“Human” Consciousness

Like most philosophy we must take old ideas of what makes a man “human,” that is having all the mental capabilities of the average human being, with a grain of salt. Their authors were bound in their time to the knowledge and language available to them; for instance, they did not have, as psychologists and philosophers do today, the benefits of computer science terminology and principles to explain what occurs in minds (or more specifically brains). Descartes noticed an intentionality in humans that animals and plants appeared to lack, and tried to explain it with a Cartesian mind as made most sense to him (Descartes Meditations I and II). Ryle, while agreeing that minds and their contents were not necessarily the same as bodies, disagreed that minds had to be contained in some dimension other than the body (Ryle: Cooney 39). Malcolm moves a step further in stating, “Things which do not have the human form, or anything like it, not merely do not but cannot satisfy the criteria for thinking.” (Malcolm: Cooney 46). This criterion sounds very strict for having a conscious mind, and could even be viewed as homocentric. But working up from the proposals of these three philosophers, using modern knowledge and philosophies, can something inhuman satisfy Malcolm’s statement?

The physiology of the human body is very distinct from others on Earth, and this may contribute to our mental “separation” from the rest of the animal kingdom. Our lack of acute individual senses, such as the nose of a dog or ears of a bat, is balanced with a stronger overall mix of ways to perceive and interact with our world. On top of our many senses we have one of the largest, by proportion to body mass, and most complex brains in nature. Perhaps this is what all three scholars were pointing us to; that it is this combination of an active mind with a body that can accurately and dynamically sense and interact with the outside world that makes mankind “human.” It isn’t unheard of to compare certain animals with young children when it comes to intelligence and problem solving; we do much the same with people who have mental deficiencies or diseases. The fact that something as subtle as a chemical imbalance in the human brain can make it almost impossible for someone to function “normally” seems to validate Malcolm’s statement.

However, Malcolm’s declaration could be taken as a hypothesis that there is some physiological formula for creating a “mind,” in the sense of normal human behavior. Let’s choose to “detect” human consciousness by looking for a specific range or set of behaviors such as Malcolm’s basic “looking, pointing, reaching for, and going to” specified objects (Cooney 45). Just as much as a computer will need specific hardware to run certain software or an entire operating system, so must there be something in the chemistry and physical construction of the human brain which allows consciousness to come into being. And why not? To say that all non-human living things lack a mind seems absurd after so much research has shown animals to have problem solving and communication capabilities beyond that of human infants. Dogs and robots can fetch things, communicate with us on simple subjects, and both are being used in groundbreaking ways of detecting cancer cells at early stages. But somewhere in their structure, either in the ways their body can sense and interact with the world, or in the make up of their brain, the hardware necessary for “human” consciousness is missing. We have all seen videos of parrots, dogs, and other pets mimicking human language, but to go so far as to claim they understand the sounds they are making is akin to claiming a computer built thirty years ago could run a contemporary operating system.

Science fiction has proposed countless forms of life that are capable of human-like, and even supposedly “higher,” consciousness. But a trend of modifications to the human form is seen in most “aliens” that are not animal like hunters, pets, etc. (Alien vs. Predator, 2004, Twentieth Century Fox). With this in mind, the entire Vulcan race (from the Star Trek series) could be taken as a population of humans with a mental state similar to autism. While someone suffering from autism often has trouble living and interacting in our society, if autism were the norm and not the minority it is possible a society could have developed to function around the conditions created.

But, what about the more fanciful aliens? The infamous bar scene in the film Star Wars IV: A New Hope presented audiences with more than a dozen otherworldly characters portrayed to be just as conscious and social as any human. Here is where we must consider another statement by Malcolm. “The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (Cooney 49). While accounts from two human witnesses of an event can differ widely, they can still relate to the event as a human because both have almost identical bodies and brains. If a dog or strange alien developed a conscious brain, it would be very hard for a human and that talking dog or alien to understand each other’s experiences, even of the same object or incident, beyond the very basic physics involved. Very simple things such as vision will be extremely varied between the two involved in the conversation. While the dog and physicists could spend all day discussing wavelengths of light and various other physical aspects of an apple, the human physicist can never explain to the dog what red appears to him because the dog cannot see colors. So while an evolved dog or visitor from space could be capable of thought, it hypothetically won’t be very “human” thought since their understanding of the world outside their minds will be very different from the average human. Going back to the example of the Vulcan race, who look just like humans except for their pointed ears, are perfectly able to communicate with humans, but the two races can never understand one another’s thoughts and choices.

In the end I feel satisfying Malcolm’s criteria of having the “human form, or anything like it” comes down to not so much a physical definition, but deciding what “human” thought is. A classification such as this usually comes down to “norms” or an average. And so while almost anything alive can have consciousness or a mind, attempting to claim that such a being has human consciousness would seem impossible. The simple concept of “why” could easily eliminate most if not all other species in nature. A lion does not understand why its prey runs from it anymore than it knows why it is hungry in the first place. This is not necessarily a claim that human thought is for certain the highest possible form of consciousness, but merely that it is its own distinct form, and creates a specific range of behaviors that makes humanity distinct. For even with the exact same mental environment (or exact body and different mind), that being’s understanding of the world, while infinitely similar, will be infinitely distinct from that of the average human being.