Does anyone understand what I mean by this? All humans are essentially beings with needs. We need food, companionship, water, air, etc. We are all basically selfish and I would venture to say that the masses don’t give a CRAP about what happens to anyone else they do not know.
Are human beings a mistake?
The animal we call human is not the mistake. The anomalie is thought.
All animals have needs - food, shelter and reproduction - instinctually.
With thought comes wants. Wants have been confused as needs by some.
a mistake perpetrated by whom? God? Nature? . . . ?
I would say nature. Has there been a “mistake” in our evolutionary history?
You can’t talk about evolution making mistakes, because it doesn’t have a goal in mind, it has no ability to see or look into the future or anything else. A process that has no goals or foresight can’t really make mistakes, unless it was designed for a task, which evolution wasn’t.
Besides all that though, humans are a fairly successful species or organism so far.
Human beings can’t be a mistake unless someone made that mistake. If you deny god, then the blame falls on all of our parents. I blamed my parents for having me for a very long time. Then I fell in love and changed my mind.
All we are is thought. “We” are as an experience that this animal is having.
As cats do not know they are cats, dogs do not know they are dog,… ditto all animals.But the human animal experiences the anomaly.
This anomaly makes crooked of a lot that is straight.
Thought has lied to it self it has created division and tells itself that they have always been there.
We either continue with this mistake or wake-up.
Agree, ‘mistake’ is a human concept that requires an active, thinking engagement to be a valid assessment, to anthropomorphise nature in such a way is to make a logical misstep.
However, what I think the initial post is trying to ask is, can we look at ourselves and consider ourselves worthy? Only after one has posited what we should be, an epic task in and of itself.
No, all we are is most certainly NOT thought, we are a physical engagement with the world around us that creates and refracts thought, a being more complex and neurotic than anything that can’t operate a tin opener.
Wake up from thought? What do you mean?
…only if you let it be / don’t make the most of what actually being a human is.
We could possibly be human by a series of random mutations, that led us to this place and time, but I’d rather be here than there.
Phoebe wrote:
To the original post then. Addressing ‘Selfishness’ as something negative. It isn’t. Now, I agree that human beings are selfish, in the sense that the self is never excluded from any exchange or relationship, whether it be an altruistic act, compassionate act, calculated act, etc. Now, I realize this is possibly distinct from the original intention of Freespirit99 who might argue not in the sense that the self is a part of every experience (to unify all possible phenomenological modes) but that people always act in a materialistically calculated self-serving way (opposed to altruism, for instance). This second claim can simply be denied, possibly not of the masses, but of a good number of people I at least had the honor to encounter in my life. Some of those people right here on ILP.
As for the first case, that the self is a part of every exchange, thereby terming all action “selfish” even if directed at the benifit of another, is not a bad thing. Just because it brings me great emotional satisfaction to drop a few quarters into the guy blowin’ into the saxaphone before I go into the subway on 2nd Ave., does not mean that my action is bad or un-altruistic. It most certainly is directed at the benifit of another individual, it even goes against a part of my self (my materialistic self-interest) to satisfy another part of my self (my emotional desire). Both people win in the exchange; action is still directed at another’s benifit, the only thing is that the action happens to be mutially benificial.
Now, if the main trouble is the second case . . . broaden your sphere of experience. Just look at ILP, though no saint, many people here are willing to sacrafice their own time and energy to answer pressing philosophical questions from anonomous strangers. So what if they derive pride or some other form of emotional satisfaction from it? It’s mutually benificial, right?
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Some people are like that because they are not selfish enough.
If you are a bit more selfish, you would care about others because others can bring a lot for you. 
I care about farmers because they can make good products for ME, for example.
I care a bit about suffering of others because I still feel them, sometime, and it may bother me, as well.
Who can be very happy next to someone who is suffering a lot?
I think I’m getting used to pains of mine and others, these days, but it’s not always easy.
I felt that the was a mistake when I was 3, and I still feel that way.
I’m more comfortable with the void, when everything is fading away into the nothingness. 
Things you consider physical are products of the mind. Everything is somekind of thought. Somekind of etheric (An all-pervading, infinitely elastic, massless medium formerly postulated as the medium of propagation of electromagnetic waves) medium creates and refracts.
Is this question a mistake?
Who would have made that mistake?
The human animal is a natural outcome.
The anomalous freak is thought.
we’re not a mistake, just an unsolved problem…
Humans are not all bad, we have the capability of doing fantastic thing’s for our own species and all others, however this rarely ever happens and when it does it is often overlooked or simply shadowed by all the negative and evil things a select handful of greedy and corrupted people have done. Governmental mind control has pretty much pacified most human liberties, ideals and morals but this is not a natural development in my opinion.
Something somewhere has gone drastically wrong to the point that living without the created alternative and constructed fake reality that we have now lived in for many many years, leaves people feeling abnormal or even a threat to the general populous.
Don’t let this get you down and always try to remember that there are still good people doing good things, and that we all have the choice of which path we go down.
Humanity will prevail as the selfish and greedy are nothing without “lesser” beings to make them feel big.
Homo Sapiens
What is a human animal if not a thinking animal?
This whole thread is a misake.
[quote="Jakob
Homo Sapiens
What is a human animal if not a thinking animal?
[/quote]
Ever since thought came on the scene, it has done everything in its power to ensure the destruction of nature and its host. It is as if this thing (thought) is the mistake.