“I invite you to the following exercise. Think about your personal history, and you will discover that everything in your life has happened such that you are here, right where you in this moment, reading this paper. Everything; where you were born, who your parents and friends are, where you went to school, what language you speak – everything leads to this moment. You can make a trace, from now into the past in way that shows that every turn you took, every choice you made, brought you here. So you were destined to read this paper today.
The beauty of this silly little exercise is that it shows us that if one looks at a history this way, it looks as if everything is predetermined of fated; but it isn’t. Your whole life was not directed at arriving here, you resulted here. And that is the nature of biological history, the way any living being lives. What happens is constructed moment by moment by the character of one’s living, always going in the path of well being, a choice of comfort, desire or preference. An animal may prefer to go one way, and in doing so, it happens to get eaten by a predator. If it had chosen another way, it might not have been eaten. Did it choose based on the consequences? No, it chose according to its desires in the present, because living is in the present. For animals there are no opportunities or resources. We humans may use these words as we comment on their behaviour according to how we explain what we see as happening to them. If we want to invent a human history, we will have to show a path of conservation that we follow. And what path do we follow? We follow the path of our desires, because desires define what we conserve. This is not a trivial point, and fundamentally we all know this. When we are concerned about what we are doing we are concerned with conserving that which we desire.”
“Biosphere, Homosphere, and Robosphere: what has that to do with Business?”
Humberto Maturana Romesin and Pille Bunnell