry and current as ours is of neurons and the skull.