What Makes Us Human

Smart people could elaborate better than me, with all of their fancy scientific terms and such. Such is not me. I'm not as smart as smart people.

In the midst of my pondering this question, I've come up with a few possible keys to our uniqueness:

1) Agency?
           - Making conscious decisions. Do animals make conscious decisions? I don't know. From my standpoint, it seems like they're just...there. They have no goals to their decision making besides basic survival. Food. Sleep. Of course, this sounds like a lot of humans too.

2) Potential?
            - What we can become, through the sheer power of not only human will, but divine providence. A baby puppy grows up to be a dog. A bear cub grows up and matures into a bear. Nothing more is expected. A newborn child can grow up to be a Beethoven, an Einstein, maybe a Winston Churchhill, maybe a Michael Jordan. Some sort of individual with incredible physical, spiritual, or intellectual capacity.

3) Experience?

           - Not experience simply from operant or classical conditioning, but actually using our powers of judgment and decision to learn what we need to from an experience, and apply it to later similar situations.

4) Life-Span Perspective?

            - Perhaps this goes with experience. The ability to look at our past, present, and future, and to understand it all, what it means, who we are, why we are, what we've done with life, what we've learned, our place in the universe.



My biology professor probably wouldn't accept it as a valid rebuttal for "evolution by natural selection," but I think we're more than animals.

Comments are welcome.