Scattered

The thing to remember is that we all start out in pieces; your parents give you a few, your culture gives you a bunch, but most of them will come with the experiences of life. This is the sense in which we both make and discover ourselves, for it is in seeking formative experiences that we find new things about ourselves; we discover tastes, and skills, and fears, and using all these decide where to go next.

And yet with each such decision, we sentence uncountable others we might have been to death by exclusion. What we seek out for ourselves will change as we find more or less than we sought, and rarely are we permitted even a glimpse at how things might have gone otherwise, let alone a visit; your tastes will change, passions will grow muted or cynical, and sooner or later you lose the chance to want badly enough all those great things you once did. If this endgame is to be prepared for, it must be by moderating our decisions, for it is the person we build through them that we will ultimately be, and this isn't necessarily someone who'll enjoy the retirement we're planning for ourselves now; decrepit retirees endup littering beaches because that's where they dreamed of going when they were still young enough to enjoy it.

What is needed then is a metric, a standard according to which we can live our lives creatively and fruitfully without becoming mired in the leftovers of our bad decisions. And indeed, such is an oft-repeated theme in the popular religions: that, through one mechanism or another, our actions will come back to haunt us. That what we do really matters, ultimately and specifically, to ourselves and our own fates.

And yet in eight millennia of accumulated culture, no such metric has gained any popularity without being distorted for other social purposes, made just another tool for interpersonal conflict. Something in humans, something that sings oh-so-sweetly when we conquer a foe or eat fried chicken, keeps us pulling back from these revelations about the importance of our choices.

And perhaps it will, in the end, come to nothing less comical than that a species of primate learned to direct its own evolution through culture, and used this power to accelerate its growth beyond physical limits; that is, to death.

Avatars

Humans are very strongly and uniquely social creatures. Of all the animals on earth, we are yet the only ones found to generate anything like culture. Across everything from generations to weeks, complex relationships among prevailing social attitudes develop within population-level groups of people, existing either as revolutions or traditions in thought. Taken collectively, this phenomenon is what is referred to as our cultural zeitgeist, or those attitudes most prevalent in our population.

What interests me is the remarkable complexity of these cultural norms, the detail and history they accumulate over impressively little time. They evolve like living things, creatures composed fundamentally of memes, which are just trains of thought.

But if, as humans, we should have reason to believe that the majority of our actions are culturally imposed, meaning that they are interactions with society at large; we would then be forced to consider seriously the perspective that we are, for most purposes, much more avatars of culture than we are biological humans. While it is of course true that there is always an interplay of biology with cultural norms, as when fashions in food and sex reflect biological priorities, it is nevertheless the case that a human could be raised to exist without any of the current social standards or attitudes, and that it could even be healthy as long as it was raised with Some social standards and attitudes. Political attitudes, on the other hand, have never been shown to exist without the assistance of primates.

I think that this relationship of humans to their ideas highlights something important in each. That humans, for one, function normally as the intersections of various socially imposed beliefs and habits; but also that this function can be carried out with any sufficiently complex belief system, and humans will in fact present cognitive deficits when raised without some such structure or routine. This view does not cast cognitively-gifted primates as the progenitors of this vast cultural landscape we live in today, but rather as more-or-less passive recipients of value-hierarchies and anecdotes; as symbiotic to the traditions that span their generations, wired with a need to believe as desperate as that of a shark to swim.

While this is a somewhat humbling perspective on the value of our humanity, I think this fact leaves room for a more nuanced view of the nature of our ideas. That if most of our actions are majorly influenced by culture, for one, then it is fair to identify ourselves as functions of society(varied though these functions may be); humanity is the vehicle through which we exist, but the complex values and beliefs with which we identify most are not things that we would have had we been raised differently. Further, if ideas and systems of ideas are our most basic form of existence, it should be expected that challenging our beliefs will be taken more seriously than simply killing us

Pathways

Reason is the means by which we trace a path between what we want and what we can have; to rationalize is to construct for ourselves a way of believing that there is something we think is important which is also attainable.

And yet this fabulous tool can lead us nowhere without a starting point, for reason cannot establish the relevance of any new idea without assuming that of an old one. We only pursue truths we think are important, and so for any pursuit of truth one must first have a sense that something matters, has an intrinsic value which relates to nothing at all but the world we'd like to live in. This I understand as having values, believing in things passionately, and as far as I can tell the character and depth of a person's values say more about their beliefs than any particular interaction they ever have with reality.