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