The Act, Question, and Ponderance of Bravery

(NORWALK, CT) – I have often asked myself what does it even mean to be brave? When you do something, do you do it for yourself, for someone else, is the act of questioning yourself making you better or worse. Those are the thoughts that have occupied my mind for some time now. Why do we do the things that we do, and does questioning our actions improve or worsen them?

The answer to the second part in my mind is simple. We, as in, the average reader of this and me can’t ever hope to redesign the world on our own. As a collective the questions we ask can change the world with their answers if they are asked carefully. But without forethought and simple reflection we cannot deign to change the world and to redesign history. In fact, our collective will is impossible to understand as an individual as our individual consciousness clouds our emotional and logical reasoning. 

Which is to say, if you believe the questions that you are asking make the world worse they may be for you, but the world maintains its existence with or without your questioning or questions. Which isn’t to say you don’t matter. We all do. Inertly, humanity, and even to some conceivable extent robots, exist, and therefore we must be good. For we are all that we know, and we know nothing beyond what we know. 

You cannot hope to change the world, but we must hope, so we do. 

The first part of my question is something that I can’t ever hope to answer on my own. We may, much like Aristotle tried to, point to the real world and believe that we have the answers because we may convince ourselves of the wrong or the right. The scientific wrong of Aristotle is obviously wrong. His action in pursuing the truth can’t be reasonably seen from his perspective as wrong, though. He lived in a time before most thought. He most likely lived in a time with thought that will never resurface, sorry, Archaeologists. We live in a time with more information than has ever been before produced. With more people who have ever lived or died. With more thoughts having been thought.

The state of nature is not something that we can return to. There is no bliss in ignorance that can be seen to those who are not ignorant. We never know what we may lose before we lose it. Yet we lose it. Despite this, we may gain things. In fact, over time, we will gain something. Things impossible to know to the human as one person. However, we all contribute to the collective consciousness. If we could go back I would. However as technology grows in sophistication humanity is losing the ability to understand the things it develops. 

Terrifyingly, we are going to the abyss with the development of AI and LLMs and particularly neural networks. We may regulate our next day. Humanity may regulate AI. In fact, it must. For our environment, our planet, the wind, the trees. However we must never forget that we are human and that means that we are good. And that what must come next is not anything that can be controlled without foreknowledge. We do things, because we do them. That tautological fallacy may fall flat on its face with the academia of the world, but we must remember that humanity is not just the sum of its parts. Individually we are infinite, as a whole we are finite. Just as the earth, sun, and