How did I arrive at what I wrote? At the risk of oversimplification, I'll have to say my influences are a lifelong devotion to skepticism and figuring out how things work. There have been classes, six years of engineering mixed with philosophy of mind and information theory. There has been about 25 years of reading on sociology, cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, theory of mind, religious philosophies, anything to do with what makes people and other animals tick at a cognitive level and also what constitutes our subjective experience.

Starting at age 13 I had a revelation and declared myself an atheist (the revelation, after years of religious schooling, was that I could reject what I had been taught, and no one could stop me!)

For years I was not only an atheist but a rabid anti-theist, but with age and experience I came to realize that the god/no god debate was not only pointless (both positions are equally non-disprovable hypotheses) but is an intellectual dead-end. (and also really annoying)

I realized that god(s) clearly do exist. The evidence of their influence is everywhere, but they exist in the same way that money, love, Harry Potter and other shared abstract concepts exist.

The question that should occupy us is not whether gods exist, but rather what is their nature, how do they work? Why do we invent them? What is it about the workings of the human mind that leads us to assume they exist, to need them? At this point in questioning the world around me, I ran smack into cognitive psychology, theory of mind, and linguistics.

Self awareness is often held above all as what separates us from the animals, however I can find no evidence that there is a hard threshold between non aware and self aware, and I will also argue that we humans are not nearly as self aware as we like to think.

Study upon study has shown that our waking, conscious self is not calling the shots. Rather it is much older portions of our brains that determine our actions, and the conscious mind is mostly left to formulate plausible motivations that match our internal model of ourselves. The conscious mind can wrest control for short periods, but when push comes to shove, it is the subconscious that takes the wheel. We call this phenomenon emotion.

Whenever asked what I think separates us from the animals, I am left with only one thing to say. Humans are the only animal with the need for self deception. We are the only animal that needs to think it is somehow different from all the others, and we are very, very good at it.

EDIT: I forgot to include among my influences a period of heavy psychoactive drug use. I didn't have any mystic "revelations" or stuff like that. No truths were revealed, rather it was un-truths that became visible. Drugs aren't for everyone and I will likely never return to them, but they taught me that the world I perceive as so real and certain ain't necessarily so. For the most part, we see what we expect to see. Drugs pointed out the cracks and poorly patched joints between the world we live in and our perception of ourselves in it. I found no answers in drugs. It was more like poking a hornet's nest of questions. Decades later, I'm still being stung.