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Aspects of Entity

I look human.  My parents are human.  I've had blood work, x-rays, and MRIs.  No doctor has ever found anything nonhuman about me.  I do have differences though.  My neuroanatomy is aberrant, and there's some mysterious problem with my metabolism.  Most scientists would say, understandably, that, even taking my differences into account, there's nothing about me that makes me anything other than human.

But maybe there's more to people than we can observe and test. I'm not talking about souls or anything. This isn't me embracing faith or spirituality. I'm saying that maybe there's something perfectly reasonable happening and humans either can't interpret it or can't observe it.

Think of a chimp observing a human. The human has Bluetooth earbuds in and is listening to a philosophy podcast on their phone. Listening to a podcast is normal and reasonable to us, but, as far as chimps are concerned, the concepts of philosophy, digital devices, wireless connectivity, and language may as well not even be part of the universe. Not only are they incapable of understanding such concepts, they'll never even be aware that such things exist to be comprehended. 

While we accept that other animals have clear cognitive limits, we assume that humans have an infinite capacity to think and understand. But what if 90% of the universe is phenomena that would be as inconceivable to us as the concept of a philosophy podcast is to a chimp?

I don't feel human. I don't see myself in humans. I utterly lack - and have always lacked - traits that I consider fundamental to humanity: sociality, competitiveness, and tribalism. I consider myself something else. I don't know how or what, and I can't fault any skeptic who'd say that I'm just badly misunderstanding a normal human experience. Maybe that's the case after all. Or maybe there's some aspect of being that humans are no better equipped than chimps to understand.

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