Individual Cards

As commonly used, individual refers to a person or to any specific object in a collection. more...

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In the 15th century and earlier, and also today within the fields of statistics and metaphysics, individual means "indivisible", typically describing any numerically singular thing, but sometimes meaning "a person". (q.v. "The problem of proper names"). From the seventeenth century on, individual indicates separateness, as in individualism. (Abbs 1986, cited in Klein 2005, p.26-27)

The individual as a force towards a goal

What is the essence of an individual? First of all we can refer to it with a noun. Secondly it does something or we think it can do something. Doing something means making a change. A person for example could do something by moving his arm.

If we search for examples of individuals then we can not just take any change or group of changes as the appearance of an individual. One would not consider the group of totally unrelated events as the appearance of an individual. But the moment there arises coherence in the actions, the moment we see a common goal, that moment we are willing to see this as the acts of an individual.

Because of the above it seems reasonable to state the following:

The property that all individuals have in common is that they tend to change their world in order to obtain and maintain a specific state. In an abstract sense, an individual tries to remove every factor that he dislikes and tries to add every factor he likes. This behavior can be referred to as moving towards a state of happiness.

This could be used as a very generic and abstract definition for the concepts "individual" and "happiness". It is so general that with this one can recognize an individual behind every group of more or less coherent changes in the world. For example, gravity could be the individual that tries to put all mass together. Note also that there is allmost no previous knowledge of concepts required, one does not need the know what a human is to know what an individual is.

In everyday life we usually do not want to call every force we detect an individual. But strictly spoken every event could be the act of an individual. This is closely related to Animism: One could explain all unexplained events as the acts of imaginary individuals.

This idea is what most people use intuitively when they think about each other. They do not think about each other as complicated organisms consisting of millions of interacting cells. In the first place they got a very basic idea of each other, called "he" or "she", and associate with it what "he" or "she" "wants". We usually use it as a simplification for things we do not understand.

Read more at Wikipedia.org