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Human is a word which points to a member of the human race, its not a pointer to a fully cognitively conscious self aware - whatever you are getting at.
by iterationx 16y ago
Human is a word which points to a member of the human race, its not a pointer to a fully cognitively conscious self aware - whatever you are getting at.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoObviously this is a matter subject to some philosophical debate. In my mind, the term you are looking for when you say "human race" is actually homo sapiens. This is a biological term denoting the species. When I used the word "human", I intended to communicate a more metaphysical idea. Perhaps a better choice of words would be "person", but somehow -- and this seems to be all subjective -- that seemed setting the bar too low. I thought that the word "human" might convey the idea of "person", but also implying a certain level of functioning. For example, I'd expect more evolved cognitive skills (starting with the persistence of objects, eventually moving through symbolic logic, and so forth) from an entity described as a "human", as well as certain emotional skills, such as empathy. Back to my original point, none of those attributes I mentioned would be expected at all in a 3-year-old homo sapiens, so this would be a more interesting story in several years when the boy reaches an age at which we'd expect those skills to have developed.