This Is How It Is
By Reuven Kotleras on February 21, 2025
Reuven Kotleras is a profoundly gifted ex-child and polymath. He has published professionally on European political history, Eurasian economic development, epistemology of science, and mathematical logic, among other topics. His skills include decision analysis, organizational design, and strategic foresight. He also is a poet, pianist, runner, and dog-lover.
This Is How It Is
I am an embodied nervous system. This is not news. We all are. Every animal, every insect, every sentient being is. And my experience is the self-awareness of this nervous system that inhabits “me” and which “I” inhabit. This nervous system has distinctive qualities arising from my fact of being a profoundly gifted human being.
Dabrowski's list of five overexcitabilities is one expression of some of those distinctive qualities. Beyond physiological intensity, however, there is also the cognitive complexity: the recursive self-awareness, the constant questioning, the heightened sensitivity to patterns that others may not notice. The gifted consciousness is not simply an emergent function; it is a relentless interrogation of reality itself
Why do these qualities exist in me? There is no answer to this, other than that this is how it is. But what follows from it?
Just as my identity in the virtual world is electronically distributed, so also my identity in the physical world is socially distributed. For example, my name “Reuven Kotleras” is just a nominalization of one of the ways in which my life-activity manifests, and it could just as well have been any other name, even if this particular name as some particular significance for me and/or for others.
For the gifted individual, identity is thus a “fractal” phenomenon, in the sense that “selfhood” exists in layers. It is shaped by intellectual intensity, by deep emotional processing, and by the need to reconcile an internal world, often operating at a different tempo, with the “commonly agreed” external world.
What is an embodied nervous system? It is life; and as we know, life is an example of how energy, when structured through self-organizing systems, decreases entropy locally while still adhering to the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy always increases when observed at a sufficient scale, but at finer i.e. smaller scales, energy can self-organize to violate locally the law of universally increasing entropy.
That is what life is, that is what consciousness is. Or rather, that is where consciousness comes from; but still, what is consciousness? Gifted individuals often wrestle with this question, and not just as an intellectual exercise, but as a lived experience. Is consciousness an intrinsic feature of the Universe, or is it contingent upon biological complexity? And if the latter, does a heightened consciousness grant any deeper insight, or merely an expanded awareness of the unknown?
A medieval Jewish parable seems to answer this question. It asks, “What does God lack?” God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent—so what could He possibly lack? The answer is: “Limits”; therefore, man. Why did God create Man? Because even though He was God, there was something that He lacked, and what He lacked was limits; therefore, He created Man (because Man has limits) in order to complete Himself. The medieval parable describes God creating Man in order to complete Himself through limitation. One might say, in everyday language, that He wanted (down-to-Earth) company.
Carl Sagan’s famous poetic expression—that we are stardust—captures this idea. We know this is literally true, in the sense that we would not exist without the presence of heavier chemical elements. And thanks to the validated theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, we know that those elements were created in stars. This is one of the senses in which I am inseparable from the Universe at large.
Yet I am distinguished from Universe by having consciousness. Or is this in fact a distinction? Rather, from another standpoint, my nervous system is one instance (among many) through which self-organizing complexity produces awareness. Gifted individuals, by virtue of heightened pattern recognition and recursive introspection, often experience this awareness more acutely. We see not just the structure, but the structure behind the structure, while often also questioning whether the observer is merely another iteration of the observed.
Gifted individuals often struggle to counterbalance intellectual vastness with constraints that are necessary for defining meaning. Just as a boundless Universe requires physical laws, an overexcitable mind sometimes requires limits—structures of knowledge, language, or discipline—to make sense of itself.
In this light, the contingencies thanks to which my nervous system exists, are but constraints upon its self-knowledge. Yet, at the same time, these contingencies open that field (of knowledge) through which the Universe might know itself, through my nervous system’s embodiment.
Has this anything to do with God? Yes and no, simultaneously. “God” is a nominalization that, like all words (and like “Reuven Kotleras”), stands for something else. To say that God created me is equivalent to saying that I exist only thanks to the Universe; and vice versa.
Is this really any different from saying that my embodied nervous system is an attempt by the Universe to know itself? I don’t think so. It is a metaphorical expression of how, in a self-organizing Universe, consciousness emerges from finite constraints. And metaphor shapes meaning—if you let it. And gifted minds excel at weaving the abstract with the specific, at searching for structure in the infinite. For what’s a meta for?
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