Sunday, September 25, 2011

life and the people in it

Life is process through which a person learns and develops. Learning and development is something that could be done through reading books, interacting with others (talking, arguing, fighting, etc.) and experiences that could be rich or poor and from which we can learn things that we should and those that we shouldn't. This is why life is a series of experiences, a series of things happening inside one's mind.

There is one particular thing that I needed to learn since a long long time. The ideas, the way of thinking inside others and all of those things that make up a personality, a mentality, are greatly affected by one's psychology and this in turn is affected by one's biology. These things vary greatly from person to another and in the same person as his/her mood changes. If I knew this very complicated fact, my social life would've been much easier and I would've been able to get along with people better.

One of my friends once pointed out to something that I think has been all along in me, which is that I don't get emotional. Things that upset most people are totally irrelevant to me and unfortunately I find myself unable to detect them. People think I'm just afraid or too shy, but I wasn't even capable of detecting a stimulant to respond to. This also made it difficult for me to know when I'm making people scared, frustrated, freaked out or whatever.

I used to indulge myself with the idea that human beings don't need to evolve anymore since they've got everything that they need to achieve anything. Anything. We have minds, high-level thinking and ambition. We're aware of our limitations and building solutions for those problems. For example, we don't need to evolve our brains in a way that is able to effectively retrieve all information in the world; we can just use information management systems on our fast computers, which is a tool we built. This idea might be true for some, but is certainly not true for most. I think that most people are too attached to their body, their primitive impulses and emotions and rarely characterized by profound thinking and a desire to discover, invent, change the world and progress.

In my mind that changed, we didn't need to evolve. Human beings as a species reached something so great, I thought. We reached the point where we have complete control (at least intellectually, mentally and not necessarily physically) over the world. We just need more time to discover more and invent solutions that would show how great we are.

Those people whose minds are less attached to their bodies and their primitive biological impulses are evolutionarily more advanced than those who are. This is why I think that human beings aren't really one single species. I'm not a biologist nor am I a geneticist so I might be crossing the line here but this is just a thought. What I'm trying to say is that if two persons have a human body and are capable of doing the basic things that we consider a typical human being should be capable of doing; we are inclined to consider them as belonging to the same species. I think this view is too physical. Evolution isn't necessarily a 100% change in all genetic make-up and isn't necessarily a physical thing. In today's world, some people are evolutionary better than others; we're already split into more than one species. Nationalities, geographical and ethnic boundaries are irrelevant here.

Maybe it is more accurate to attribute all differences between the members of the human species to developmental and environmental factors rather than genetic. This is a safer option given the fact that human beings kill each other (violence would be much easier when those 'people' don't belong to the same species). But this also raises questions regarding how we could solve problems on earth if the issue isn't about genes that need to be upgraded. The abstract solution is easily stated: give people a chance to experience things that develop them in a way that serves humanity. Carrying out this simple thing is hard given all the selfishness that is somehow embedded in our bodies (or that is engraved in our heads as we live life).

We need to think about solving problems. We need to have free and independent thinking. We need more ideas and more projects. We need to keep thinking about the world because we're part of it, and the problems of the world are our fault. So before your emotions take over to shush someone who's saying something useful or trying to make a contribution, defer the biological and primitive emotions to the mind and be in control of yourself.


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