What does it mean to be human?

Jul 31, 2018 by

by Ian Paul, Psephizo:

What do you think is the biggest question facing our culture? Is it to do with Brexit, and questions of national identity? Is it about social media, and questions of truth? Is it to do with sex and gender identity? Or are you facing personal questions and challenges that dwarf these? My conviction is that, underlying all these questions is one, much bigger one: What does it mean to be human? All the questions we currently face can be trace to this, larger, underlying question.

And this question, in turn, as two parts to it: who counts as human? What really sets us apart and makes us distinctive? Within the different narratives in our culture, there are numerous challenges which threaten to undermine any confident answer to these questions. In the realm of science and materialism, we are challenged from two directions. On the one hand, we are constantly being told that we are not very different from other members of the animal world. We share 96% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and we have discovered that they can communicate in a kind of language, have social rituals like us, and even go through mourning rituals when one of them dies. (Elephants do this too, but that doesn’t feel like such a challenge to our human identity.) On the other hand, more and more of our life is being taken over by computers, if not robots. Last month, a computer was judged to have won a debate with a panel of experts, and we are told that robots might one day soon care for the elderly. In the film I, Robot, Will Smith interrogates the robot Sonny and challenges him with the reality that robots are not human.

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