Are we human because of unique traits and attributes that we do not share with either the animal or the machine? The definition of “human” is circular: we are human by virtue of the properties that make us human (that is, distinct from animals and machines). It is a definition by negation: what separates us from the animal and the machine is our “humanity.”

We are human because we are not animals or machines. But such thinking has become progressively less tenable by the advent of evolutionary and neo-evolutionary theories that postulate a continuum in nature between animals and man.

Our uniqueness is partly quantitative and partly qualitative. Many animals are capable of cognitively manipulating symbols and using tools. Few are as expert as we are. These are easily quantifiable differences, two of many.

Qualitative differences are much more difficult to corroborate. In the absence of privileged access to the animal mind, we cannot and do not know whether animals feel guilty, for example. Do you love animals? Do you have a concept of sin? What about object permanence, meaning, reasoning, self-awareness, critical thinking? Individuality? Emotions Empathy? Is artificial intelligence (AI) an oxymoron? A machine that passes the Turing test can well be described as “human.” But is it really? And if it isn’t, why isn’t it?

Literature is full of stories of monsters – Frankenstein, the Golem – and androids or anthropoids. Their behavior is more “human” than the humans around them. This, perhaps, is what really sets humans apart: their unpredictable behavior. It is produced by the interplay between humanity’s underlying genetically determined unchanging nature and man’s kaleidoscopically changing environments.

Constructivists even claim that human nature is a mere cultural artifact. Sociobiologists, on the other hand, are determinists. They believe that human nature, which is the inevitable and inexorable result of our bestial ancestry, cannot be the object of moral judgment.

An improved Turing test would look for puzzling and erratic patterns of misbehavior to identify humans. Pico della Mirandola wrote in “Prayer on the dignity of man” that man was born without a form and can mold and transform – in reality, create – himself at will. Existence precedes essence, existentialists said centuries later.

The only defining human characteristic may be our awareness of our mortality. The automatically unleashed “fight or flight” battle for survival is common to all living things (and to properly programmed machines). Not so the catalytic effects of impending death. These are exclusively human. The appreciation of the fleeting translates into aesthetics, the uniqueness of our ephemeral life breeds morality, and the shortage of time gives rise to ambition and creativity.

In an infinite life, everything materializes at one point or another, so the concept of choice is false. The realization of our finitude forces us to choose between alternatives. This act of selection is based on the existence of “free will.” Animals and machines are believed to have no choice, slaves to their genetic or human programming.

However, all these answers to the question, “What does it mean to be human?”

The set of attributes that we designate as human is subject to profound alteration. Drugs, neuroscience, introspection, and experience cause irreversible changes in these traits and characteristics. The accumulation of these changes can lead, in principle, to the appearance of new properties or to the abolition of old ones.

Animals and machines are not supposed to have or exercise free will. So what about the mergers of machines and humans (bionics)? At what point does a human become a machine? And why should we assume that free will ceases to exist at that rather arbitrary point?

Introspection, the ability to construct self-referential and recursive models of the world, is assumed to be a uniquely human quality. What about introspective machines? Surely, critics say, such machines are PROGRAMMED for introspection, unlike humans. To qualify as introspection, you must be WILLING, continue. However, if you want introspection, WHO wants it? Stubborn introspection leads to infinite regression and formal logical paradoxes.

Furthermore, the notion – if not the formal concept – of “human” is based on many hidden assumptions and conventions.

Despite political correctness, why assume that men and women (or different races) are identically human? Aristotle thought they were not. Much separates males from females, genetically (both genotype and phenotype) and environmentally (culturally). What do these two subspecies have in common that makes them “human”?

Can we conceive of a human being without a body (that is, a platonic form or soul)? Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas think not. A soul has no separate existence from the body. An energy field supported by a machine with mental states similar to ours today, would it be considered human? What about someone in a coma? Is he or she (or is he) fully human?

Is a newborn baby human – or at least fully human – and, if so, in what sense? What about a future human race, whose characteristics would be unrecognizable to us? Machine-based intelligence: would it be considered human? If yes, when would it be considered human?

In all these deliberations, we can confuse “human” with “person”. The first is a private case of the second. The person of Locke is a moral agent, a being responsible for his actions. It is constituted by the continuity of their mental states accessible to introspection.

Locke’s is a functional definition. It easily adapts to non-human persons (machines, energy matrices) if the functional conditions are satisfied. Therefore, an android that meets the prescribed requirements is more human than a brain-dead person.

Descartes’s objection that singularity and identity conditions cannot be specified over time for disembodied souls is correct only if we assume that such “souls” do not possess energy. A disembodied intelligent energy matrix is ​​conceivable that maintains its shape and identity over time. Certain genetic and AI software programs already do.

Strawson is Cartesian and Kantian in his definition of a “person” as a “primitive.” Both the bodily predicates and those pertaining to mental states apply equally, simultaneously, and inseparably to all individuals of that type of entity. Human beings are one of those entities. Some, like Wiggins, limit the list of potential people to animals, but this is far from being rigorously necessary and unduly restrictive.

The truth is probably in a nutshell:

A person is any type of fundamental and irreducible entity whose typical physical individuals (i.e. limbs) are capable of continually experiencing a variety of states of consciousness and permanently having a list of psychological attributes.

This definition allows non-animal people and recognizes the personality of a brain-damaged human (“capable of experimenting”). It also incorporates Locke’s view that humans possess an ontological status similar to “clubs” or “nations”: their personal identity consists of a variety of interconnected psychological continuities.