This Elusive Thing Called Humanity

There is nothing wrong with responding like machines because our society is constructed of machines and there is nothing wrong with responding like animals because we are animal. Somewhere in the middle of all that is this elusive thing we refer to as humanity.  We can reason that humanity and we can also feel that humanity but we each discover it and experience humanity as an individual and not just as a universal. 

What makes humanity human is that we are far more than just reason and far more than just emotion but in trying to make that more into an argument or a spiritual object we are then tearing apart something whole so we can examine parts of it which accord to our belief or reasoning.  We either concertize it into a symbol or we secularize it as an identity of our group.

If we have someone who espouses logic but fears emotion it may be that emotion reminds them of someone terrible that they came across in their lives, so the chief guide for that reasoning is a trigger of inhumanity in that person's past.  Equally if we have someone espousing emotion it may be that logic reminds them of someone terrible that came across their lives and made them feel less, which again a life exercised by some form of inhumanity rather than this elusive thing we call humanity.

Humanity is a catalyst for appreciation, where the appreciation can be for a well reasoned individual or a person with an emotional response which accords with our highest senses, but the situations we come across can leave us depreciated rather than adding to our intelligence of how to appreciate.  That is what makes appreciation among the toughest of our inner compass to learn because we confuse the ability to appreciate with the need to be appreciated.   We should be able to reason the meaning of appreciation while recognizing that appreciation is also connected with our emotions, but humanity is not this duality of reason vs. emotion.  These are just two faculties of a complete being.

What makes humanity even more elusive is trying to find it in our brain or trying to find it in our heart.  There is a point between being a machine and being an animal that humanity exists and what makes humanity even more perplexing is that humanity is different from nature.  We cannot imbue nature with humanity because nature is not human, it is an unfathomable force which exists and a part of that force shaped human beings.  We learned through our machines and we grew because of our animal nature.  If flesh is animal, bone is machine complete with all the physics of joints and moving parts.  So in discovering our humanity we do not negate our being as a machine nor our being as an animal.  It is when we are reduced to being a machine we lose our humanity and equally when we are reduced to being animal we lose our humanity also. 

We are not going to operate in the world we have created without an appreciation for the machine and we are not going to grow in our wisdom if without an appreciation for the animal - and that machine and animal is us.  The there is all that which is outside of us which we are connected to and this includes natural and it includes the artificial.  We can ascribe human values to nature but we cannot be surprised when nature bites us in the arse, we can ascribe human values to the artificial but we cannot be surprised when objects disappoint us and create divisions within us because we transferred humanity into a symbol or an object.

Humanity then is not a comparison, it is not me saying that I am more human for having thought about humanity and I am not more human simply because I can make a show of humanity, because humanity exists best (as some say) when it is there when no one is looking.  A display of humanity is no different to a display of a peacock, that is our animal being expressing itself and if there is logic that is expressed here, then we are not going to be better than artificial intelligence where machines and deep learning take logic beyond the range of human thinking. 

So we should be thankful for the machines we are able to build and thankful for being a thinking endowed part of the animal kingdom, and from there we may personally find what it is that makes us human but it is solely our finding and then humanity is an enlightening aspect of the whole, because that is the chief gift we have been given, that we can appreciate the whole.