The Human-Created World

In the beginning we did not live in a world of our own creation. Oh, sure, we were already the masters that made the grass green: we always lived in the world created by our own nervous systems, but the external world was not yet of human creation but the world we inherited from geological and biological development. This seems like it should be obvious but it is worth keeping in mind because today we live in a world that is almost entirely of human creation. This ranges from the obvious, like technology and infrastructure and money and domesticated animals; to the subtler such as the languages that constrain and control our thought processes. And sure, I know that there's still a lot we don't control, like the weather and microbes; and much of the ocean remains a mystery and... uh, that's basically it. For better or worse, we inhabit the world we made for ourselves.