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We are more than just our biology |
One can not understand what humanity is by looking at a single human, or even a collection of humans one by one. We are more than just our biology. If a space alien captured one of us as a small chile and put it in a cage and raided it, the alien would learn very little about humanity is like. The child would seem like a dumb animal with very few survival skills. The alien would be confused wonder how could such a fragile creature survive in the wild.
But humans do quite well because we are part of a society and we can communicate and divide up the task necessary for our survival. Some people grow our food. Some people drive the trucks to deliver the food to us. Some people make the trucks used to deliver food. Some people make the parts for those trucks. People drill for the fuel for those trucks. Others build roads. Some teach people how to build roads. Some create the laws so that we can all drive safely. Some design the computers we use. Others write the software. We are all interconnected into a great system that allow us to survive together much differently than a single human specimen raised in a cage.
We are more than just our biology. We are also the systems of society that have evolved. Society is like our software, the software of the human race. And that software is evolving too. It's also our technology. The machines we build. Our knowledge and understanding of how things work. The Tree of Knowledge which is the sum total of human understanding. All these things are attributes of the single life form that we are all part of.
We have the capability of seeing galaxies that existed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But how is it we see these galaxies? Our eyes can see them. We can see them because we built the Hubble Telescope and that device is an eye we constructed that we all share. Humanity has built a common eye.
Space telescopes are our common eyes. The Internet is our common mind.
But we don't see through that eye directly. That eye picks up individual photons and transmits this information to a network of computers that analyze the data and interpret what it means and then draws a picture for our eye to see that represents what is out there in a way our brains can understand. Our brains can't understand the data from the telescope so we build computers to extend our brains and allow us to move thinking to machines that help think for us.
Our mind are not limited to our biological brains the way most animals are. Because they can't communicate complex ideas they are limited to what the individual knows though evolutionary programming, mimicking the behavior of their parents, and their own experience. We developed speech that allows the knowledge of one person to be shared with others. We then evolved written language which allowed communication over distance and time and allowed information to be preserved more accurately.That evolved into the Internet which now allows an individual, like myself, to put my discoveries out in from of the entire world. And all of this extends who we are. Our knowledge is as much part of us as our DNA.
When you look at humanity as more than just people but as part of a life form that has existed and evolved over a billion years you can appreciate us as something more wonderful that it just being all about me. We are a part of a greater whole that includes all like on Earth, the history of life, and all our technology and our understanding of the universe. Just as we are more than a collection of individual cells our common life form is much more that a person or group of people.
Our understanding of what we are from this perspective is very important because humanity is on the verge of a paradigm shift where the process of evolution itself is going to drastically change. We are about to shift from traditional evolution to engineered evolution where humanity will design what we will become. We are already in the process of doing that without realizing what we are doing. We now have to realize it - own it - and take responsibility for our future. Humanity is pregnant. We are about to create a child race which will not share our biological evolution and we are going to have to figure out what we are so that we can decide what we will become.
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