An Observation on the Evas

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StrokeMeGoat
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Re: An Observation on the Evas

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Postby StrokeMeGoat » Tue Aug 14, 2018 2:21 pm

I think the three layers of an Eva as a being are reflective of a more fundamental, underlying principle surrounding human consciousness and being a living being. This is why we see the concept of threes so pervasively within human belief systems, hierarchical structures, in our cultures, and our spiritual/psychological beliefs.

There is the Holy Trinity (with trinities in general incorporated prolifically throughout the entirety of NGE, often even stated explicitly), Freud's Id/Ego/Super Ego along with most of the foundations of the psychoanalytical theories of his contemporaries like Jung, along with a propensity to conceptualize most of our experiences and existential phenomena in threes. We are born, we live, and we die; we have a past, present, and future; existence has componets of space, time, and energy/matter; There is a you that observes, one that thinks/judges, and one that feels; We all have a heart/body, mind, and a soul/spirit; We are father, mother, and child; we are ourselves, the consummation of the concept of the other, and the surroundings we inhabit; etc.

Your three layers reflect the same ideas these trinities all more or less cover when it comes to the three most basic aspects of our conscious being. The robot/machine that is a slave to the pilot's will is like the most primal and rudimentary functions of animals or the designs of any and all machines, slave to either their programming and design. For living beings, that which we are slave to absolutely are our survival needs and the automatic functionality of the myriad component parts that make us up (cells, organs, etc.). When it comes to machines it's just a matter of the structure of the overall system that is the machine when considered as a unified whole. Animals are at their core just organic machines themselves whose core functionality is governed by the internal structures from which their being emerges. You might think of all of this as simply hardware, be it composed of synthetic or organic, biological physical materials.

The Beast is rather obviously our animalistic urges, instincts, and our more primal desires. Just exactly how much any real amount of cognition or consciousness that's involved in these isn't all that clear, to be honest. What is clear, though, is that the emergence of these behaviors is the result of biological programming or "software". More complex machines, like computers, that are capable of information storage and communication likewise perform operations and computations governed by the programming of the software stored as information on the physical hardware. It's fundamentally metaphysical and conceptual in nature. The laws governing our existence can be thought of as software to a degree that governs the behavior of the energy and physical matter that interacts strictly in a mechanical sense, devoid of any inherent meaning in and of itself on a conceptual or metaphysical level.

Energy and matter can be thought of as totally governed by something metaphysical indeed, but results in a totally physical phenomena. The formation of systems of energy and matter and their constant interaction are entirely physical, but the information that is created, stored, and communicated as a result of those systems and their interaction with one another results conversely in phenomena that is purely metaphysical and can only have meaning when considered by another system that resulting in metaphysical phenomena, such as consciousness. Things at this intermediate layer are merely understood, experienced, felt, and perceived. It is our emotion, feelings, implicitly understood concepts and understanding of our reality with respect to both it and ourselves within in it, etc.

The (wo)Man part, your third layer, is our conscious thoughts and judgments. It is our rational and logical method of analyzing and understanding our reality, ourselves, the other beings and objects that are not us, our ability to plan for the future, to consider our pasts, and the experience of the passage of time as our lives progress ever forward on. Once we develop legitimate systems of AI that function more or less the same way our own neural cognitive processes that result in complex thought, experience, and so on, machines containing the structure for this system and the means to sustain its function will also achieve existence at this third layer of being. It's also specifically what's responsible for our ability to form bonds with other beings that have reached at least some degree of this third layer--to feel empathy, to love one another, to form relationships based on mutual trust, etc.

In a sense, it's just the concepts of the body, mind, and soul/spirit explained in greater symbolic detail. The body is purely physical hardware, our minds are just a structural system of physical interaction between that hardware that allows for reacting to the world our bodies inhabit following heuristic models that govern the behavior of our interaction with our world, and the soul/spirit is what binds the mind to body. This is mediated by the capability to create, perceive, and communicate symbols and symbolic representations that are formed from the associations of the symbols formed from our past experiences and perceptions and the degrees of their similarities and differences from one another. These symbolic understandings and associative processes give rise to self-propagating, self-sustaining, and self-modulating systems of belief and perception.

Just as you said with this third layer with the Evas, it's difficult to say really just how much control the conscious processes that emerge from this third layer actually have over our actions and behaviors... or whether it can be said that any degree of free will truly exists despite how it may appear to us. This layer is also to an ever higher degree a metaphysical phenomenon, resulting itself from basic metaphysical phenomena that result from physical phenomena... it's like meta-meta, lol. That's why the conscious and cognitive phenomena resulting from this third layer, like thought and planning, judgment, etc., are something we experience as if devoid of any perceptual feeling inherent to them (in contrast with feeling physical pain, emotional suffering, violent/sexual/nutritional urges that come from the second layer, the bestial animal mind),

So in other words, an Eva is in pretty much every sense analogous to a human being from a functional and conceptual standpoint, along with canonically being literally human beings as well in the lore.


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