Irony

There is a widespread belief that introspection is one of the defining characteristics of the human psyche. We can, how ever, not be certain that other information processing systems, such as other animals, also poses this property. It is when thinking about this matters that one more directly approaches that blurry line between unconscious and conscious beings.

We are so accustomed to symbolic reasoning, that we cannot imagine introspection with out a notion of "the self" and of it's relationship with "the environment". How ever, on the wake of connectionist approaches to cognitive science, it is perhaps time to give a broader definition of introspection.

That isn't, how ever, what I had in mind when I started writing this.

Don't you think it is an irony, that this, the quintessential human feature, is in many cases a curse in that it disables us from enjoying the world around us?