As an individual, my genes have come to me through a long process known as evolution. My genetic knowledge has been built upon a heritage that goes back over a billion years. So even at the very beginning of my life, I owe my existence to a string of events that spans beyond my comprehension; billions of choices, chances, and variations. At birth, I owe my existence to a process completely outside my control, encoded in a message that defines me in ways beyond my understanding.
How I perceive the world through my senses is the starting point of my "individual" journey. My sense of who I am begins to take form, and "I" begin to exist as my body discovers its relationship to the world around it. But even here, my individual experience is guided by a long history of "shared" learning. Shared learning is the lessons I learn through modeling or imitating what other entities have learned. My genetic traits have hard-wired my modeling ability, so it comes naturally. I not only learn from direct experience, I learn from the experience of others.
Most importantly, as an infant I model communication skills, like talking. I may have been born with some basic, genetic communications skills (crying, laughing, eye contact), but my ability to learn from others depends on the deeper communication skill of language. Initially, I learn from watching and listening to others. As I get older, I was presented with the skill of reading, the ability to learn from people who live beyond my sensory world, and who may not even be living. I'm not sure at what point "who I am" was based more on the lessons beyond my own senses, but I would guess that happened some time around adolescence. My world exploded as the lessons I learned from reading easily exceeded those I could garnish from my "individual" experiences. In fact, by now, my personal experiences were heavily influenced by the learning I had gotten from the "virtual" experiences books had given me.
By the time I reached high school, I was no longer an "individual". Rather, I was a process of learning, dominated by lessons, carefully culled and passed on from the past. And the more I wanted to learn, the more I surrendered to the process of culling the lessons of the past. But how do we, as a species, decide what lessons to pass on? How do we decide which lessons get the attention, energy, and commitment necessary to keep them alive to pass on?
The scientific method is a process by which sensory experiences are culled based on their shared perception. It is a process of communication, a process that permits learned information to be passed on to future generation.
To claim that I am an individual, and as such, need only make decisions with my own, selfish interests in mind, is a rather narrow view of who I am and how I got here. To think that I am even able to make decisions on my own is a bit of an exaggeration. Certainly, I am responsible for my own decisions, in that I am the one making the decisions. But those decisions are overwhelmingly driven by my education, which is a distilled version of the experience of millions of other human beings, many long-since dead. Imagine the decisions I would make if I had never learned to speak, had no way of communicating with others, never learned the lessons passed on from generations past. I am responsible for my decisions, and I take on that responsibility. But to say my decisions are my own is a bit laughable. To deny the legacy passed on to me, both genetically during the past billion years, and through teachings of the
past 100,000 years, is an arrogance that satisfies the small, self-rewarding part of me that I know as my ego. I choose to be humble, based on evidence that who I am is defined more by those before me than on my own existence. I choose not to forget that who I am, and what I accomplish, depends on a much larger process than my own experiences. I acknowledge that my well-being is the result of a process of testing, gathering, and remembering lessons, a process that has been going on for over a billion years. I commit to feed this process, not just feed off of this process, by giving back and contributing, rather than satisfying my own ego and consuming and destroying, the very source of my well-being.
How I perceive the world through my senses is the starting point of my "individual" journey. My sense of who I am begins to take form, and "I" begin to exist as my body discovers its relationship to the world around it. But even here, my individual experience is guided by a long history of "shared" learning. Shared learning is the lessons I learn through modeling or imitating what other entities have learned. My genetic traits have hard-wired my modeling ability, so it comes naturally. I not only learn from direct experience, I learn from the experience of others.
Most importantly, as an infant I model communication skills, like talking. I may have been born with some basic, genetic communications skills (crying, laughing, eye contact), but my ability to learn from others depends on the deeper communication skill of language. Initially, I learn from watching and listening to others. As I get older, I was presented with the skill of reading, the ability to learn from people who live beyond my sensory world, and who may not even be living. I'm not sure at what point "who I am" was based more on the lessons beyond my own senses, but I would guess that happened some time around adolescence. My world exploded as the lessons I learned from reading easily exceeded those I could garnish from my "individual" experiences. In fact, by now, my personal experiences were heavily influenced by the learning I had gotten from the "virtual" experiences books had given me.
By the time I reached high school, I was no longer an "individual". Rather, I was a process of learning, dominated by lessons, carefully culled and passed on from the past. And the more I wanted to learn, the more I surrendered to the process of culling the lessons of the past. But how do we, as a species, decide what lessons to pass on? How do we decide which lessons get the attention, energy, and commitment necessary to keep them alive to pass on?
The scientific method is a process by which sensory experiences are culled based on their shared perception. It is a process of communication, a process that permits learned information to be passed on to future generation.
To claim that I am an individual, and as such, need only make decisions with my own, selfish interests in mind, is a rather narrow view of who I am and how I got here. To think that I am even able to make decisions on my own is a bit of an exaggeration. Certainly, I am responsible for my own decisions, in that I am the one making the decisions. But those decisions are overwhelmingly driven by my education, which is a distilled version of the experience of millions of other human beings, many long-since dead. Imagine the decisions I would make if I had never learned to speak, had no way of communicating with others, never learned the lessons passed on from generations past. I am responsible for my decisions, and I take on that responsibility. But to say my decisions are my own is a bit laughable. To deny the legacy passed on to me, both genetically during the past billion years, and through teachings of the
past 100,000 years, is an arrogance that satisfies the small, self-rewarding part of me that I know as my ego. I choose to be humble, based on evidence that who I am is defined more by those before me than on my own existence. I choose not to forget that who I am, and what I accomplish, depends on a much larger process than my own experiences. I acknowledge that my well-being is the result of a process of testing, gathering, and remembering lessons, a process that has been going on for over a billion years. I commit to feed this process, not just feed off of this process, by giving back and contributing, rather than satisfying my own ego and consuming and destroying, the very source of my well-being.
