What is that makes a human being, human?

One of my favourite authors, Philip K. Dick, was deeply concerned with this question. He asks and answers it in different ways in all his books, but probably most obviously in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which in its film version became Blade Runner.

Both remain the best novel and best film treatments of the subject of androids, or artificial intelligence in a form that resembles and is in most practical ways indistinguishab le from mankind.

As our own technology advances philosophical questions about machine sentience obviously become more and relevant, but there are also multiple other ways in which the question of what constitutes a human being is a vital one.

It’s the question at the heart of an abortion debate, for instance, and it’s really a question underpinning every discussion of individual liberty. People have rights because they are people. The rights that matter most are human rights.

Philip K. Dick constantly asked the question of his characters, because he was asking it of himself. And through him, I found out that this is one of the most important questions in the history of philosophy, especially of ancient philosophy. Dick became obsessed with the Pre-Socratics because they shared his need to explore what makes us fully human. And this is very, very old thinking we are talking about, some of the oldest ideas in the history of western civilisation.

If we were to talk about narrowing the most important questions ever posed down to very simple things, to what their core essence is, we might say that they consist of ‘what am I?’ And ‘what is all this?’. What is a human, and what is the world? All of our real thought begins with these questions, which include not just our philosophy but also our art, our culture, our literature and yes, our religion, our mythology and even our science too.

I think the handprints or animal paintings on a cave that date from long before the Ancient Greeks are asking these same questions. I think the oldest surviving figurines, the Venus figures which are odd, bloated, sometimes many breasted and sometimes headless depictions of the female form (the oldest thus far discovered, the Venus of Hohle Fels, is at least 35,000 years old) are asking these two questions.

These are questions that prompt the entire history of human creativity. Whatever we possess that we created, whatever we have which is most artistic, most sacred and most meaningful outside ourselves and other living beings, is created from the point at which our species started asking these questions.

What defines us as different to another animal, the full range of our sentience, self awareness and emotion, our cognition and our capacity for reason, was born with these questions.

Asking ‘what is a human being?’ is itself one of the things that makes us human. Unless we try to understand ourselves,as individuals and as a species, we are moving through the world propelled only by instinct and animal reaction.

These questions don’t become significant again just because of technological advance. They are always significant, but we rediscover them most urgently at times of societal collapse. Societal collapse presents us with those moments where all of the long and careful answers we have built, the ones which frame our rules, our laws, our morality, are falling down around our ears.

And in these times, these circumstances, we again encounter creatures that share our appearance but share none of our inner life, creatures that wear human form but have no humanity about them.

We are wise to fear the artificial intelligence that has no limits, no conscience, no humanity. We are wiser still to fear the biological human being who has none of these things, either. And it seems to me that we are encountering and producing more and more of the latter. Whether that’s a feral youth stabbing another child to death, a Muslim terrorist committing atrocities, or an ideologically warped leftist supporting those terrorists, we are seeing more and more humans with less and less humanity.

Often, the ones who proclaim their humanity the loudest, possess the least of it.

The closest Philip K. DIck came to an answer to the question of what is a human being is that a human being has humanity. Compassion, to give it another name. And compassion not as a vain signal of virtue, and not as a thing which claims to love everyone at a remove, whilst neglecting those at home. The compassion that cannot comprehend the actions of a terrorist, and would never seek to excuse them.

We have seen compassion itself abused into its opposite. We have seen it turned into a cruelty towards the real innocents, and the real victims. In the UK we once had a man called Long Longford. Longford spent a large portion of his life arguing that the treatment and imprisonment of Myra Hindley was inhumane. He defended her. He protected her. He championed her.

Hindley, of course, was a serial killer who had tortured children to death. Both Longford and Hindley lacked real humanity, real compassion. To support evil is to commit evil. There is of course a difference between an evil action and an evil reaction, but it is a difference of degree, not of kind. Excess of alleged compassion for the guilty and the inhumane is a denial of compassion to the innocent and the human.

For me the thing that makes us human is the capacity to think and feel in ways that are different, ways that are more, than those available to an animal or a machine. We need the capacity to reason, as well as the capacity to love. Both working together prevent us from being either a Hindley or a Longford. Correct reasoning would have told Longford that the victims of Hindley were worth more than she was, as well as a correct emotional response.

In Blade Runner the androids, the replicants, insist on their existence as thinking, living beings, equal to or superior to mankind. In a way they are saying ‘we are human’, even as they despise humanity. Their surface quest is to find a way to extend their lives beyond the very short limit set by their creators. This is the same quest Gilgamesh went on in one of the earliest surviving stories we have. Their deeper quest is to understand their own nature. And this is a human quest. Their surface aim leads them to kill people and behave inhumanely. But ultimately the message is that in dying they find not just the limit of their existence, but the moral limits that make them actually human. Roy Batty in his last moments can kill or save Rick Deckard. Both have been trying to kill each other for the entire film. Batty’s last action is to choose not to kill Deckard.

And it is at this point that Batty delivers the incredible speech improvised by Rutger Hauer. The speech that confirms this was a living being with sentience and worth. But that speech is only unlocked, only made meaningful, moving and true, by behaviour, by Batty having just chosen not to kill, showing human reason, judgement, discernment and compassion. He proves with an action what he is then allowed to confirm with a speech. He reflects on the life of Deckard, and it’s worth, before he is allowed to express the worth of his own existence. In other words the poetry and reflection on his own life is only possible because the action has already made him human.

Humanity, then, is defined both by behaviour and limitation, by choosing not to do certain things, inhumane things. We must have the intellectual capacity to make that choice correctly, and the emotional capacity to want to make that choice correctly. We must be able to discern between innocence and guilt, and pick the action that makes us more, not the one that makes us less, human ourselves.

If Batty earns humanity by choosing not to kill, by understanding Deckard’s life, then conversely the kind of savagery displayed by Hamas is surely also a behaviour, a choice, that lessens their humanity, that removes their right to be considered human. Just as the actions of Myra Hindley made her less than human. You cannot take these actions and make these choices and expect the same treatment that belongs to an innocent. You have already denied that. You have already shown that you are inhuman.

To be human means to judge and evaluate, ourselves first and foremost, but others too. Psychopaths and terrorists of course also claim that they have the right to judge others, and on some religious or ideological excuse determine life and death. But the existence of false judgement that leads to barbarity does not invalidate the need for correct judgement that leads to humanity. It makes it all the more urgent.

There are objectively things you cannot do and continue to call yourself human, or be treated as human by others. The deliberate and personal and sustained act of terrorism that sees you raping women, tearing screaming children away from murdered parents, beheading babies, surely signals that it is now more humane to kill you than to let you live and do these things again. Real human life, life that still has the capacity to think and feel in ways that are more than raw brutal savagery, matters more.

What amazes and depresses me most is not just the existence of inhuman monsters like Hamas. What is almost as urgent a problem is the apparent death of a capacity to think and feel with discernment, reason and compassion amongst others. The person who can see these events and side with the terrorists. And do so whilst perhaps talking about humanity and compassion, as BLM did, or oppression, as Celtic fans did, as if any oppression we can imagine is worse than the kind that beheads babies, as if any compassion can exist whilst making excuses for beheading babies. But also the people who lack the logic and discernment, the thinking and feeling capacity, to distinguish between this and media driven hysteria on a succession of other topics, who think they are being particularly discerning and clever by displaying their own lack of humanity towards genuinely innocent victims.

We must ask what is human to be human. And we must admit that the purely savage and those who support them don’t fit the definition if the definition is to make any moral sense at all. We must demand that they be more than they are, or else we become less than human too.