Stimuli

Whenever I’m chemically altered, I sit down and think. That is, unless someone or the other interrupts my train of thought. And in some of those occasions of contemplation, I think about the infinite nature of human experience. Due to the varied nature of stimuli present in our environment, the permutations and combinations are infinite. Even in a relatively small sample group of say, 10 human beings, the difference in experience regarding just one particular stimuli will be sizable since it is highly influenced by the rate and number of other stimuli. For example, when I read a book, the way in which I relate to it, or the way in which I understand it will be vastly different from the way someone else relates to or understands it. And this is because me and the other someone have been exposed to different stimuli at different rates up until the point of reading that book.

Thinking along this line, it is nearly impossible for two human beings to have the same experience out of a single stimuli. It is highly unlikely that two human beings would have been exposed to the exact same combination of stimuli even in the rare case that they had been together since birth.

The reason for this could be that a significant portion of the stimuli that shape our experience is personal. Yes, all stimuli are interpreted and perceived in a subjective manner, but there are some basic stimuli that influence our experience which are a result of genetic accidents. Like the size of our body parts. And it’s undeniable that these basic and personal stimuli have a defining role to play in establishing the foundation of our experiential pyramid.

Identical twins is an interesting example of human beings with similar foundation of experiential pyramid and are together since birth. It just goes on to prove that even if the foundation of two human beings’ experiential pyramid is the same, the variety of impersonal and external stimuli are so large 

that their experiences are sure to be molded radically different.

But in spite of the mathematical near impossibility, it’s rather interesting to see human beings acting like a wretched herd. A herd in which there are no individuals, but ideals. They are desperate to relate even slightly with someone who is similar to them in negligible ways. This rut that the human civilization has fallen into (from the earliest of civilizations mind you) has been explained away as a natural process that has happened with evolution. Human beings are so certain that evolution has got everything figured out right, that nobody even thinks of questioning it. Evolution can fuck things up! It’s a part of nature and nature is always fucking things up. It has been since the very beginning. Providing a sustainable habitat to the cosmological blunder we call “Life.”

And who says trains of thought must be properly concluded? Fuck you!