💾 Archived View for gemini.onedimension.net › thought › things-that-make-us-human.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 18:01:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Things that make us human

I tend to think that our ability to abstract concepts[1] from instances of physical things is what makes us human.

This is something people think a lot about, it seems. I was recently reading an article about elephants[2], and the author included a passage from a book called The Explicit Animal, which lists out all of these supposedly human-specific traits:

Man has called himself (among other things): the rational animal; the moral animal; the consciously choosing animal; the deliberately evil animal; the political animal; the toolmaking animal; the historical animal; the commodity-making animal; the economical animal; the foreseeing animal; the promising animal; the death-knowing animal; the art-making or aesthetic animal; the explaining animal; the cause-bearing animal; the classifying animal; the measuring animal; the counting animal; the metaphor-making animal; the talking animal; the laughing animal; the religious animal; the spiritual animal; the metaphysical animal; the wondering animal… Man, it seems, is the self-predicating animal.

Last updated Fri Feb 18 2022 in Berkeley, CA

Links

1: /thought/abstractions-make-us-human.gmi

2: /thought/do-elephants-have-souls.gmi

Backlinks

/thought/humans.gmi