Dependent Organisms

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Humans Are Dependent Organisms
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A human's view of the world is fundamentally governed by his emplacement as a dependent component that lives within a superorganism. As a higher-level living system, the superorganism provides an "internal" protective and nourishing environment for its component organisms. From a human's view, this is the "external" environment that he learns from and interacts with, as he develops to become a worker within one of the superorganism's businesses or organizations.
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Humans Live Within a Superorganism's Internal Environment

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At their current stage of development, humans must generally obtain their food, goods and services within their superorganism's market structures. This dependency is accompanied by cultural norms, mores, and a somewhat flexible rule of law to ensure that human behavior collectively benefits both the superorganism and its dependent components. Within most of today's more sophisticated nation-state superorganisms, humans are given considerable freedom of choice and movement, including migration to visit or live within a different superorganism. But wherever they live, their basic dependency manifests itself in the way humans see and understand events and the way they interact within a superorganism's internal environment.
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How Humans Comprehend Events
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As a dependent organisms, humans must participate in their superorganism's markets. In performing these interactions, they must be able to recognize both their current needs and available supplier offerings as potential elements of a market event. The foundation for this recognition is their lifetime accumulations of event experiences that can be used to evaluate a current situation. For this to occur, they must have a common system of identifiers and features involved in both remembering a previous market event and recognizing the potential for a new one.
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To accumulate knowledge and make it retrievable, humans have developed an ability to objectify the characteristics of an event as it is being sensed. From this perspective, an event is made up of actions associated with the "things" that a person is perceiving at the time. Each of these "things" is a set of sensed features that humans have learned to interpret as the emergent properties of an aggregate object.
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An infant learns to recognize objects in terms of the features that he senses. "Mother" is a large warm, nourishing and comforting object. Hanging simple objects over a crib with stimulating properties such as bright color, shiny, smooth, fuzzy, wiggly, etc., help an infant begin development of his conceptual mechanisms. Later development in more complex abstraction builds on that basic objectified framework.
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If all the features of an event were unique only to that event, there would be no basis for retrieval from the myriad of different events for comparison, and no basis for communication about the event with others. For both retrieval and communication purposes, event features must be remembered in terms of standardized concepts that are consistent with a person's language, education and other experiences, and commonly understood by other human components of the superorganism.
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Development of Concepts
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Development of concepts builds on the innate human ability to perform abstraction on an event's sensory inputs. Through sequences of experiences, humans are able to abstract and perceive certain familiar combinations of sensory inputs as identifiable "things" that are involved in their current interaction with the external environment. This ongoing objectification of sensory input constructs an organized memory of the things that have been involved in the events that were previously experienced by the human organism.
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Concepts are Familiar Sets of Sensory Inputs that Often Occur Together

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In the resulting memory structure, abstractions are treated as objects upon which further abstraction may take place. This produces a multi-level arrangement of hierarchies of conceptual objects, where higher-level objects within multiple hierchies may share common lower-level objects. The connections in this complex network arrangement are what allow a person to recall multiple past events that have certain features in common with the event currently being sensed.

Given that a human organism has a rich, complex memory structure within which relevant previous events can be recalled to help evaluate a current event situation, what is the mechanism used to judge whether one alternative action is better than another? Belief Systems describes values and how they help a human organism make decisions to deal with both known and unknown aspects of his external environment.