It’s been quite long since I talked about the human nature.
One of my most favorite topics simply because it is just so inexplicable. There
are few other parts of philosophy that even come close to this form. Now if you
are a biology teacher who has taught me, I have already bugged you with this
question. If you are a saint, I have already told you a million times over that
you are wrong and that if I were to agree with you we would both be wrong so let’s
just skip to the end where I pose the problem statement over again for those of
you who have just joined the debate.
Take the human body for instance. We are composed of the
brain and of the organs in the rest of the body. We have voluntary and
involuntary think centers that make sure we poop alright. That being said, we
comprise of the basic understanding and comprehension of our surroundings and
of the phenomena that cause it to be so.(the understanding might not be correct
but it at least has us convinced that it is). If we break down this
supercomputer like functioning down we could see that we are essentially made
out of the organs and in turn tissues. There tissues in turn by cells and cells
that are controlled by the center called the nucleus which gets the code of
what to do via a sequence of enzymes and amino acids called the deoxyribose-nucleic
–acid (DNA for short). Now into this code is more than functioning. The essence
of existence and the mere tendency to live on remains within this code and more
than that multiple copies of it tend to work in tandem in order to generate the
results that we see today as a massive civilization. A simple chain of a
handful elements (no literally handful, mainly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and
nitrogen) has been capable of inducing the tendency to keep living within the
organisms and I think that it is more than conscious that drives us to be that.
Now let’s just say that we as a species were driven to behave in a living tendency
as such and taking that as a null point, we are to discover what keeps us that
way. Let me take you a little deeper into this. Humans have always been
developing defenses for themselves. We have always, as a species been on our toes
when it came to protecting our assets and interest groups knowing that one day,
inevitably, we shall perish. What makes this more interesting is the methods we
device for the same. Now in a recent video by V-Sauce on YouTube, I saw him
mention how, what sets humans apart is something which is very fundamental. Our
ability to ask questions. Now scientists have been able to train chimps to
count, to express, and even to an extent to feel emotion and convey it in the
precise manner. But the one thing that they haven’t been able to do even to the
species that is second most intelligent to humans, is to induce the ability to
ask questions. I have always had this theory that our will to know everything
around us is more than just a human factor and a few days ago while driving, it
struck me! It is the ultimate defense mechanism. What made humans evolve, what
made them stronger and more agile and adaptable than other species to a certain
environment is their ability to ask questions. Now I am not stating this
biologically or as a theory in general to be universalized but it is worth
giving a thought.
Early on in the process of going around doing our own
business, we as humans catered to the fact that we needed a defense mechanism
simply so that we can strive and be alive for as long as we want. And what we
figured more than any other organism was that we needed information. We needed
a constant flow of knowledge of things around us and things around those things
and then things around them in turn. We ended up hardwiring knowledge gathering
into our predecessors and today we see ourselves are explorers and expedition
makers and the wanderers of tomorrow. We have seen, through history that more
we know about things, the safer we are, everything else kept constant. And it
perpetuates into our lifestyle.
Now the root of me writing this article was actually to
figure out why we happen to have a tendency to survive, and I somehow ended up
thinking about all of this and then wrote that down. And that very same thought
process stands as testimony to our ultimate defense mechanism. Our ability to
ask questions. And more so, our incessant and frustrating morbidity to answer
them.
