Self-Reference

Self-reference will drive you crazy. The only way you can check if you're crazy is to psychoanalyze yourself (you could get someone else to do it, but if they tell you you're crazy, how do you know that you're not just crazy and imagining them saying that? If they tell you you're not crazy, same thing). But, invariably, over-analyzing one's sanity is the only certain way to drive yourself insane. So sanity is impossible to determine in a sane way.

This is why I am hesitant to start criticizing and analyzing the things I love. Because really, aren't the people and things we love a reflection of ourselves? If you're ask to describe yourself, you always start by listing your passions, your loves, you dreams, your likes and dislikes. And yet, while we all loathe to reflect on our own lives, we couldn't be quicker to criticize these things we love (the very things that define us!). Perhaps it is the way in which we love things that defines us, not so much what we like. If I say "I like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", does that describe me in the same way that "Adams' style makes my whole body smile; his jokes, although seemingly silly and simple, are in fact delicate and elaborate in a way that makes me forget, for a minute, that the rest of the world exists, and laugh shamelessly as if I were in a group of my closest friends" does?

Then why is it that I feel like I'm being personally attacked when someone says, "I don't like [Wayne's] voice, it bug's me", or "robots do math, it doesn't require creativity"? That's just someone else's opinion, their way of discribing themselves. It has nothing at all to do with me! I think the problem lies in the fact that there are only a certain number of interesting things in the world for us to comment on, and so we all have to share the same things, and so to describe ourselves we have to say why we love/hate these same things. The question I pose is this: Is there a way to fully describe oneself using wholly internal characteristics? Is there a way I can define myself without referring to things I like or don't like? Can I create Me from Me?

If you're curious what got me started thinking on this (which I'm sure you aren't, but I'll tell you anyway), I was just learning today one of the most beautiful facts in mathematics, Gauss' Theorema Egregium. It basically says that you can decide what kind of surface your on just by making measurements on that surface. Ever hear some science-guy say that 'space (or space-time) is curved'? "Curved around what?!", you might ask. I mean, it's all of space and time that's being curved, what other direction is there for this thing to be curved around? Don't we need to go out into this crazy 5-D space to see that? Well, the answer is no. You can see that space is curved just by making measurements in space. So why can't the same be true about people? I mean we obviously interact with this 'other-dimension' (the world), but why should it be that we need to look into this other world to see ourselves?