What Is A Human Being?

February 16, 2023

While reading a fairly innocuous essay recently, I came across the phrase, "We, as a species," and I thought:

Whenever someone uses the phrase, 'We, as a species,' they are about to say something really stupid.

Then, I decided to be a little more generous. So, instead I thought:

Whenever someone uses the phrase, 'We, as a species,' they are about to make something up, with the hope that the word 'species' gives their claim the illusion of scientific rigour.

Ditto for whenever anyone says we are "essentially” such-and-such creatures, or that "underneath it all," we are really some such way.

Now, I'm no rhetorician, logician, or even magician, but I feel like there's a certain fallacy going on here. I don't have a fancy name for it, and I'm not about to say that it's a fallacy inherent to human nature, or one that plagues us "as a species." What's happening here is that people are beginning with an empirical claim — that people often behave in some way — and then augmenting it with a subjective claim — that this way of behaving is essential to humanity or being human. Whenever someone speaks to me of essentiality, I put on my dubious hat.

Our words and concepts are ambiguous. Ask any linguist what the word "chair" means, and their hair will fly out of their heads. No one knows what a chair is. Does it have four legs? Three? Is anything you can sit on a chair? What about a chair in a dollhouse? No one can sit on that, but we still call it a chair. When you sit on something that isn’t a chair, does that make it a chair?

According to my sources, these questions are the foundation of all first-year linguistics courses, and my conjecture is that they make everyone in the room go absolutely crazy, which is of course a prerequisite for involving oneself further in the field of linguistics.

The point is that there is no "essence" to "chair-ness." We call a lot of remarkably distinct objects "chairs." If I go on my hands and knees and someone sits on me, suddenly I'm a chair. I'm a human chair. What makes a human a chair? What makes a chair a human? Are humans essentially just chairs that are all bent out of shape, given consciousness, and allowed to move about?

This ambiguity is why people can consistently get into arguments about what is or isn't a sandwich, or whether AI art is actually art. It's why I can walk into a room and ask whether a pony is a horse. Is a pony a type of horse? It certainly looks a lot like a horse.

Now, this ambiguity is no cause for alarm. It's actually quite handy, because it means that our language, and therefore our modes of thought are flexible. We can incorporate new information, revise old information, and generally change our minds much easier than we could if our concepts were more rigid.

This is what makes something like literature and poetry possible. It's what makes it so that we can understand that Moby Dick is both a whale and a symbol of a concept. When reading the story, we have to, in one sense, consider Moby Dick to be a whale, because he looks like a whale, acts like a whale, and is chased by whalers. For the plot to make any literal sense, he has to be a whale. But he's not just a whale, because he's a whale in a novel, and his being in a novel, the role and status he occupies in the novel, makes us think of other things, like the danger and inscrutability of nature. He's not just a whale, and he's not just a symbol; he's both, and at the same time, he's just words in a book and not literally anything. He's a concept.

The downside of this ambiguity is the way it interacts with our systems of logic. Logic is about perfect clarity; it's about determining whether claims are true or not true. To know whether a claim is true or false, we first need to know what exactly is being claimed. That's somewhat hard to do when we don't even know what a chair is.

This brings us to the question of what we, as a species, really are, and what we're really all about.

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Human beings, as a species, are a concept. The human species exists as a component of a certain model of categorization that separates it from other animal species. There are plenty of similarities between human beings and other animals, and within a larger, more general categorical model, they are treated the same. When we think of the things that exist on the planet Earth, we might think of flora and fauna and rocks. In this model, an ant and a human being belong to the same concept. Within a smaller and more specific categorical model, there is no human species, but only elemental atoms. And within an even smaller and even more specific categorical model, there’s electrons and quarks and who knows what.

To use an example I've written about before, there are those who say that humans, and all creatures, are concerned primarily with passing on their genes, or DNA, by way of producing offspring. Their proof is that all life forms have the ability to pass on their genetic code in some way, and a complementary desire to do so. Now, the claim that there exists an impulse toward having children is obviously true, otherwise no one would ever do it. If no one had any desire for children, everything would be dead.

I could argue, in a similar but slightly more holistic argument, that humans are creatures who like to create. I could point to art, crafts, buildings, tools, foods, and, of course, children again. I could point to the fact that even the earliest examples of humans drew stuff, and attempted to make their mark on their environment.

Now, both of these arguments are based on facts, and have material proof for their correctness. However, they are both entirely unverifiable, because their argument is not that such and such a desire or impulse is real, but that it is essential. This is an entirely conjectural move, and boils down to a subjective feeling that something is important.

People sometimes argue that war is essential to human existence. They point to the history of humanity, and say, "There's always been war." What they're actually doing here is saying that war is essential to human History, being something that happened. Everything that has ever happened is essential to human history, because human history is defined as everything that has ever happened since humans began existing.

Does this necessarily mean that we need to do more war right now? People used to subsist on the plants they found growing randomly on the ground. Up until the point when we developed agriculture, it could easily have been described as an "essential" aspect of humanity that we eat stuff we find on the ground. However, when some people decided to plant food intentionally, suddenly eating stuff you found on the ground wasn't essential anymore. We'd found another way of going about it.

Depending on how you think of them, humans can be a weird monkey or a deformed angel. We’re similar to monkeys, but also quite different. We’re similar to angels, but different from them too. When Socrates tried to define human beings via deduction, he ended up with “featherless bipeds with long, flat nails.” This is clearly a joke, but the upshot of the joke, and really much of Plato’s dialogues, is that no scientific model is so foolproof as to survive extended questioning by a pseudo-fool. There is no way of categorizing the entities or concepts in the universe that doesn’t lead to strange or unintuitive results.

Any way you try to define human beings, the result is either dissatisfying in its breadth, or contradictory in its specificity. There’s no way to get at the essence of human beings without leaving somebody somewhere out of the picture. And as soon as you try to argue that the people outside of your schema are not actually people, you’ve already lost, because we just called them people.

Have you ever read about the way scientists categorize fruits and vegetables? Everyone knows that the current model defines a tomato as a fruit, but did you know it also considers a squash a fruit? What about an almond? Would you ever, in the wildest dreamworld of your imagination, think to call an almond a fruit?

The botanists are not wrong; they’re just using a different model. Their concept of fruit is more specific and probably more logical than ours. But that doesn’t make them right, either.

I mentioned before the idea of humans as a weird monkey. This is the basis behind evolutionary psychology, and other such disciplines. However, I would personally place the emphasis much more strongly on “weird” than “monkey.” As soon as you start talking about things like “finding mates,” you’ve lost the plot. Biologically, you could say that humans mate and produce offspring, but we don’t really do that. We fall in love and have kids. Moby Dick appearing in a novel makes us consider him more than just a whale, due to the fact that we know the novel was constructed and imagined by a human person. In the same vein, our “finding mates” and “producing offspring” are fundamentally changed by existing within a human context.

Why would we use such different words if the concepts weren’t different? Euphemisms aren’t just ways of avoiding saying a certain word or phrase; they are about changing the way we think about the very thing itself. By calling it "falling in love" and "having sex", we’ve changed the meaning, and changed the way the thing is done. We’ve changed our understanding of ourselves. Suddenly, we can think of ourselves as something different than an ape. By thinking of ourselves as something different than an ape, we open up the possibility of being something different than an ape.

If we all think of ourselves as inherently warlike creatures, we will not resist war. If there is an opportunity to use war to resolve a conflict, we can justify it by saying, “Well, it’s in our nature.” Then, a bunch of people get blown up by a bomb. Many people think that blowing people up with bombs is bad, but… we can’t help but be human, right?

Every time someone says, “We, as a species,” they are presenting their model of what we are capable of. They are presenting what they conceive as the limits of our being. They are saying, “Whatever we do, we can’t get beyond this.”

I say to that: Humbug! Speak for yourself! I know you are, but what am I?

Sociology and evolutionary psychology speak of individual people as components of a whole. Our actions only become meaningful in aggregate. This makes sociology depressing as hell to read about because it makes it seem like no matter what you do, you’re just playing into someone else’s system. Even your explicitly radical, contradictory, or revolutionary actions get swallowed up by an unfeeling model. When the model is convincing enough, it seems that there’s no real possibility of changing the world, or changing anything at all.

But no model is perfect. Systems of categorization and systems of organization come and go. Maybe my kids will call an almond a fruit and not bat an eye. In the past, we thought of economic value in terms of resources, then of land, then of labour, and now no one has any idea what’s going on. In the age of automated machinery, we suddenly find a need for a new economic model. In the age of computer AIs that write really boring high school essays, we need a new model for what is and isn’t a high school student. If we continue to develop humanoid robots and computer chips that we put in people’s brains, we might need a new model of humanity sometime soon. Let’s try to make it one that doesn’t totally suck.

Maybe we could try one that takes into account love, charity, and generosity? Maybe we could work emotional intelligence, physical and intellectual adaptability, and the ability to have fun times in there somewhere? But we can’t forget also to include the fact that we are capable of experiencing tragedy, either our own or others, and coming out stronger for it. Or that when we are sad we are still beautiful, and that no matter what we do, there is always the possibility of redemption.

Why, when attempting to define humans, must we always reduce? Why must the essence be something simple? We are not mere carriers of DNA, we are not mere pattern-recognition machines, we are not warmongering apes, and nor are we even social and loving friend-makers. There is no "underneath it all," there is no "essence," and there's no "we, as a species."

Where can we see all this in its starkest relief? What is the corpus, what is the data from which we can construct our new model? If we were to teach a child or an AI what it is to be human, where would we point them? Zoology? Biology? Chemistry? Psychology?

To my mind, the best place to start such an investigation would be literature. Literature allows us to see humanity as we see ourselves, not as a mass but as individuals. It allows us to see our idiosyncrasies as well as our similarities; what we imagine ourselves to be and what we imagine ourselves one day capable of being. Because we can't forget to include in our model not just our material composition or our physical actions, but what lies in our imagination as well: the stories we tell and the worlds we run off to.

Perhaps such a model is impossible. Perhaps there’s simply too much to take into consideration. It’s quite possible that our only choice is to leave it open and unfinished, to recognize that there is much about ourselves that we don’t know and may never know, and to conclude that we, as a species, might be capable of anything we can dream of.