Thursday, July 31, 2008

People: Agency, Love, Friends' Dalton Letter

Given the tens of thousands of generations that precede us, I think human beings - homo sapiens - can be thought of in the following ways:

Humans are experiential, feeling, thinking, remembering, imagining, sentient, networking, idiosyncratic, embodied, procreating computers {conscious, cultural, distributed input-think/feel-output bodymind systems that can have babies and can self-program (“add/remove programs?”;) / learn / plan and that also have been 'selected for' / “encoded” in ancestral environments via Darwinian natural selection, and by family and community (acculturation)}.

I see this as the beginning of a 'theory' of the 'person' - as well as the 'subject,' the 'individual' and the 'actor', in anthropological and social theory senses - that incorporates information technology metaphors, evolutionary biology {Darwinian evolution by natural selection}, as well as a conception of agency {choice}.
I contextualize this conception of human-ness in this letter - scottmacleod.com/daltonletter.htm - about love and loving bliss vis-a-vis a kind of far-reaching 'realism' :).





No comments: