Life is an experiment. I recall someone calling it "one continuous mistake," which sounds pretty gloomy at first, but I actually don't think so. Mistakes get a pretty bad rap. I'd say that most of what happens in life can be considered a mistake. That's the nature of the thing, since we're always experimenting. But the problem is that experiments usually don't go well. It's the way nature works, through trial and error (perhaps informed trial and error is more accurate). Every option is given a fair shake, only most of them have no chance from the outset-they're inherently problematic.
The funny thing is that our existence is the end result of a series of successful experiments, out of the many many more unsuccessful ones. It's funny though, how things never settle for those successes, there are always more experiments to carry out... most of which will fail. If I were to characterize the nature of, nature, I'd say it's pretty resilient, pretty hardy. Stick to those guns! Maybe that's why we admire that trait in our heroes.
So we go through life, behaving in accordance with the nature from which we emerged: finding options, making attempts, running into roadblocks and paying the price. Only we have new tools at our disposal: memory and cognition.
Rather than blindly stabbing about in the dark, we can organize our experiences and use them to make predictions about future endeavors. We can limit the number of blunders through a systematic reduction in doomed enterprises. And we can build on our successes, much as nature has done through eternity, to construct broad, trans-generational perspectives. We call this process, when carried out systematically, science.
But there's a larger piece to this, and it has a lot to do with our social nature. Even when our developing understanding is not systematized, even when it's semi-consciously carried out and logged, there is an element of understanding that passes into the collective passively. This is the informed part. Nature works this way.
All things, knowledge, systems, constructs of any sort, are built upon a hierarchical structure; there is a base structure, from which higher order systems emerge. Consider a human body. Molecular structures allow for cellular ones, which in turn allow for body systems that collectively maintain a living body. Now here, I'll go into conjecture:
The trial and error of the lower order systems yields a kind of "process knowledge" that is transferable to the higher order systems. This minimizes the number of doomed experiments, since the process systems that govern molecular success also control body system success, for example. Co-constructive methods of functioning (non-zero sum interactions) are favored at every level, so that the number of zero sum trials can be minimized once this is learned. While this doesn't eliminate doomed experiments, it does minimize redundancy and reduce the near infinite failures to a manageable number.
The highest system level to date is social. We are currently experimenting with ways of socializing. Most of these experiments fail. Still, we appear to be making rather wasteful experimental decisions, beating the dead horse of zero-sum self interest, long ago proven ineffective. I'm rather certain, however, that this is driven by a minority of egocentric social leaders.
Further conjecture: when we are in the zone, flowing, or experiencing enlightenment, we allow ourselves to feel the billions of years of systems knowledge and make decisions that align with the way of nature.
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