Garden

About the blog

   Have you ever considered what makes us human?  Specifically those things that separate us from the rest of the zoo?  There's more than one way to look at the question:

• Physical characteristics
• Social or cultural characteristics
• Mental characteristics

   I tend to favor the mind over some body part only slightly different from other animals.  The same goes for social or cultural things like tool use.

   There's also something we can do with our minds that exceeds any other creature on the planet by a wide margin.

   You might be wondering what that is.

   It's being able to put ourselves in someone else's shoes because of empathy and gain perspective.     Perspective seems to be the more overlooked and defining thing about us.

   Whether you carry a bible with you or a cell phone there's a garden story you've probably heard.  It's also where snakes learned to talk so more apples could be sold.  That's not really the point of this blog though.

   The garden of Eden is where we supposedly gained knowledge of good and evil.

   Somehow that happened without state legislatures to write it into law and vote.  It also happened without 10 laws written into stone tablets.

   You might now be wondering what that has to do with perspective.

   Without laws or rules in writing and without a society to nudge or push us along...  how do we know what's right or wrong?  How do we even know what's good or bad?

   There's really just 1 way though you might find it too subjective.

   I'd argue that's backwards and only appears subjective on the surface.

   We can put ourselves in someone else's shoes to see how we'd feel in the same situation.

   It's how we can evaluate whether something is fair or unfair based on our own experience.

   Perspective doesn't just appear in our minds out of the blue either.  It occurs when the conscious sub mind and the unconscious sub mind each take a position on something (a perception) and we switch back and forth between them creating an image in mental stereo.

   The difference between the 2 positions is relative.

   Each person's mind will probably take 2 different positions than others given the same situation.  Being relative makes normalization (an apples to apples comparison) between us possible.

   That allows us to define good and evil in a similar way even with everyone's unique perception of the world.

   So as far as the garden goes...

   There's a hint about what defines us as human when 1 mind made of 2 minds exists.

   That also means 2 things.