Along with gender, being human is a socially defined concept.
It might even be defined by social criteria, quite literally. Yet, Homo economicos is not the only social animal and not the only one with a social conscious either.
Actually, I think you want to talk about humanity as a whole, as an organism to draw a clear distinction, because the level of controlled organization is unparalleled.
In that sense I can agree with your sentiment, because I am not sure how much man's success is really controled and not just the result of sheer luck, despite horrible accidents and individual failure.
On another note, this isn't your websearch box. I went on to write an essay because I tried to take the question serious. This became invariably self centered and thus potentially dehumanizing to everyone else, trying to reclaim the terminus because failing to find an interesting definition which would rest on intricate topics in current research and traditional philosophy, I felt rather insecure, dumb and worried if a strong definition of humanhood would eventually exclude myself, whereas too weak a definition would have barely any utility to anyone. It is quite poetic, here's the climax:
"The collective memory greatly expands that capacify, so it can remain out of the question if an individual ape has a low mental capacity, if you won't ever find enough monkeys assembled around a typewriter as you can find humans in the market place trying to dictate the value of life."
To double down on that, let's say the appropriate question goes who is.... Whereas what rather goes along as relative pronoun to denote possession. What has a human, well, a typical human has many humans around them, above and below. Whereas a single human is practically dead, if not conserved in living memory.
Next up: Human rights for Artifical General intelligence and bionic hind brains for poor hackernews commentators, where to draw the line.
As much as I agree with the general spirit of your reply, I think there is some merit to think of posterboy.human() being a socially defined concept.
It's recently became a loaded term (much like gender) due to people in general using the term like that. See expressions like "humane" or "transhuman".
I would prefer if they used some other word instead of overloading the method, but oh well.
It might even be defined by social criteria, quite literally. Yet, Homo economicos is not the only social animal and not the only one with a social conscious either.
Actually, I think you want to talk about humanity as a whole, as an organism to draw a clear distinction, because the level of controlled organization is unparalleled.
In that sense I can agree with your sentiment, because I am not sure how much man's success is really controled and not just the result of sheer luck, despite horrible accidents and individual failure.
On another note, this isn't your websearch box. I went on to write an essay because I tried to take the question serious. This became invariably self centered and thus potentially dehumanizing to everyone else, trying to reclaim the terminus because failing to find an interesting definition which would rest on intricate topics in current research and traditional philosophy, I felt rather insecure, dumb and worried if a strong definition of humanhood would eventually exclude myself, whereas too weak a definition would have barely any utility to anyone. It is quite poetic, here's the climax:
"The collective memory greatly expands that capacify, so it can remain out of the question if an individual ape has a low mental capacity, if you won't ever find enough monkeys assembled around a typewriter as you can find humans in the market place trying to dictate the value of life."
To double down on that, let's say the appropriate question goes who is.... Whereas what rather goes along as relative pronoun to denote possession. What has a human, well, a typical human has many humans around them, above and below. Whereas a single human is practically dead, if not conserved in living memory.
Next up: Human rights for Artifical General intelligence and bionic hind brains for poor hackernews commentators, where to draw the line.