I never said Satyr was not part of human nature.
All ILP posters are hacks.
We have no idea what human nature is … and if we ever find out, it’ll be something like systems biology (or maybe even biological/physical anthropology) that makes the discovery. In other words, IMO it’s a scientific question, and one with no good answer at the moment (and honestly, I don’t really see much space for philosophy in answering a question like this).
Natural selection created substantial variation in our nature. Some segments of human populations bred with neanderthals, some evolved in very cold climates, others in warm climates, while others evolved in mild climates. Some had ample access to food and friendly surroundings, allowing them to multiply in higher numbers (also allowing more members of the society to reproduce), while others did not. These and countless other factors affect our evolution, and by extension, our nature. Evolving in harsher climates tends to promote greater levels of cooperation, and so we can expect these sort of attributes to be selected for. Evolving in milder climates reduces the need to cooperate, and so other factors may be selected for. I could on and on with this, but the point is … human nature is a really really complex issue.
You do not know what all other people know; so you can only say: “You have no idea what human nature is …”.
That is a dangerous statement. If merely scientists were allowed to answer that question, then we would already have what we are going to have: a new religion!
Science works like a selection system. Thescientific results are never complete, perfect, and correct; they are always merely the results of the zeitgeist. This means that it is absolutely necessary to be sceptical and to not let the scientists alone with the answers to questions of us all.
The “natural selection” is not God but merely one aspect of the natural development.
That it is not proven.
Evolution is not just about adaptation to nature, but also about distancing from nature.
If (if!) that were right, then it would be just one more good reason to talk about it.
Lev wrote:
Man, is frequently referred to as an ‘animal’. This reduction of a human being to the status of an animal or even a machine is a pessimistic view of who man is. Perhaps as a response to this, modern pagan cults and ideologies are deifying human beings. Man is neither, like an animal or like God, he IS god. What is happening is a swing from the extreme view of human nature, animalistic, to an extreme deification. People are now confronted with two choices, human beings are nothing but preprogrammed machines or they are divine with unlimited potential.
What then are the various meanings of the four prominent anthropological terms, soul, body, heart and spirit?
Nope, I’m sure … no one can define human nature (at least not in a satisfactory scientific way).
Ummm, not really sure how to take any of this seriously?
Oh, a god dude (should have noticed from the screen name). I’m afraid to say, as far as organic life on earth is concerned, natural selection pretty much is god (but it’s a much less pesky god than the myth makers believed) 
Wrong again … keep up to date with the science.
newscientist.com/article/dn … anderthals
And we do
The young of mind … 
… and the preprogrammed Secular religionists.
So, you are “sure” … 
Do you also know why you are sure and why you can be sure?
No. You do not know that. So you are wrong.
That is wrong. So my statement is correct: it is not proven!
In 20 years scientists and you will probably say that “machines bred with neanderthals because of a nice text of newscientist.com”. … “Nice”.
Exactly.
Not all that young (sadly), but I am a scientist with a little philosophy under my belt (enough to know that philosophy isn’t the best tool when it comes to questions like ‘what is human nature’ … oh yeah, and that religion is drivel)
Yeee haaaaa
Or you could just go to KT boards, and find that Satyr has mostly defined human nature in a satisfactory way.
Or continue to make up statements and theories. Its cool either way.
Before I comment, are you referring to the internet babbling of Satyr, the inbred imbecile of the world wide web (at least according to the short Google search I just did), or the actual philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre?
Keep things on topic, please.
You just showed that your first statement is incorrect. We do have a very good idea what we mean by human nature.
It is that part of the human experience that does not include the details of what we learn through life - as this can remove, modify, or change the emphasis and direction of our natures, as I suggested above.
For example; language is a common factor in all human societies. Humans are speaking animals. So much is clear. But each language is cultural. But each human child is equally capable of learning any language as much as any other. But each different language is the means by which we structure our understanding of the world, and in this sense it parts us from each other, and allows us to depart from our primal natures. Language is natural; French is not.
On the the question of “breeding” with Neanderthals. I can tell you that assertion is still highly contested. Humans tend to marry, not ‘breed’. One thing the human kind has a natural tendency to is tribalism and group think. Small h/g groups, even with a policy of exogamy, tend to chose similar out-groups with shared culture. I studied this question at college, and I think it unlikely that modern gracile humans entering Europe at around 30Kbp, when the Neanderthals were wiped out would have taken Neanderthals as spouses. I could imagine some rapes and even colonies of mixed race developing, but there is no doubt that the gracile modern human won the contest, and all Neanderthal traits disappeared. The emerging humans wore tailored clothed, practically hairless; using sophisticated weapons such as bows and arrows, with microlith technology, and having artistic ability. The Neanderthals had none of this, and did not make suitable marriage partners as each groups would have thought the other quite unusual looking - even ugly.
There are very few differences between modern humans from the Arctic to Australasia. Humans have developed a thing called ‘clothing’, that together with natural living adaptability means that a human from any place on earth can inhabit any other place on earth.
Humans co-operate with equal vigour wheresoever they are found despite the climate.
Fair enough … if you want to approach the question from a linguistics standpoint (Noam Chomsky did great work in this area btw), okay sure. But typically when philosophers talk about human nature, they’re getting at something much more comprehensive (although I’m not minimizing the importance of language).
We know attributes of human nature. We certainly know a considerable amount about our biological nature. We enjoy sex, we need to eat, we need hydration and oxygen, we reproduce via sexual reproduction, etc. But again, this isn’t typically what philosophers are getting at when they try to describe human nature. They usually try and reduce it to one primary feature (like a will to power), or describe things they postulate have the most meaning (virtue or being or whatever). But I’m not even saying we don’t have a will to power (although I do question whether it’s a basal instinct) or virtue is unimportant or Heidegger’s being (what it means for a human to exist) is b/s (I love all those ideas).
A truly comprehensive definition of human nature would be predictive, and outcomes would match the predictions. It cannot be done via historicism, there’s too much evolutionary variation (although I love the way Foucault used history, but I digress), to much environmental variation, etc.
Anyway, not my intention to belittle philosophy (I love philosophy), but I do believe it has limitations (and in many areas, it’s no substitute for science, which IMO includes this question).
With the neanderthal issue … it is settled. We possess ~20% of neanderthal DNA (I’m a molecular biologist, and when you sequence DNA and find that 20% of our DNA is from neanderthals, it’s impossible to explain it any other way). I mean, 20% of 3 billion base pairs is 600 million base pairs. So the probability that this DNA came from any other source is so close to zero, it’s not even worth considering. And humans didn’t always marry …
If you gave a dolphin an addition of a linguistic area of the brain, then taught it some manner of language, would it be more human?
I think it would, and any animal if they could speak would be more human. Speech itself is what makes us human.
And of course you’re entitled to your view, but is language the be all and end all when it comes to human nature? It is true that no other animal has the ability to create language as humans do (although they can “communicate” with each other, communication is distinct from language). But even if you did want to zero in on language, we have so much to learn in that area, I don’t know how anyone could think that we have it all figured out. But maybe I should elaborate on my position. We can list the factors that we need to better understand in order to gain a more complete picture of human nature (I personally would include more than just language), but we currently lack a comprehensive understanding of those factors (and again, language is no exception). So maybe we’re just defining the problem in different ways?
In my view, saying we have human nature “all” figured out … is to have predictive ability. Someone like Nietzsche might say we have a will to power, someone like Kropotkin might say we’re more inclined towards cooperation. Yet, we see examples of both all the time, and so no single rule seems to fit all circumstances. Obviously, much depends on conditions. You see different outcomes under conditions of abundance vs conditions of scarcity (as just one example). Even more complicating, different types of humans evolved under different circumstances. If you live in a harsh primitive environment, being smart enough to build good shelter will probably both suit your ability to survive and your ability to reproduce, hence, after several generations, those type of traits will tend to predominate. Also, cooperation would obviously suit survival under harsh conditions. So tribes that are better at cooperation will have a greater chance of survival. Peoples who evolved in milder climates, who had a reduced need to cooperate, may not perform as well in that area (but other traits may have been selected for). And of course, by now there’s been so much interbreeding between different peoples, it further clouds the picture.
So we wind up with huge variation in these sort of traits. And these are the type of characteristics that have always been the subject of discussions and scholarship centering on human nature, throughout the history of philosophy. So I really don’t see how my position here is all that controversial?
Taking a very ambitious view towards science, maybe one day, systems biology (with the help of very powerful computers) will be able to not only figure this out, but even possibly have the ability to predict evolutionary progression under different conditions (and how those different scenarios will manifest in terms of human behavior, sociology, intellect, and so on). From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, our ability to predict the progression of evolution is really crude right now. From the standpoint of systems biology, right now we’re at the point where we can barely model a tissue system or really small animal (we’re really only beginning to learn how to do this), so we have a long way to go
Taking a subject like linguistics. To really understand it we’d want to understand the relationship between our language and our neurology. We’d want to build computational neural networks (which is a painstaking thing to do, you have to image the brain during different types of speech, narrow regions you want to focus on, tag neurons, which is incredibly complicated, and oh yeah, the average humans has about 100 billion neurons, although it’s conceivable that we could create algorithms which would automate the process, but we would still need to collect huge amounts of data through conventional means before we could do this), and to top it off, even if we accomplished all those things (which would be amazing in itself), we still wouldn’t be done. We’d want to understand the developmental and genomic aspects to this, and then (MAYBE) we’d have the power to start making predictions. Of course, regardless of what we do, in all likelihood, the best we’ll ever be able to do is understand the probability that certain events will or will not occur.
As an aside, I wouldn’t use the term “speech” … language is the more appropriate term (after all, mute people are just as human as you and I).
… (apparently, cannot delete a post?)
Sure, it’s one of possibly many differences between humans and other creatures. We could add dexterity, there are many skills and arts only humans and our opposable thumbs can perform. There’s probably a few other fundamentals, but i think we can round it all into one; what is different about humans is what human nature is. Everything that other creatures can also do, is part of a more general class. Not forgetting that animals are usually much better at surviving in the wild, and most predators are better at it than humans without weapons. In fact we humans majoritively would think about killing before doing it, so reflection and the considered mind is a big part of it too.
I think you are right about language, all animals use language even where rudimentary. There seems to be less of an ability to be detached the further down the brain scale you go. This i believe is where the fundamental difference lies. Nature is nature driven, humans are a bit that but also self driven.
Theoretically, if there are humanoids/aliens out there with an even greater capacity to be detached, they would be ‘more human’ than us!?
This would put each of us on a hierarchic scale where some people are; less detached = more driven = less human, and at the other end, more detached = less driven = more human.
E.g. Hitler is more of a killer/predator and thus more driven, more like nature, less human. Gandhi… Etc.
That tough guy down the pub who all the working class people respect, would also be less detached, more driven, less human.
If all humanity became more detached, then humanity would become more human!
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