Who art Thou?
We humans seem to have a distinct problem defining who we are. History of thinking has a long list of attempts. From Plato’s minimalistic shot at ‘Featherless Biped’, famously ridiculed by Diogenes bringing the plucked chicken to the school. Through ‘Rationality/Thinking’ in various disguises (e.g. Aristotle, Descartes, Linnaeus), to political/social animals (Aristotle, Marx), to Imago Dei (Augustine, Thomas Aquinas), to tool makers (Franklin), to “we-make-ourselves” (Sartre), to modern “social bipedal primates with massive brains” and to — finally — a CD with data (Gilbert).
First, don’t you have a feeling that they are all right, just touching the proverbial elephant from different angles? All the above elements are parts of ‘us’, highlighting our different aspects: from morphology to genome. Btw., my background resonates best with the CD/data approach — this is the elegant, clearest, most modern minimalistic approach. Alas, Gilbert seems to omit one crucial aspect. If I were to take the CD with his genome and execute it in some very different place, time and circumstances — I am sure a very different person would arise. Nature and nurture. We are dynamic processes, not fixed programs. The genome also contains templates for temporal patterns of protein expression. A process which is highly responsive to external stimuli, rendering it unpredictably variable from individual to individual.
Here is the important caveat: it is beyond the scope of this short essay to delve into the fantastic intricacies of the cutting edge of contemporary genomics and molecular biology. However, all those mind-boggling discoveries do not change the gist of my argument.
So, who are we? We seem to be more a case of ‘category’ than of ‘identity’. For practical purposes, I will call human any organism whose genome would be classified by contemporary genomics as Homo sapiens and which is capable of developing within the network of human language, norms and social interactions. It takes both genes and memes to make us recognizable as humans. Here I side with pattern over lineage, as I argued in Are we Theseus ships? Notice that neither condition explicitly requires natural origin.
Allow me now to make a thought experiment. Do you remember the original Blade Runner with young Harrison Ford, a movie based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by P. K. Dick? There we have a fully synthetic lady whose genome would likely be classified as human, and who is a fully enculturated person convinced — along with her unsuspecting surroundings — that she is truly human… Personhood earns her the standing; the genome only fixes the kind — a human person, not some other sort. All three — Rachael’s subjective ontology, phenomenology, and morality — fit this perception.
The mainstream systematics — in its leaning towards ‘lineage’ interpretation of humanity investigates the product of natural evolution. It is, of course, not factoring in the possibility that one day we might be faced with synthetic ‘persons’. This changes the equation, doesn’t it?
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Well, 50 years after the book — experiencing the lightning-fast progress in molecular biology (e.g. Synthia — Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, the first cell with a synthetic genome; 2010) and computing (e.g. AI), this outrageous (and a long-shot) sci-fi idea seems to feel a bit less… sci-fi.
Wouldn’t we admit that she was human?
More of my essays and how to reach me:
- https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7245-7993
- kmwikipediapl@gmail.com
Acknowledgments
The author wants to thank his son, Teofil, for sparking the idea and acknowledge the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI), AI Claude (Anthropic) and Google AI systems in improving the manuscript.
Originally published on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20813336
