I've just calculated that I've lived for approximately 27,925 days (I'm 76.5 years old). Lets not quibble, call it 28,000 days. That's a lot of life experience.
Do humans learn from experience? Am I a better person now than I was as a child, a teenager, a young adult? I really hope so - I do believe I am. "We 'construct' our knowledge through experience – by doing. The human mind is better equipped to gather information about the world by operating within it than by reading about it, hearing lectures on it, or studying abstract models of it" - https://www.changelearning.ca/get-informed-understanding-human-learning-how-humans-learn-best.html
If you accept my premise, then as long as the learning is beneficial for the individual & for the society in which the individual lives, everyone benefits from "good" learning. "Humans have changed the world tremendously in the past centuries. They have invented technical devices, institutions that regulate cooperation and competition, and symbol systems, such as script and mathematics, that serve as reasoning tools"- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-016-0003-0 Learning results in long term change - for everyone. Humans are capable of becoming better people as they learn from experience & age.
Unfortunately the opposite is also true, we live in a world of opposites. Why do humans become bad, cruel, evil? Is it because we dehumanise our victims? Or do we "see other people as blameworthy, as morally responsible, as themselves cruel, as not giving us what we deserve, as taking more than they deserve"? https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/12/14/16687388/cruelty-border-immigration-psychology-human-nature History is full of the appalling things humans have done & continue to do to eachother.
Is it simply good & evil, God & the devil, right & wrong...?
I don't know. But I do know that in my lifetime, humans have created a completely different world, which I have had to adapt to & live in. In doing that I too have changed. It is a world which is infinitely more complex, more populated, more demanding of resources, simply more everything.
That model is not sustainable. Humans are living longer. Population is growing - "world population increased from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.7 billion today". "Life expectancy, which measures the age of death, has doubled in every region".
Humans are voraciously using up everything in the world larder of resources. In doing so they are destroying their own habitat. Ultimately humans will destroy themselves if they don't stop. It isn't that we don't know what is happening - We don't truly see. We don't internalise. We don't want to change.
It's on a knife edge. Will humans draw back from the brink of extinction? Have they learned from experience?
It probably won't happen in my lifetime. But unless there is radical change it will. "Evidence shows that a sixth mass extinction is occurring now. Unlike previous mass extinctions, the sixth extinction is due to human actions". https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_Introductory_Biology_(CK-12)/06%3A_Ecology/6.26%3A_Human_Actions_and_the_Sixth_Mass_Extinction
The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the Sixth Mass Extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is ongoing as a result of human activity.
That's you & me.
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