Far Removed

All work requires energy. Thinking is work. Therefore, thinking requires energy. Organisms conserve energy. The more energy you spend, the more food and rest you need.  If you don't conserve energy, you might die. Energy conservation has a clear evolutionary benefit. Humans are no exception.  Tribes have to think about the energy it takes to support their members. The more members a tribe has, the more work has to be done to care for them. Some people require more work than they can contribute. Others may misuse the tribe's work. Humans have evolved safety measures that help them and their tribes conserve energy.   It's worth pausing here to note that humans didn't evolve in cities. Our minds and instincts are still those of hunter-gatherers. Many of us live outside of the environment our species is best adapted for, and some of the ways we tend to think and behave confer less benefit to us now than they did millennia ago.  Every thought and feeling yo...

In some contexts, if we can make statements about X that can be said to be true, we can make statements about X that can be said to be false. For instance: if "Orangutans are arboreal" can be said to be true, then "Orangutans are nonarboreal" can be said to be false. "Orangutans have orange fur" is a statement about anatomy. "Some orangutans live in Borneo" is a statement about geography. "Orangutans are arboreal" is a statement about behavior, thus it goes to essence. Here, I'm using "essence" to refer to the way a being tends to be. It's physically possible for orangutans to be more nonarboreal, but they aren't. Arboreality is in their nature. It's essential to orangutanity, so to speak. I've claimed that I am not a modern human ( H. s. sapiens ).  This claim is based on my belief that there are aspects of being that are essential to humanity. These aspects are not anatomical or geographical. They ar...

I've said that I don't identify as human.  What do I mean by that?  I've spent a lot of time thinking about that claim.  Does it even make sense?  As my parents are fully human, it's reasonable to assume that there's an aspect of me that's fully human, too.  But there's another aspect that is something else.  I don't know what.  We generally think of conscious creatures as comprising a body and a mind, with the latter being dependent on the former.  We take it for granted that a human body will only have a human mind.  In this, we presume that the humanness of the human mind is necessarily determined by the humanness of the body, but what if it isn't? If the nature of the mind, such as it is, emerges from neuroanatomy, suffiently divergent neuroanatomy could create a mind that diverges significantly from humanness.  On a spectrum between more typical and less typical human neuroanatomy, an anatomical configuration nearest the least typic...