The essence of us
 

I was reading the excellent thread What is Philosophy and saw this post by willravel: and I thought, "The essence of a human being is, meaning, assigning meaning." That and opposable thumbs.

What are your thoughts on the essence of a human being?

When I've got my science hat on, I think we're bags of meat who've misinterpreted significance of the consciousness necessitated by our particular biological position.

When I don't have my science hat on, it gets more complicated.

Human beings are self-aware, reasoning creatures of free will, with eternal souls. We seek for meaning, for brushing the transcendent, for happiness, and for each other. We are defined by nearly limitless capacities for love/selflessness and hatred/egotism.

We are meaning making machines. Washing machines are built to wash clothes; human beings are built to make meanings. We can't ever stop making meanings, and the meanings we make generally don't serve to have us live fulfilled, inspiring lives full of possibilities.

Traffic is just traffic. Your mother is just your mother. Poverty and hunger are just poverty and hunger. None of them mean what we make them mean, not REALLY.

meaning is a tricky category.
much depends on the use that you are making of the term.

i don't think we have an essence--i don't think human beings are objects with a sequence of predicates that distinguish them from other objects--i think we are processes, collections of processes one function of which is to generate pattern.
one of the mechanisms we use to generate pattern is language--we force our experience of pattern through it and stabilize ourselves, generate a theory of action (via the relation of subject to verb) and of relations to the world through statements: if you generate recursive statements, you start assigning meanings. assuming that i understand what is meant by meanings here.

much of what and how we are disappears in this translation process--temporally oriented process is not captured via syntax relations--instead they are replaced with particles that set up and describe relations between states.

if you want to talk about how we generate meanings in a bigger sense, that is about how we establish relations between phenomena as we move through a perceptual field (a miniature version of the social-historical), then you are in a framework of process and constraints, the relations between catastrophe/modalization at the process level and the production of stability at a higher order of neural network functioning, etc.

you also have a problem of how to describe this space, since its logic/dynamics are sheared off by the ordering you impose on them through the sentences that you make.

i like this: consider how you'd account for the processes that go into making a sentence in terms shaped by the sentence you made.

it's all very strange, this place where complex dynamic systems and experimental writing run into each other.

careful how much you play with it lest you end up in a land far far away.

philosophy is therapy in many ways---imagining that you can talk about meaning production (bringing phenomena into relation) using sentences as a base-line is a therapeutic exercise.

maybe more later.
who knows?

Language could arguably be the essence of human beings. However, if you think of other animals they too have languages of their own, or at least we assign meaning to the sounds they make. I truly believe we are chemicals and synapses, and pops! and pings and I see a pattern continuing in looking for meaning which I nonetheless find meaningful.

Roachboy
This rings so true.
You slay me Roachboy. Lay me right out.

Said another way: what you make making meaning mean.

The meaning of 'Science' and its processes, this is the human nature.

Bittersweet dichotomous fleeting tangibles.

Absurdity.

We are reasoning machines equipped with minds incapable of reflecting upon itself who live in a world in which the meanings we ascribe to everything continually slip through our fingers. Everything we know is predicated upon an assertion.

Our knowledge is by far our best poetry.

Willravel? Hey that's me! *blushes*

The essence of a human being? Oh lots of things.
Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen.
Sentience.
Accumulated memory and experience.
Individual accomplishments.
This and that.

Opposable thumbs.

Other primates have grasping hands with opposable thumbs.

I vote for brain complexity.

Perversity. A trait you don't find in any other creature.

The essence of us is we.

I'm more of an existentialist than an essentialist. An existential humanist, to be more precise. Think Satre's "Existentialism Is a Humanism."

In relation to the OP, this means that we are free to assign meaning or purpose to things, but we are also free to say, "Fuck it." It is ultimately our individual minds that decide what we do with it; there is no imperative.

The essence of the human being, no matter how big, small, or intelligent is and will always be love...It is the one thing that drives us, motivates us, warms us, and drives us crazy...Without love or some semblance of it, we would simply cease to exist, our worlds revolve around it, and its the only thing I can see that if removed from the equation would make something once considered human, not...

baraka guru: but in other posts, you're also a kantian.
how does that work, an existentialist humanist kantian?
one way to square them is that the operation of the a priori is essence, yes?

are there any other creatures on this planet that can reflect upon themselves? i think there are a few that are getting seriously close and as soon as they reach that point we may have some competition.

I like the idea of assigning meaning. In Anthro 101, what we usually teach undergrads is that "culture" is what differentiates humans from other animals. Of course, other animals certainly have societies, but do they have cultures?

One must define culture, of course, and here roachboy's posts fit right in.. culture is process, culture is patterns being passed down from one generation to the next, and culture is rather arbitrary, in that we assign all meanings to each symbol, each event, each pattern. None of the meanings within our cultures are pre-existing, and yet our entire lives revolve around their practice and observation. To me, that is what makes humans quite interesting.

Culture is not always a positive thing, of course... it can be quite destructive, especially if a society does not allow itself to evolve/adapt to new social and physical environments over time. Us vs. them is not going to be sustainable for much longer into the future, as a form of obtaining and hoarding resources to preserve "our" group over another's. But it has also been the key to our success as a species ever since we stepped out of Olduvai. We just have to see what the next incarnation of it will be, if we can get to that point.

i´d have to research this further but i was put into the belief that several species of monkey do, in fact, have culture. an example is of a group of them spending time in a hottub piss-farting around

I think Kant could be considered a precursor to existentialist humanism, could he not? He valued free will and reason. Consider his categorical imperative: "I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law." But he also states that "All imperatives are expressed by an 'ought'. By this they mark the relation of an objective law of reason to a will that is not necessarily determined by this law in virtue of its subjective constitution." To me this reads as an embracing of moral ambiguity based on a social collective of individual experience. This is certainly a step towards what we understand as existential humanism.

I am not a Kantian, per se, but I see his views as a critical foundation of the modern mind.

Yes, and that is why the latest anthropological fix on "culture" as differentiating us from other primates is so difficult... Jane Goodall also showed us that chimps could pass on learned skills to their offspring, which could also count as culture/process/patterns (e.g. fishing ants out of an anthill using a "tool," which was a stick, and then showing the kids how to do it later). So it's really not very easy to say what makes us so different from the rest... it is a question of degree rather than kind, if you ask me.

My opinion...and nothing more:

We exist because the universe wants to be known.

Science leads the human species to explore ever more complex aspects of "that which is"....generally accepted as "God"