What Does It Mean to Be Human? | Wired Science. What does it mean to be human? And can science illuminate the answers? A star-studded panel of scientists gathered to discuss those heady themes last night at the World Science Festival in New York City. Here are their answers in convenient nutshell form: Marvin Minsky , artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can’t: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information. Daniel Dennett , cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. Renee Reijo Pera , embryologist: We’re uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. Patricia Churchland , neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Jim Gates , physicist: We are blessed with the ability to know our mother.
Nikolas Rose , sociologist: Language and representation. Ian Tattersall , anthropologist: It’s not "what is human," but what is unique: our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition. Agent Smith's speech from The Matrix. What Does It Mean to Be Human? What Does It Mean to Be Human? What does it mean to be human? Or, putting the point a bit more precisely, what are we saying about others when we describe them as human? Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear. Minimally to be human is to be one of us, but this begs the question of the class of creatures to which “us” refers.
Can’t we turn to science for an answer? Some folk-categories correspond more or less precisely to scientific categories. If this sounds strange to you, it is probably because you are already committed to one or another conception of the human (for example, that all and only members of Homo sapiens are human). If science can’t give us an account of the human, why not turn to the folk for an answer? Unfortunately, this strategy multiplies the problem rather than resolving it. At this point, it looks like the concept of the human is hopelessly confused. Paradigmatic indexical terms include words like “now,” “here,” and “I.” What’s a natural kind? What Does It Mean to Be Human? By Maria Popova Primates, philosophers, and how subjectivity ensures the absolute truth of our existence. What does it mean to be human?
Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our existence. And yet the diversity of views and opinions is so grand it has made that answer remarkably elusive. While we don’t necessarily believe such an “answer” — singular and conclusive by definition — even exists, today we make an effort to understand the wholeness of a human being without compartmentalizing humanity into siloed views of the brain, emotion, morality and so forth.
So we look at this complex issue from three separate angles — evolutionary biology, philosophy and neuroscience — hoping weave together a somewhat more holistic understanding of the whole. There is a lot more biology to our behavior than we used to think.” ~ Richard Wrangham Share on Tumblr. Invitation to World Literature. Greek, by Euripides, first performed in 405 BCE The passionate loves and longings, hopes and fears of every culture live on forever in their stories. Here is your invitation to literature from around the world and across time. Sumerian, 2600 BCE and older Turkish, by Orhan Pamuk, 2000 Greek, by Homer, ca. eighth century BCE Greek, by Euripides, first performed in 405 BCE Sanskrit, first century CE Japanese, by Murasaki Shikibu, ca. 1014 Chinese, by Wu Ch'êng-ên, ca. 1580 Quiché-Mayan, written in the Roman alphabet ca. 1550s French, by Voltaire, 1759 English, by Chinua Achebe, 1959 Spanish, by Gabriel García Márquez, 1967 English, by Arundhati Roy, 1998 Arabic, first collected ca. fourteenth century.
CC Lesson: Gettysburg. Darmok/Gilgamesh Star Trek Episode.