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The Other Mind

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 typical end could produce a mind that resembles human minds only in the smallest ways.

Is it possible to say that one mind can differ from another?  If "human mind" means something concrete, it probably isn't monolithic.  There could be aspects of the human mind that are different by degrees from person to person.  If so, it could be possible for a person to have the most different kind of human mind.  I know a human will never have a horse's mind, but maybe there are human minds with the lowest number of especially human traits.  If there are kinds of differences that are impossible, then there are kinds of differences.  If there are no kinds of differences between human minds, then why do individual minds appear to be different?   Why can we say that my mind isn't your mind, if we can?

This goes into questions about what the mind is, what identity is, what we mean by "I," and how those things might relate to each other.  If the mind exists, are there things about it?  I don't know.  I do know that culture and environment play as big a part in our development as anatomy.  And I know that I feel different from humans in significant ways that I clearly struggle to articulate.

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