Well, I woke up pretty early this morning and gulped down a few cups of my favorite stimulant. I got to doing homework since Spring Break is almost over and I wanted to get ahead on my studies. Anyway, I got to writing an essay that was supposed to be about narrative, but it quickly strayed from that to a new subject. This is what came out:

Connecting the Dots

Human beings, through the phenomenon of cognition possess the ability to observe with their senses the world around them. We take in this data and then measure and reason through it to make connections between the stimuli perceived. This leads to the formation of thoughts. As our brains take in the perceived senses, imprints are left on the brain as neurons begin to arrange and network themselves in a manner as to organize the data and store it for later processing. This gives us the ability to make connections between other stimuli in order to form basic thoughts. These thoughts enable us to interact with our environment, and leads to the formation of more advanced and complex ideas. Ideas such as language, creation of tools, domestication of plants and animals, and harnessing natural processes for personal benefit. A certain utterance is a signifier linked to a signified which when the connection is made forms a sign, or idea that is intended. It is only through making this connection that ideas are able to be transmitted between humans. These signifiers could be gestures, body language, verbal utterances, signs or drawings, or writings. No matter the medium, from the point of birth we begin absorbing and processing the data about the world around us and continue to make connections to improve our ability to interact with our environment.

From birth each individual human has a unique experience of the world around them, or their reality. That is to say that everyone’s experience of the universe is a subjective one. Two individuals can perceive the same stimulus and derive very differing opinions or descriptions about what the stimulus is and what it means. However, there are many similarities as well that the two individuals may find that allow them to come to some mutual agreement about the object or stimuli. It is this ability that I believe is the most integral to human society as well as human progress.

If it were not for the ability to transmit ideas and share data and experiences with other individuals, then at the point of death all of the information that the individual had gathered over his or her lifetime would be lost. To get around this problem we have created means of communication; grunts, gestures, drawings, writings, etc. Through these mediums, ideas are transmitted on to other individuals and the idea is able to be stored in the minds of more human beings. For example: One individual, through observation, learns that by collecting clay and bricking it and allowing it to dry he can form a material that is suitable for building that is superior than that of say wood and straw. The other individuals around him would observe his method and try to replicate it; however this replication of ideas can lead to mutation. It is also important to point out that the individual that the idea of creating mud bricks would not be an original one. First someone had to reason the idea of building structures, then observations about the properties of mud had to be made; countless ideas which were not in the mind of the individual at birth, but instead gathered and stored in that individuals mind are all arranged in a manner that allow the individual to come to the thought of creating mud bricks. In short, the idea is not original and cannot be attributed to the “creator” as his or her invention, but instead a collection of information about the environment which came to yield a new idea. This idea can then be spread through others observing the practice, or the individual promoting the idea to others through language and communication. As others perceive this then new idea, their brain along with all of its collected data and experiences are able to process it and mutate the idea into another new idea.

With the importance of transmitting ideas established and how this transmission can occur we can now look at human society and progress on terms of availability of information. The first and probably most basic form of communication is gestures and audible noises. Soon however, to store information in a more permanent manner, creation of symbols, pictures, and eventually written language was developed. Written language can then be reproduced and spread in more efficient way and also provide a way to more permanently store the information for later generations.

There are direct correlations between complexity of society and the information that the society collectively possesses and shares. There is also a direct correlation between complexity and technology. For instance, first we have gestures and words, then written language, then the advent of paper and pen, then the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the internet. Each of these technologies or abilities were generated as the society collected more information about the world, then an individual or perhaps group of individuals within the society took the available information and generated a new idea. These generated mediums allow for faster and more efficient transmission of information between individuals which lead to more creative capability within the society for even more technological progression. It is also interesting to point out that progress in communication technologies available to mankind seem to come at an exponential rate. After a new faster form of communication is generated, it is usually followed by an explosion of new ideas and inventions. This is because individual experiences and information about the world are able to be transferred to others more quickly than before. Research available after a February 2009 press release from comScore, a prominent source for research on digital information, shows that “Americans conducted 13.1 billion searches at the core search engines” (comScore). Before the internet and the vast amount of information available to its users, as well as search engines to find the information, who or what was answering these 13 billion questions a month? The questions may have gone unanswered or may not have even been asked in the first place.

The internet connects individuals to one another in a way like never before. Social networking sites such as FaceBook and Myspace, video websites like YouTube, search engines such as Google and Yahoo! all aid in the spreading of new ideas, and do so on a global scale. Ideas can spread and proliferate throughout the world faster and more efficiently than ever before. The byproduct of this ability is growing complexity of global society as well as greater technologies being invented at faster and faster intervals. More data is available to each individual user of the internet than ever before and the availability of this information makes mutation of ideas into new ideas more efficient.


It's in no way complete, but maybe you guys can tell me what you think about this idea.