Human Duality
We’re smart. We’ve developed complex economies and built incredible infrastructure across the globe. We’re potentially on the verge of creating Artificial General Intelligence. In many parts of the world we live in relatively safe societies of abundance.
But we’re still apes. We still have hair on our skin and limbic systems and biological responses to our environment. We’re still animals. As proud of ourselves as we may be, we get angry and territorial and tribal. We’re flawed. We’re bipedal beasts.
I often think this when I read any sort of psychological or sociological research. That we’re just monkeys studying ourselves, and from a certain cosmological vantage point, it’s comical. We try to reason ourselves into or out of things, but in the end, we’re tied to our primal biology.
But this is part of what makes us so unique, this ability to live within two worlds, the primal and the logical. It’s what drives us to explore and accomplish and create. We help each other. We make art. And we contemplate our place in the universe. We started surviving the savannah and now perceive black holes and distant galaxies.
It is on this grandest of stages we must consider our predicament. We are the tension between animalistic and logical. We are conscious creatures making sense of ourselves and our place among the stars. We are imperfect, but nonetheless a miracle. What’s next?