This is born out of another discussion and has likely been hashed out here in the past, so for those of you who have been here a while, my apologies.
My position is that we are not individuals and that individuality is (largely) a myth.
we are far more connected than we would like to think, and that part of us that is unique is quite small, almost insignificant.
consider:
we are born from an act of two others, so we don’t do that for ourselves. we are nurtured and taught by others for (under ideal circumstances) the duration of our childhood, and as we grow older, we learn in cooperation with others.
we learn language from others, which we then use to think (primarily)
we dress pretty much the same as everyone else, listen to the same music, same radio stations, watch the same tv shows, share the same internet.
pretty much everything we do is geared toward connecting with others.
My religious beliefs are different from my parents, friends, and indeed virtually everyone I’ve met. I have my own name, my own face, my own genetic code, and my own record collection. I live alone. No one else occupies this space. I’ve been alive for 340,824 hours and during that time, no one has had the same experiences or interacted with the same people. To some extent, sure. But you only need to be a little bit different to be different, to be unique. When it comes to the spectum of issues, I’ll always agree to some extent, and disagree to some extent with any other individual.
Then again, to some extent we’re all one.
I’ve always felt that by far the two most important subsets of humanity are the individual and humanity as a whole. All others–race, nationality, religion, ideology–pale by comparision.
Owing to the nature of the physical universe, no two people share any experience in the same place, at the same time, and in the same way. Despite whatever superficial similarities — the earth, after all, is similar in some ways to a bowling ball — every experience for every person is unique.
No. It means that we, as humans, have experiences. The subject of these experience is quite likely fundamentally unique. Of course there must be some “sameness” in reality and existence for us to speak of it meaningfully, but this doesn’t make it literally shared.
but one’s ability to relate beliefs or even have them requires the ability to structure them in a way that they can be compared to others’
otherwise they simply don’t exist, or can’t be acknowledged is more like it.
unless you can claim to have invented the concept of the hour, and that no one else uses that time measurement, you must conceede that however many hours you have been alive have been in cooperation with others.
ok, so maybe an hour “feels” different to you than everyone else,
you “experience” it differently.
But feelings and experiences are made up of the same component parts for everyone.
broken down, the elements are all the same. The order of them varies, but that’s just window dressing, actually even less than that, more like dust on the window dressing.
and if the earth is like a bowling ball, can it be like the one big ern used with the rose in the middle?
and where do we put the thumb?
Well, this post is fairly similar to the one I made a few days ago, “Mass Production Leavens Mass thought”. A little more indepth opinion of mine on this subject is listed in this post.
Although, more specifically to individualism. We’re all very similar and all very different. So, to compare whether we’re actually individuals or not you would have to specify the constant of comparison. Everything in a broad generally statement, would obviously lead to the answer, yes we are.
lib.
it depends on how we define “big” but i’m willing to take credit for appearing smart whenever i can, so, yessir i did use big words
what about the thumb?
and oh yeah,
I’ll conceede that some aspects of experience are unique. But most things concerning experience are common to all; it’s definition, the construct itself, etc.
it’s only the content of “experience” that is sequenced differently for each person. (i don’t think i said that right, is there a linguist in the house who can explain how antonyms are more similar than dissimilar? it’s that sort of thing)
and experience is only one of about a bazillion aspects of being human. (give or take a few kabillion)
the rest are shared.
and yes, it only takes one difference to make something “different” but did we really think we were going to speak in absolutes here? black and white?
in other words, a 1 watt lightbulb would certainly make a room “not dark” technically, but watch those shins around the coffee table!
According to yourdicionary.com, and individual is “a single human being as contrasted with a social group or institution.”
I really can argue both sides of the issue. Every human IS individual… Everyone has different preferences and different personalities.
We aren’t really individual…The big thing nowadays is to “be an individual” however, with everyone now doing that, being an individual has become a trend. I think a former signature of mine expresses it well: “you’re unique, just like everyone else.”
we are all individuals but some are more individualistic than others.
if you are too individualistic the normals talk about you. if even more individualistic they may do worse things than that. this tends to reduce individualism.
It looks to me that the pro- and con- indvidualists here are just mincing words. It looks to me that greck has a different meaning attached to the word “individual” than does everyone esle here.
As for myself, I am definitly an indvidualist. There are important parts of a human life that are not shared between people. The fact that there are many people out there that are listening to the same radio station or reading the same book or typing on the same type of computer is irrelevant to the discussion of whether or not I am an individual.
No one else is sharing my consciousness at this moment or any other. I would like to aviod the semantic arguement of “what counts as consciousness?” for the moment and simply say that no one else is feeling/seeing/experiencing exactly what I am at any point in time.
I’ll go with monica’s definition of an individual,
my point is that it’s a really small part of who we are as human beings; that the majority of what we are is “community property” so to speak.
i can think of no human action that doesn’t have consequences for other human beings, let alone other living things on the planet.
dal_tingmar had a good point- if someone tries to exert too much individuality, they are called “crazy”
connectedness and individuality arent opposed to one another, individuality is an aspect of connectedness,
individuality is the pinch of spice that makes the soup palatable
it just occurred to me the irony of the fact that, in arguing against individuality that i have become unique in this thread, while those who argue that they are individuals sound remarkably similar OH THE IRONY!
