Of course we know what is to be human, a quick glance and we can tell, can’t we? We’re those bipedal mammals with big heads and bigger egos. The differences between the racial groups exist, but by any reputable definitions of a species we are just one. We arose in Africa comparatively recently, not more than two hundred thousand years ago…small groups of individuals left via the Middle East in one or two episodes of migration and from there spread across the globe. The visible racial differences are no more and no less than adaptation to local conditions by the process of natural selection and perhaps by inbreeding due to small numbers within populations groups. Had groups of humans stayed small and isolated from each other for much longer than was the case, we might well have developed into separate species. Fact is this didn’t happen…we are one species by any definition of the term.
Are we in any way special, compared to say goats, cockroaches, or any other animal? Though there may well be other creatures elsewhere in the Universe that would qualify as human in terms of my definition, we are the only humans that we happen to know of at this particular point in time. Obviously the bipedal part isn’t terribly important in the definition, we may be the only placental mammals that habitually walk on two legs, but the humble chicken that makes it into the Sunday roasts is also bipedal. We are homo sapiens sapiens, a subspecies and only surviving species of homo sapiens. We can call ourselves human because of the sapiens part of our scientific name, meaning wise. I’ve always thought this to be ironic as I see so little wisdom around, nonetheless though we might not be terribly wise, we are at least smarter than any other creatures; we have a lot of computing power between our ears.
Humanness rests on achieving a state of awareness. Awareness is a little difficult to define, though most of us know what is meant by it. It is the ability to contemplate your own position within the cosmos, not necessarily to understand that position, but to be able to contemplate it. It is to be aware of the thoughts in your head, and the thoughts of others. It is something beyond mere intelligence, although I strongly suspect that it flows from intelligence, perhaps an inevitable side effect that occurs when intelligence goes beyond a certain point. Awareness is the quality that allows us to appreciate the abstract, to know what art is, and to be able to recognise beauty, purely for what it is. Without awareness we would not have religion, because religion stems primarily from being aware of yourself within the cosmos. To be human must be to achieve genuine awareness, at least as aware as we are. The dividing line between human and non-human is not a clean line in evolutionary terms (nothing is) although here on Earth we draw it easily because it seems to us that no creatures exist that straddle it. I’ll leave this for now, but I am not sure that the other great apes do not achieve a level of awareness greater than what we credit them with.
The definition of what qualifies as human must also be pinned to a species rather than to individuals. I am the last person that would advocate some sort of test based on I.Q. to determine the relative humanness of one individual versus another. That sort of eugenics is worse than racial prejudice and could potentially have even more horrific consequences. An entire species is either human or it isn’t, including all those unfortunates born with a very low intelligence or with a medical condition that prevents awareness, or have lost brain function due to accident or disease. The test is sufficient intelligence and the ability to achieve awareness, within the average member of a species.
In his book, The Human Story, Robin Dunbar[i] illustrates the concept of intentionality. Intentionality is the mind states of believing, thinking, wanting, desiring, intending and hoping i.e. a state of awareness of the content of our owns mind and the minds of those we are interacting with, this is known as ‘Theory of Mind’. It is a handy test of the degree of ‘awareness’ that a creature might be capable of, and surely awareness is a question of degree. It is thought that true awareness requires at least the ability to operate above two levels of intentionality. Humans can typically go up to four or five, some of us can reach six, but very few go as high as seven.
Intentionality is something we come across on a daily basis, but don’t really recognise it unless we give it some thought. It is how we view our own thought process in conjunction with that of others. It is how we operate vis-à-vis our fellow humans.
Dunbar gives the following example of 6 levels of intentionality. It is a simple example, but notice how you start to lose track after four or five and need to concentrate quite hard to follow:
It’s a lot easier if you only go to say three:
Peter believes (1) that Jane thinks (2) that Sally believes (3) her ball is under the cushion.
It’s like a game of bluff, but consider your typical social interaction, you’ll recognise this process going on. This sort of mind reading is an essential part of human behaviour. I don’t think that we could function in almost any social interaction without it. Certain medical conditions, like autism impairs an individual’s ability to handle theory of mind, which severely limits those individuals from normal social interaction.
Whereas theory of mind, by itself is not awareness, clearly it goes hand in hand with awareness. One cannot contemplate your position within the cosmos unless you can be aware of your own state of mind and how that state of mind influences and is influences by the world around you. Take religion for example, to be able to imagine an unseen parallel existence, peopled by gods and demigods that interact with us and our world is an excellent example of theory of mind… what is prayer other than an attempt to influence the mind of God?
I’m going with homo sapiens sapiens as the only intelligent and aware creatures that exist on Earth today, that can be called human, all other contenders have gone extinct due to luck and inability to compete with us. The big question is, will we continue to be the only creatures that meet the definition of humanness.
The film Bicentennial Man based on the novel The Positronic Man, co-written by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, explores this theme very well. The story is about a robot that due to some quality error in its manufacture has genuine originality, feels emotions and is as fully aware of itself and its thoughts as any human being is. Robin Williams plays the part of the robot, Andrew Martins, who is portrayed as a really nice chap and eventually empowered with considerable wisdom, as you’d expect from a sapient being that has managed to live for two hundred years.
It’s a good story, well told and well presented on film. In my view this is also not an impossible scenario in the relatively near future, if humanness is indeed a function of processing power. Moore
If we do manage to create real AI, will we have created something that can be considered as ‘human’ in terms of my definition?
Roger Penrose discusses four viewpoints in his book Shadows of the Mind[ii]:
· All thinking is computation, including feelings of awareness
· Awareness is a feature of the brain’s physical action; whereas any physical action can be simulated computationally, such simulation does not evoke awareness.
· Appropriate physical action of the brain evokes awareness, but this action cannot be simulated computationally.
· Awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational or in any other scientific terms.
Personally I don’t quite follow the second argument as it seems to harbour a contradiction; nonetheless, the main question is whether or not our awareness (our humanness) is a result of our brainpower or some other metaphysical means. If awareness is simply computing and if it is, can it be authentically recreated in a mechanism other than the human brain? The question posed by the film Bicentennial Man is deciding between the 1st and 3rd points of view. Andrew the robot indeed fulfilled the definition of human long before the closing moments of the film when he was legally declared to be so.
The concept of a human soul lies in the last viewpoint, essentially that humanness or true awareness can only be God given.
I don’t claim to have a definitive answer; I do, however, believe that we are a product of what happens in the space between our ears. If we mess with that, either by introducing chemicals into our system or physically, we become changed, this is fact. Most of us have some experience of this, knowing someone whose personality has been altered by addiction or accident. This seems to me to indicate that who we are is driven by the physical, rather than by some other mysterious agency. If the first viewpoint turns out to be true, then the definition of what is human must encompass all creatures that qualify, including computers if one day they achieve this capacity.
Of course computers have long since outstripped humans in terms of computational speed; that’s what they are good at, one calculation after another at a pace that makes us look utterly pedestrian. What humans are good at is processing many bits of data at the same time, i.e. parallel processing ….perhaps therein lays awareness. Perhaps humanness results at some point where sufficient parallel processing is coupled with the ability to recall experiences. According to Ray Kurtzweil[iii] computers will likely reach our level of processing power at about the year 2020. He bases this on Moore’s law; personally I think that a significant slowing down of Moore’s law is inevitable due to the law of diminishing returns, but it shows no signs of slowing down just yet. Kurtzweil envisages a merging of human and machine, even at a thought processing level, as a distinct possibility. This may sound like science fiction, but some science fiction has an odd way of becoming real science and real technology.
The question of what is meant by humanness may not entirely be as academic as it may at first appear. We may soon have to make room for a much smarter, hopefully wiser creatures than ourselves in the definition. Perhaps these creatures will understand the meaning of existence better than we can.
Of course this makes the definition of life that I dismissed in the first paragraph a much more interesting philosophical question.
[i] The Human Story, by Robin Dunbar, published by Faber and Fabar
[ii] Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind, at page 12 in paperback version published by Vintage Science.
[iii] Ray Kurtzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, published by Penguin
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