Topics Existence

Question If humans (or perhaps sentient beings) could be defined, what exactly are we? I have never studied philosphy, but when I studied media I was taught that we were 'automatons'(which seemed a little glib...though that shouldn't matter) and I've come across a few theories such as wavelengths etc. Is there an answer? I hope this isn't too scientific.

Accepted:
February 24, 2011

Comments

I think that it depends on what one is looking for in a definition. Aristotle famously characterized human beings as rational animals. (Of course, if other rational animals were discovered, it would follow from Aristotle's definition that they, too are human beings. So perhaps Aristotle's definition could be modified to constitute simply a definition of 'person' or 'agent': in which case the discovery of other rational beings than human beings would simply lead to the class of persons or agents being enlarged. For what it's worth, such a characterization would accord with Locke's discussion of personal identity in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he distinguishes between the identity conditions of human beings and those of persons: the latter are such that beings other than human beings could fall within the scope of the concept, whereas the former is limited to human beings, that is, beings that look like human beings and manifest the form of life shared by other human beings.) Perhaps the best definition of a human being that could be given today, however, would be one that involved the genetic make-up of human beings, which differentiates them from other, even closely related species, yet captures what it is to be the kind of creature that belongs to the genus homo sapiens. Such a characterization is, I think, preferable to one that takes human beings to be automata, because other animals could be and indeed have been--by Descartes, for example--characterized as automata. (Although it should be noted that Descartes himself took this characterization to mark a difference between human beings and other animals, since he believed that whereas animals were mere automata, machines, human beings were composites of mind and body, which served to differentiate human beings from other animals, who, according to Descartes, lacked minds.)