| I'm not sure in the strictest sense there is an "ourselves" to be.
Perhaps for the first several days after birth we're without any kind of knowledge beyond instinct; eat, sleep, poop.
As soon as we are aware of outside input we start to become amalgamations of what we see and hear, taste and touch, etc. I think most people grow up with attitudes, opinions and beliefs that they've picked up along the way and now consider their own.
Once and a while someone will take the knowledge they posses and combine it or apply it in a way no one has considered before. Newton, Einstein, Berners-Lee. None of them invented anything out of the whole cloth, but they took what they knew and used it to develop a theory or product that hadn't existed prior to that.
So in that sense I'd say we're very much products of our world. You don't hear of a child in an African village suddenly come up with a new economic model for a nation. We can only output combinations of what we've allowed to be input, or what was available as input. |