So - I have choice. But what am I? What are we? How do I relate to we? I am a Human, an individual that is part of Humanity. Humanity is more than the sum total of autonomous individuals. We are an interdependent species. We humans are organized more like a hive of bees.
When we are born we know little more than how to suck on a nipple. Who we become depends on the society that we are born into. We are fed the food they give us. We learn the language they teach us. We exist in a society of other humans that was created by them and they ancestors. We are integrated into society.
We think that our thoughts are our thoughts but they are not. What you are reading right now are my thoughts. I am expressing my thoughts using words that we invented by other people whose individual existences are, for the most part, long forgotten. My awareness was crafted in large part by the society and culture where we were created. If I had been cloned at birth and moved across the planet after I was born I would have been taught a different language, raised in a different culture. That person would not really be me. Who I am is in a large part who we are.
Although we exist as individuals we also exist as a part of humanity. Just as our cells are individual life forms, they combine to make the human individual. Similarly we are the cells of the human race. Who we are as humans is the result of the choices make by our ancestors, all the way back to the original pond scum that we all came from.
As an individual my existence is limited to the scope of my individual life. As a member of humanity however I am but a small part of a greater individual called humanity. Humanity isn't immortal but is far longer lived that individuals are. Humanity descended from other life. We will continue to exist until we become extinct.
Our individual minds are very limited. We think we are smart but without our connection to the hive mind our understanding of the universe is no more that sticks and stones. What we know isn't as much of what e know individually but what we know collectively. In the Church of Reality we refer to this as the Tree of Knowledge which represents the sum total of human understanding.
We as humans can travel to the moon. We can fly better and faster than any other species. We can swim to the bottom of the ocean. We can communicate instantly across the planet. We can take the heart out of one person and implant it into another person. We can measure time to billionths of billionths of a second accurately. And we can see objects that are 13 billion light years away. But it's not individuals doing these things on their own. There is not a person on the planet that if dumped on a dessert island could build a cell phone. All these things are done collectively.
A few hundred years ago humans couldn't do these things. But our biology has remained the same. What has changed is that we have grown out Tree of Knowledge. We are evolving through human software. To the extent that we are humanity and humanity is the individual that is evolving over time, then if we care that humanity continues to evolve then we succeed in being part of the process. If humanity dies, we become extinct, then everything that any human has accomplished is lost forever and we become meaningless.
So what we are is actually more than one thing. We are individuals with individual choices. We are also part of humanity, a greater life form, that is nearly immortal from our perspective. We have the ability to choose and what we choose affect our small piece of a much larger picture.
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