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It's incredible the amount of collective knowledge contained in the most pedestrian objects. A cup for example. Or a street.
These objects are the product of a long lineage of continual trial-and-error, something a kind of design[1] evolution. We just sort of assume that we'd know a priori how to design these sorts of things, when in fact there's not too much inherently obvious about it. Why, for example, when building a retaining wall, do we include rebar? Why does that rebar need to be suspended in the cement? Somebody figured it out. Or rather many people figured it out, over a long period of time.
Since we're able to abstract[2], we can separate that experience out from the specific instance and pass it along. It becomes another part of us, in some way. Collective knowledge, evolving along with us. We're not these discrete entities, but rather something infinitely attached to what's already happened, in the sense it's often impossible[3] for us to see alternative ways of approaching problems than what's already been done[4].
Last updated Fri Apr 01 2022 in Berkeley, CA
2: /thought/abstractions-make-us-human.gmi
3: /thought/functional-fixedness.gmi