Thglimited - Heavy Industries

Humanism. There are a thousand definitions from a thousand groups who claim to embrace the philosophy, yet the one thing about humanism that is perfectly clear is not what they believe in but what they don’t believe in. They reject the idea of God. What god, I am not sure. Is it the ancient animistic gods? Is it the pantheon of Mount Olympus? Is it the gods defined by the various and sundry bibles? Is it theism? If so, then every twenty something is a temporary humanist, while they reject the religious beliefs of their parents and endeavor to establish a belief system of their own. Is it deism, itself? Do they reject the idea of things more complex than themselves? Do they assume that human’s are the culmination of evolution and that the only thing that need be admired is that which they can perceive with their five senses? Ah, I wish that this lay at the heart of most modern humanists. I fear they have rejected even the evidence of their senses and now rely almost exclusively on those 6 square inches of brain matter we call the left frontal cortex.

Poor little humanists, stuck in their sterile little boxes while the rest of us are out gallivanting across the universes and making mischief around corners into other dimensions.

Humanists profess that they embrace the art of being human but I do not think they know what that word means.

Human: 1. of or consisting of the species to which men and women belong. 2. having the qualities that distinguish mankind, not divine or animal or mechanical.

Definition 1 is troublesomely vague. If we are talking about the genetic make up, the DNA, of the current pool of bipedal humans who walk about on planet Earth, of the physical bodies we animate, then to be human is to be animated meat. What exists now has suffered under the attention of this planet. The species has been on the brink of extinction at least once, perhaps more. The genome that survived is flawed and broken and subject to mutation. We have systematically culled certain DNA pools from our collective group using genocide and war. The body that we call human, now, is not the same as the thing we inhabited 10,000 years ago, nor will it be the same as that which we will be using 10,000 years in the future. Evolutionary forces insist that all things must change to survive. Using that logic, one could say that, per Definition 1, to be human is to be in a state of constant flux. I am human, therefore I inhabit the current breed of human meat. In terms of quantum physics, if one can only study the particle or the motion, but never both simultaneously, the meat is the particle. It’s the dead thing pressed between slides under the glare of the microscope of our attention.

But, humans are more than the physical body, one might argue. The amputee or the paraplegic is not any less human for having less body function. Is it our minds? But, there are functioning humans walking about with only a fraction of the healthy brain mandated by our genome. What of the mentally impaired? Can we exclude them from our human club? What then? Emotions? Laughter? Tool creation? Logic and puzzle solving? Art? We share all of these things with other members of the animal kingdom? What then, defines us as human? Our complex DNA sequence? Plants have us beat by a factor of 3.

Definition 2 defines us by what we are not. Animal, machine or supernatural. But we have blurred the boundaries between us and animals in our study of the human genome. Machines have become extensions of our conscious cognitive brain and have become so integral to our modern existence that one could argue the species would fail without them.

Is it that we are self aware? Oh, oh. Be careful.  If we must define being human by defining awareness, the “I am” of each of us, then you begin to walk dangerously close to the edge of deism, because the act of perceiving the “I am” is the act of understanding your own godhood in the face of a greater and more complex awareness that inhabits the energy system of the greater whole of existence. There is godhood and then there is the greater collective Godhood. The universe is a gloriously subtle thing.

Perhaps the philosophical dissoluteness of our present times can be laid at the feet of our current conundrum, the conundrum of defining what it is to be human. We stand in front of the mirror and strip away all our false masks one by one until we get to the true face of our collective being, but, alas, if we refuse to acknowledge the supernatural, then when the final mask comes down, we of course, will see Nothing.