Topics Biology

Question One thing I learned in Philosophy of Science class was that the definition of Species can be a very difficult thing to pin down exactly. My question (I think I have several) involves the definition of Human in relation to other animals. Say that we were to all agree on a definition of Human (imagine that!), and this definition describes humans along only psychological and mental properties. Assuming such a definition were possible - would this definition hold true for some 'intelligent' alien species (let's call them X)? Say their minds worked like exactly like ours. Would X truly be a different species? Let me put it another way. In science and futurism, one thing that often comes up as possibly happening at some point in the future is what's called Mind-Uploading. It's something to do with a human brain being successfully emulated by a computer; copying and loading a simulated model of someone's brain, such that people - humans - can 'live' inside a computer. Basically, what's going on in the Matrix. I personally doubt it but I think a lot of people consider it possible. If such a thing were possible for Humans, and for the intelligent species X... Then at that point, how would we go about distinguishing Humans from X? Imagine we uploaded both a Human and an X to the same computer or machine. How can we then distinguish them as being of 2 different species?

Accepted:
February 13, 2020

Comments

We have apples and Martian

We have apples and Martian oranges here. Whatever exactly biology means by "species" (and there's a debate about that), it's about what the actual science of biology, with its particular set of concepts, theories and empirical claims, uses the term "species" to mean. And so to imagine the word "human" defined only in terms of psychological and mental properties is to imagine a use of the word "human" that has nothing to do with what biologists mean when they talk about species. Once we get to uploading and matrix-style scenarios, we're not even in the same intellectual universe as biology.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't use the word "human" in a way that's tied purely to the psychological. We can use words however we like. I'd suggest, however, that there's a better word: person as used by philosophers. And so in that vocabulary, your question becomes: if we discovered alien creatures who fit our psychological notion of what a person is, should we count those creatures as persons?

My impression is that most philosophers would say "Yes" without much hesitation—not all, but most. Also: most philosophers would say that if psychological traits are what really matter in deciding what it is to be a person, then there may very well be non-human persons ."Human" in most contexts is at least partly a biological term. But when it comes to how we should treat beings, whether they are biologically human doesn't seem nearly as important as whether they are psychologically like us. Some non-human creatures feel pain. That's a reason not to treat them in certain ways. Some non-human creatures form emotional attachments to other creatures. That's a reason not to separate them gratuitously. And so on.

So I think what you're really asking about is a perfectly good thing to think about, but I don't think it's about species in the sense that that word is used in science. In fact, the word "speciesism" is a term of relatively recent origin that's meant to remind us: what species a creature is shouldn't be where we focus our attention when we try to decide how a being should be treated. What we should concentrate on is what the being is like—especially what it's like psychologically.