With regard to self-awareness and the comment about a monkey using a joystick without having any conception of the mechanisms by means of which the joystick works…. that describes 99.9% of all humans. Who, after all, has even a vague understanding of how their smartphone works (no, it’s not about stroking icons…) or even, at a far simpler level, how an automobile works? The fact is, 99.9% of us are precisely like the monkey at every point in our lives.