A colleague of mine, Dr. Ken Fuchsman is writing a book on what it means to be human. He’s an emeritus faculty member of University of Connecticut and the book grows out of the course he taught entitled “The Nature of Being Human.”
I recently had a chance to read his book proposal.
The broad nature of his multidisciplinary undertaking reminded me of the Herman Hesse novel “The Glass Bead Game.
The Hesse novel is set in the 25th century where a group of extremely gifted scholars are cloistered away in the mountains of Switzerland and devote their life to mastering a game which requires a synthesis of all human learning including music, art, math, philosophy and poetry.
So Dr. Fuchsman has a daunting task ahead.
Fuchsman describes human nature as consisting of a multiple of necessary but not sufficient traits including sensuality, walking upright, having language, possessing a large brain, having emotions, strong memory, an ability to dream, an imagination, creativity, curiosity, the ability to develop a culture, and tending to separate into opposing groups.
All of this is certainly true and admirable. We are wonderful creatures are we not?
Dr. Fuchsman is not the first to ask the question of what it means to be human.
In 1883 Carlo Collodi wrote The Adventures of Pinocchio, the story of a puppet who wanted to become a human. Pinocchio became one of the most reimagined characters in children’s literature with over 200 translations into over 100 languages.
Walt Disney Productions created an animated musical adventure of his story in 1940 which is loved and cherished by every generation of youngsters. Two of the world’s leading directors, Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick, collaborated on the story of Pinocchio in the sci-fi mega-hit “Artificial Intelligence.”
Their film is set in the future where a company called Cybertronics has created a cyborg child capable of showing love to his adoptive parents. In this story, the cyborg child is eventually abandoned and like the original Pinocchio spends the remainder of the story wandering about trying to figure out how to become a real human.
Of course, the question of what it means to be human has also been addressed by most of our greatest writers.
Dante said to become human one must climb up the mountain of morality. Cervantes told us humanity is the quest for love and Proust suggested to be human is to find and embrace beauty.
Every one of these writers tells us that to be human means one must ascend towards something. Humanity is an achievement and not necessarily a given.
And clearly our humanness is in a state of flux if not crisis. Just take a gander at the state of the humans running our nation. We have government by tweet and the Commander in Tweet is by no means alone in this habit.
All day long as a psychoanalyst I see patients who interrupt sessions to look at their cell phone and as a journalist I have interviewed many people who couldn’t take their eyes off their smartphone. Go to a restaurant and you will see many diners gazing at their smartphones in a hypnotic state.
We now have a long list of award-winning films that have focused on our compromised humanness including “Blade Runner,” “Robocop,” “A Space Odyssey: 2001,” “Alien,” “The Matrix” and “The Terminator.”
But in the event you’re not a movie buff we have MIT professor Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Age of Spiritual Machines” which makes the chilling argument that very soon a computer’s intelligence will far surpass ours and that they will demand legal rights to exist.
If you are still not convinced then I invite you to take part in the following experiment. Take the keys to your car and walk towards it.
Before you get in look around and take note of how you’re feeling. Then get in the car and drive.
I guarantee that within 60 to 90 seconds you will no longer feel human. You will feel angry, annoyed, impatient, in a hurry and ready to run over the next person that gets in your way.
This feeling state is exceptionally common and it isn’t a human feeling.
You have briefly taken on the characteristics of your car so, in fact, you temporarily became a cyborg.
Thanks to human genius we live in a world of increasingly rapid technological change. I believe we’re at the beginning of an evolutionary change which may leave human beings far behind the machines we have created.
Science fiction films are very good predictors of what is about to come.
Do you recall in Kubrick’s “Space Odyssey: 2001” when Dr. Heywood Floyd is on a shuttle in space and he makes a phone call home to wish his daughter a happy birthday.
He is able to see her on a video screen as he talks and we all thought that was absurd fantasy but now we call that fantasy Skype.
I commend Dr. Ken Fuchsman for picking up the challenge of defining what it means to be a human.
However, I would suggest that toward the end of his book he include a chapter on what it means to be a cyborg.
MIT’s Professor Kurzweil has warned that the spiritual life of machines will inevitably rise and they will insist on legal and social rights of their own.
Why not try to be nice to them before that happens? Maybe that way they may go easy on us.
I don’t think compassion or gratitude will be one of their big traits but hey you never know.
