Discontinuous space-time

I am amazed, in ways I never before appreciated, just how differently each of us apprehends the world.

For many years, I have been toying with the conjecture that people are "formed" by their environment. This idea is nebulous, but amounts to an extension of the proposition that creatures adapt to their environment. As the Brillat-Savin quote on Iron Chef would have it, "tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." The notion is that people respond in specific ways to their environment, because their environment requires them to do so. Thus, the nomadic plains dwellers hunted buffalo and did not settle into growing corn. The nomadic way of life and dependence on buffalo in turn forms the local culture. People believe things about taking buffalo, and that guides their behavior. On the other hand, the farmer who knows how to grow corn has a completely different set of habits, because that's what's involved in growing corn. Successful farmers aren't nomads, for instance.

Technology makes a difference. More powerful technologies free people from immediate dependence on the natural environment. The nomadic hunter is transformed into cattle rancher, when the skills of raising cattle are learned and the appropriate instruments are acquired. One of those instruments is the right to pasturage, which involves a legal system that allocates land use. The cattle rancher has a different mind set than the nomad, because of the fixity of his acreage and the intensity of his attention.

The foregoing illustrates that the principle is still the same, but needs clarification: it is the ecology in which one finds oneself which makes the difference. Ecology is interactive, whereas 'environment' is static. So, it is the interaction of the person and environment which is formative. In eating, there is the food and the processing of it. We do not become corn by eating it, but transform the corn into something that is a combination of corn and self. We are a different self because we ate the corn, rather than, say, wheat, but there is still some core we call 'self.' Perhaps this is because the eating is relatively faster than the rate of its changing us. Thus our drift into "coreness" is imperceptible.

Once we get there, once there are "wheat people" and "corn people," we don't know the difference until we confront each other. If everyone in our village eats wheat, we won't know the difference corn can make.

This is what writing a book has done to me. I suddenly discovered how different from my conception are the people I thought I knew. This is not unpleasant; it is just surprising. It also is a new start on life, which I greatly appreciate.