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Tuesday, February 19, 2008

On Being Human

Are we human because of alone traits and properties not shared with either animate being or machine? The definition of "human" is circular: we are human by virtuousness of the places that do us human (i.e., distinct from animate being and machine). It is a definition by negation: that which offprints us from animate being and machine is our "human-ness".

We are human because we are not animal, nor machine. But such as thinking have been rendered progressively less tenable by the coming of evolutionary and neo-evolutionary theories which posit a continuum in nature between animate beings and Man.

Our singularity is partly quantitative and partly qualitative. Many animate beings are capable of cognitively manipulating symbols and using tools. Few are as expert at it as we are. These are easily quantifiable differences - two of many.

Qualitative differences are a batch more hard to substantiate. In the absence of privileged entree to the animate being mind, we cannot and don't cognize if animate beings experience guilt, for instance. Bash animate beings love? Bash they have got a conception of sin? What about physical object permanence, meaning, reasoning, self-awareness, critical thinking? Individuality? Emotions? Empathy? Are artificial intelligence (AI) an oxymoron? A machine that bases on balls the Alan Turing Diagnostic Test may well be described as "human". But is it really? And if it is not - why isn't it?

Literature is full of narratives of monsters - Frankenstein, the Golem - and humanoids or anthropoids. Their behavior is more than "humane" than the world around them. This, perhaps, is what really put world apart: their behavioural unpredictability. It is yielded by the interaction between Mankind's implicit in immutable genetically-determined nature - and Man's kaleidoscopically changing environments.

The Constructivists even claim that Person Nature is a mere cultural artefact. Sociobiologists, on the other hand, are determinists. They believe that human nature - being the inevitable and grim result of our bestial lineage - cannot be the topic of moral judgment.

An improved Alan Turing Diagnostic Test would look for knotty and planetary forms of misbehavior to place humans. Pico della Mirandola wrote in "Oration on the Dignity of Man" that Man was born without a word form and can mold and transform - actually, make - himself at will. Being predates essence, said the Existentialists centuries later.

The 1 defining human feature may be our consciousness of our mortality. The automatically triggered, "fight or flight", conflict for endurance is common to all life things (and to appropriately programmed machines). Not so the catalytic personal effects of at hand death. These are uniquely human. The grasp of the fleeting translates into aesthetics, the singularity of our ephemeral life breeds morality, and the scarceness of time gives rise to aspiration and creativity.

In an infinite life, everything happens at one time or another, so the conception of pick is spurious. The realisation of our finitude military units us to take among alternatives. This enactment of choice is predicated upon the being of "free will". Animals and machines are thought to be devoid of choice, slaves to their familial or human programming.

Yet, all these replies to the question: "What makes it intend to be human" - are lacking.

The set of properties we denominate as human is subject to profound alteration. Drugs, neuroscience, introspection, and experience all cause irreversible alterations in these traits and characteristics. The accretion of these alterations can lead, in principle, to the outgrowth of new properties, or to the abolishment of old ones.

Animals and machines are not supposed to possess free volition or exercising it. What, then, about mergers of machines and world (bionics)? At which point makes a human bend into a machine? And why should we presume that free volition discontinues to be at that - rather arbitrary - point?

Introspection - the ability to build self-referential and recursive theoretical accounts of the world - is supposed to be a uniquely human quality. What about introspective machines? Surely, state the critics, such as machines are PROGRAMMED to introspect, as opposing to humans. To measure up as introspection, it must be WILLED, they continue. Yet, if self-contemplation is willed - WHO volitions it? Self-willed introspection takes to infinite arrested development and formal logical paradoxes.

Moreover, the impression - if not the formal conception - of "human" rests on many concealed premises and conventions.

Political rightness notwithstanding - why presume that work force and women (or different races) are identically human? Aristotle thought they were not. A batch offprints males from females - genetically (both genotype and phenotype) and environmentally (culturally). What is common to these two sub-species that brands them both "human"?

Can we gestate of a human without organic structure (i.e., a Platonian Form, or soul)? Aristotle and Seth Thomas Thomas Aquinas believe not. A psyche have no being separate from the body. A machine-supported energy field with mental states similar to ours today - would it be considered human? What about person in a state of comatoseness - is he or she (or it) fully human?

Is a new born babe person - or, at least, fully human - and, if so, in which sense? What about a hereafter person race - whose characteristics would be unrecognisable to us? Machine-based intelligence - would it be thought of as human? If yes, when would it be considered human?

In all these deliberations, we may be confusing "human" with "person". The former is a private lawsuit of the latter. Locke's individual is a moral agent, a beingness responsible for its actions. It is constituted by the continuity of its mental states accessible to introspection.

Locke's is a functional definition. It readily accommodates non-human persons (machines, energy matrices) if the functional statuses are satisfied. Thus, an humanoid which rans into the prescribed demands is more than human than a encephalon dead person.

Descartes' expostulation that one cannot stipulate statuses of uniqueness and personal identity over time for discorporate psyches is right only if we presume that such as "souls" possess no energy. A bodiless intelligent energy matrix which keeps its word form and personal identity over time is conceivable. Certain artificial intelligence and familial software system programmes already make it.

Strawson is Cartesian and Kantian in his definition of a "person" as a "primitive". Both the corporeal predicates and those pertaining to mental states use equally, simultaneously, and inseparably to all the people of that type of entity. Person beingnesses are one such as entity. Some, like Wiggins, bounds the listing of possible people to animate beings - but this is far from rigorously necessary and is unduly restrictive.

The truth is probably in a synthesis:

A individual is any type of cardinal and irreducible physical thing whose typical physical people (i.e., members) are capable of continuously experiencing a scope of states of consciousness and permanently having a listing of psychological attributes.

This definition lets for non-animal persons and acknowledges the personhood of a encephalon damaged human ("capable of experiencing"). It also integrates Locke's position of world as possessing an ontological position similar to "clubs" or "nations" - their personal personal identity dwells of a assortment of interconnected psychological continuities.

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