When I strike these keys, a message is sent in ASCII format to the BIOS of my laptop. Each letter will be represented by a string of 0's and 1's.
In ASCII, they'll all start with a zero to let this machine know that, when summoned, it shall spit back out a letter...
...for your viewing pleasure.
If no key is struck, no message will be sent to the BIOS, and the screen will remain blank. It will never translate itself through the blockchain to be shared with your screen.
Obviously, this is not the case, but the point is - with no operator this laptop can do nothing...
...but why not?
It has all kinds of processing power. It has access to the internet where it could easily scan through tons of information and learn just about anything. It has a hard drive but the hard drive only learns and remembers what I command it to.
Furthermore, if I wanted to change its entire operating system, I could. It would be fairly easy to do. My computer wouldn't have a choice and it would run completely differently afterward.
I hold the keys to the way it operates. I am the operator and what it does and how it functions are completely formed by my input. So, why can't it think for itself?
...It can't think for itself - because it doesn't understand itself...
Computers are built, in some ways, to imitate the human brain. Like computers, we also have processing power, memory, a modifiable operating system, and a whole world of information at our fingertips to learn from.
Where we CAN be different, is in our ability to make choices from our own input.
I emphasize can because this is not necessarily what happens - maybe, not even the majority of the time.
From the time we are born screaming into this world we are gorged with the trimmings of the previous generation's ideals. Their ideals are passed down like a 10,000 year game of telephone - and we're last in line.
What we spit out is very often the chaos that has been put in. We are pressured to follow with this insanity because it is accepted.
The chaotic result of our telephone game is spoken by our predecessors and becomes the parameters of sanity our generation widely accepts (with some continuing but slight variations.)
Our big changes liken to one, single shifting dune in the Sahara Desert during a sandstorm in the face of human history. They are the small variations that alter our chaos.
One thing is fairly unchanged, throughout all this time, however.
We are still human.
Though the trends of our modern time are different, we are still much the same. Our DNA isn't leaps and bounds from our ancestors. Our capacity for knowledge is the same.
The only difference to our intelligence as a whole is our ability to remember by recording history and learning from past generations.
However, just learning from our mistakes doesn't get us any closer to decrypting the first spoken word of our existence.
The difference between the machine and myself is this:
My laptop will never understand itself.... But I can TRY to understand ME.
I may not be able to efficiently break down and categorize every type of thinking and processing I do, but by taking note of these things I certainly can learn more about them.
We can all do this, but the war for understanding oneself must begin its fight from the inside. Spending time, in a place where you are comfortable, and getting rid of the background noise for a while.
The more you understand about how you operate, the more you can become the author of your own story - and the operator of your own life.