The human animal

What is a human being? What is what really make us humans? We could consider some attributes like...


Head, trunk and limbs

Remove it its limbs and leave head and trunk: still a human? Humm, yes. Well, we cannot cut something else because the specimen would die. The head and trunk may be still human yet death human’s.

Well then, had we extracted the brain from the body and implanted it to a machine, it would turn into a cyborg. Maybe the head attached to the trunk is the minimal physical requirement to have a human being as such one.


Thought

Note: I include in “thought“ the idea of “I” and the feelings.

Considering that argument that justifies extraterrestrial life by relating it to the size of Universe, we’d say reason is not an specifically human attribute.

But, can we say thinking is something typical in humans? By doing so we may be discriminating those patients in coma, cerebral death and mentally handicapped. It’s like saying that a car is just no longer a car if its engine is broken.

In the case of mentally handicapped, whatever it may be the nature of his or her condition (being possible to include here some patients who are in a simply state of... let’s say “permanent oneiric activity”) their brain is competent enough to keep vital functions in an autonomous way. So this is a fact in favor to not to (necessarily) consider reason as typical (inherent) human attribute. Brain death is another matter. It is sad and it is painful, but there is no human life in there. I don’t want to be more specific and risk myself to seem “inhuman” so just in order to justify my statement I will only say that a life form is an autonomous energy system.

Let’s discuss about something else. An electronic brain that may fit and work well in a corpse: “that” would be human? Nope. Our “Goubreenstein” will be a humanoid as the consciousness that organism belonged to is no longer there. It’s just a body used as such (a good way to reduce costs yet certainly controversial).

In short, provided the head and trunk are stick together and the subject is alive, we can consider it human; even if it lacks of reasoning, although that is kind of “atypical”.


“Made in Earth”

Well, we do can be sure about this: that genetic evolution which gave rise to human genome took place because of the singular conditions of our planet. In other words, we were born here. That is not going to change even if the Earth disintegrates and even if centuries later the humans living in a nomad colony of spaceships outside the galaxy may forget Mother Earth.


Human culture

Let’s bring back again that ungrateful people of the future spaceships colony. What we have in here are “earthling” cultures, product of geographic coincidences. If here the cultural differences are huge already, in other times, in other worlds, it won’t be different. Certainly we can talk about “human behavior” in general terms, but for “human culture”, in equal terms, needless to say is impossible. Ah! and culture itself is not either an exclusive human attribute: there’s culture in the most simple hierarchical organization of any animal community; also, any pair of subjects with consciousness capacity (yes, alien beings) will tend to form a collective manifestation of identity, but well, that’s another story.


Human genome

What about artificial human genome? This is what a call “the neo-mith of the Zurkion” A zurkion is a human replica. It is neither a clone nor a humanoid. Nano-technical engineers succeeded in making ova and spermatozoa replicas from specifications of the volunteers’sexual cells. An ovule was fertilized (spoiling lots of expensive zurkian spermatozoa in the process) giving as a result a healthy creature which entirely resembled a human baby. Such zurkion has human genome but its cells are not from human beings.

Apart from naming differentiation, can we consider a zurkion as a human? Maybe in practice we do, in the same way we could give citizenship to a perfect android. But we can’t on the conceptual side as the hereditary nature of our reproduction implies the presence of ancestors. (... not even those two volunteers find themselves, meet themselves, fall in love, run away from the costly and dangerous project and then pretend that creature is their own son... or daughter)


And then again, what’s a man? ... Oh, let’s say it’s just an animal, relative of apes and it’s all over!

Dec. 27, 2005 - El Jardín Lúgubre