Hard Wired

I think there is something about approaching thirty years old - maybe in general or maybe in the context of modern America or some other spatial/temporal artifice that is independent of any cultural or historical context - that lends insight to how truly oblivious I (we?) have always been and always will be with respect to the nature of reality and the extent that I am even able to interface with it. How much of what I am depends on the execution of code that was written upon the fusion of two haploid cells, and where in this program can I find a way to reconcile my wildly changing perspective with what feels like a continuous self-like thing? More broadly, what is consciousness and what the hell is going on around here, really?

Research is showing that human brains continue to develop well past adolescence and that full maturity doesn't occur until about the mid-twenties (source: hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html). The nature of the continued development is more than just retaining capacity for plasticity but suggests (to me, at least) that perhaps we continue to fine tune neural connections in order that our consciousness will best serve our evolutionary goals during this time of maximal, soon-to-be-plateauing/declining reproductive capacity. That evolution has maintained this hardwiring makes perfect sense but really confounds how we understand ourselves as agents responding to our environments with at least some degree of free will. I think that, probably more than most of us would like to be, we are all just kind of doing "what feels right," whatever that means.