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by RobertoG
3322 days ago
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Your comments: "Yes, knowing why one's parents behaved the way they did is useful" and ", but anything before that isn't really different from stories about other people" are contradictory. How could you know why your parents behaved the way they did if you don't know about their parents? The person you are is a function of where you grow up, that is, your community. To deny that is to deny what humans are: social primates programmed to absorb a culture. |
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I only need to know their experiences with them and other people. Anything before stuff that shaped them is a bonus. Otherwise: how can you know your grandparents without knowing your grand grandparents? And so on? At which point does "knowing" become clogging up your mind with fuzzy distant blobs, then?
> The person you are is a function of where you grow up, that is, your community. To deny that
Would be contradictory with "in so far as I am a result of that chain, I can more accurately examine those current traces in my current me".
Though come to think of it, I'm denying it the way you phrase it. Communities and societies are even more importantly functions of the individuals in them. They have no meaning and no existence on their own, outside of a mutual agreement of actual people. We get shaped by our relationships and experiences with other people, and you can sum that up as "my community", but that's just a shorthand for my own actual experiences with the actual people I interacted with, and their experiences with me.
And who would you "absorb" culture from, if that was all there's to it? From others who just absorbed it? There needs to be a source at some point, why not be such a source, at least partially.