Human Nature - Transcending the Nature vs. Nurture Debate

Self-awareness is key to our development as human beings. Our lack of understanding of our own nature is a major factor contributing to human suffering and slavery, from antiquity until now. In fact, our idea of human nature is so erroneous, that only a minuscule few of us recognize that all of humanity is experiencing slavery today.
Human nature is to live in a free and orderly way. And the only way to achieve both freedom and order, is living in accordance with natural law and objective morality.

The nature of human beings is that they are programmable. People function according to the information they receive. A given input will result in a given output. That may sound very similar to John Locke’s blank slate view. However, the key difference is that in reality, there is right information and wrong information. This is where Nature comes in. Before any Nurturing is done, there already exists information that if put into the individual, will cause them to function well.
Nature and Nurture are just two different types of programming.

Exploring the idea of information further, it can be divided into two parts. Information is defined as, “Information is processed, organized and structured data.” The two parts are data and format. Nurture is data. Nature is format. Data can be thought of as letters on a computer screen. And it can be likened unto the lessons, experiences, traumas, and observations throughout life. This is what is meant by the word “Nurture” - our record of experiences. However, there are many ways to interpret a sequence of letters. It can be read right-to-left, upside down, arranged into sentences, or interpreted in different languages. The grouping and arranging of data for the purpose of interpreting it is known as format. For human beings, our format for interpreting our experience is our genetic background, and our inherited qualities. This is the real dynamic of Nature and Nurture.

Any discussion about human nature has to involve the Trivium. The Trivium is the classic liberal arts education technique that can be traced back to Ancient Greece. The way we learn starts with the Grammar stage, which refers to raw data. The data is processed in the Logic stage and converted to a form in which knowledge can be obtained. Finally, in the Rhetoric stage, knowledge is converted into action. I’ve spoken in my previous presentation about human beings being composed of three parts, physical, emotional, and spiritual. In educational terms, it is information, knowledge, wisdom. In computer terms, it is data, processing, execution. In atomic terms, proton, neutron, electron.
So, what is this third aspect of human nature? What is this area that corresponds to the electron, to rhetoric, data execution, action, and spirituality? The trivium of human nature is Nurture, Nature, and Free Will.

Knowing free will is the pinnacle of knowing human nature. The dictionary definition of free will is “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.” That definition is wrong. All of the book definitions of free will are at the very least incomplete. These definitions describe basic general freedom. However, Free Will means more than just “freedom of action” or “freedom of choice”. Free Will is 1. The ability to act, according to, or contrary to, one’s nature, and 2. The choice to place objective truth over all other things. Objective truth and morality is inextricably tied to the concept of free will. Free Will is not merely choosing, it’s consciously choosing right over wrong. And the problem is, as a race of people most of us don’t know right from wrong. This results in us not exercising our free will, which leads to us not knowing our own nature, which leads to us living in a condition of slavery.

Transcending the nature vs. nature debate, here is who we are:
Human beings are the epitome of adaptability, malleability, and programmability. The information we receive, known as input, determines our behavior in the output. That information comes from parental and environmental influence, as well as direct genetic information that we inherit. We journey through life applying the trivium, taking in that information and making sense of it. As we process the information life gives us, we are innately drawn to the higher ideals of freedom and order. Through free will, we can align with these ideals, knowing natural law and objective morality.

This is what we are meant to do. This is the meaning of life. As we enjoy the fruits of our labor, we bear the consequences of the choices we make. Until we make the free will choice to accept truth and reject illusion, humans will continue to live in slavery until the lesson is learned.