One particular subject that I found very interesting in this article was the evaluation of human values, what they are, and where they derive from.  One major component that sets apart human beings from other mammals in the world is our capability of thinking, understanding, and analyzing decisions that range from the smallest day-to-day decisions to critical decisions that affect many parts of our lives and possibly the lives around us.  Each and everyone one of us is different in our ways of understanding things around us, and how those certain things make us feel.  I believe that is a major component to why an alien from a different planet would view us as humans as unpredictable, complex, and quarrelsome.  In my humble opinion, I believe that the author’s examples of human unpredictability and quarrelsome gave our human tendencies a negative outlook.  I believe that the beauty of the human mind is how we are all unpredictable in the ways we  understand certain things in the world.  If a Martian came to a foreign world where humans were predictable and not quarrelsome, where the unique factor be? Would we all just be the same robots that think, look, feel, and act the same way? The essence of our consciousness and how our personal values stem from it is the foundation to our interesting yet unique ways of understanding the world around us.

I believe that the development of personal values is the foundation of the human being conscious.   Without an inner conscious and our ability to understand how it interacts with our mind, values would be nothing more than streaming lines of thought in our heads with no substantial evidence on why it is important to us.  Therefore, since we know that personal values exist, how are they developed throughout our lives?  The article discusses whether or not our values are freely chosen from our own doing, or if they stem from our inheritance or the way we were raised.  This made me think about my own personal values and how they were stemmed.  Through personal experience, I believe that we use our inheritance, the way we were raised, and people we surround ourselves with to understand which values align with our own conscious.  We evaluate the good and the bad with our life experiences and apply them to our own development of personal values.  According to the article, values should “be synonymous with personal evaluations and related beliefs.”  Although it seems like we as human beings do not freely choose our own path of values, I strongly believe that although our beliefs are strongly influenced by our inheritance and by the culture around us, we choose freely what to believe and value and what not to in the end.