Ouphilpo

The expression of my individual experience requires that I engage in general or universal explanations consisting of relations and correlations. If any attempt at reflecting on myself requires the use of general facts to articulate my individual experience, then my experience is largely the same (in terms of expression) as others’ experiences. In order to claim something, such as the assertion that I am only a single possibility or the result of an intricate solution to a problem, then I must draw on universal understandings of possibilities and solutions. My common sense reasoning can provide the data needed to evaluate a problem of emergence (in this case, how to flourish or grow in the world), but in order to express this problem, I must appeal to universals, such as the process of flourishing and what it means to grow.
Physicians have meticulously calculated charts and dates of how to best solve the problem of simply growing by taking the average of a large group of children in the past, and finding the most efficient interim between shots and checkups as a child. The only way I can speak of “flourishing” or “solving the problem of survival” is by appealing to these generalities or averages, and assuming that the way I solved the problem, or the way the problem was solved for me (as I was unable to take care of myself as a child) was to take the general method that works for most, and apply it to my individual experience. The same process is at work in my attempts to claim that I am merely a single possibility in an endless list of possible selves. By using words such as “individual” and “possible,” I am using explanatory generalities (common understandings or comprehensions of the words) in order to articulate my seemingly individual experience, rather than expressing my solution to survival in a unique way, free from universal preconceptions.
My contrasting of individual instances from events governing the specific instance was faulty. By individual instances, I was referring to particular points of time, whereas events governing the instance were the amalgamation of instances that led to or caused another specific instance. However, to highlight an “instance” is impossibly vague, for any instance can be divided into infinite instances, such as in the parable of Zeno’s arrow. Additionally, an amalgamation of instances is not only arbitrary in its composition (when did the first cause of an event happen?), but any answer to this question is ultimately subject to the same Xenoian scrutiny. By assuming cause and effect, I was not only overlooking how this could not only lower the chances of an event happening or not happening, as a particular setup is (generally) more prone to occur than another different setup of events, but this overlooking also rejects probability as a whole, entailing that events happen because of other events, not because of random happenstance. For instance, if my claim is that my self is the probable solution to a series of problems, then the problems I initially face after birth largely shape the way I will or can solve them. Further, the events that set up my birth into a Western hospital required wars over land disputes, years of research and development, as well as the incentive to build the hospital in the first place. If I were to continue this path, it would assume a primary first event, from which all events happen prior to or because of its existence. Probability, then, only factors in to the possibility of that single event to even occur, or to occur in the particular way in which it did.If I were to express how probability is responsible for my development, I would need to appeal to universal understandings of probability and experience, as well as find a way to reconcile the problems in distinguishing instances from processes, and processes from instances.