Post. No. 26: Being Human

Those fossil fuel protesters at the U.S. Open tennis match distracted me into writing the previous post on climate change. My original intent was to followup on my last AI post, “Robots and Us”, and examine more closely the contrast between being human and robots. Now this post does exactly that. Hopefully you will find it interesting or enjoyable.

Perhaps the most salient aspect of our humanity is our mortality. Our sense of mortality comes from our sense of ourselves as a separate self, and as a person in our particular culture. It could be argued that our humanity is a result of our self awareness as a person in society. As will be explained later in this post, all our human emotions stem from these two basic facts: awareness of a self and a person living in society. None of this is magical. It all comes from our coding, just like Robot AI comes from coding. This post does not examine possible origins of our evolutionary-driven coding. That issue is above my pay grade.

As described in much more detail in Post No. 24, our coding is significantly different than AI coding. Let’s briefly recap. The growth and differentiation of all our bodily tissues and organs comes from the genes in the DNA stored in the nucleus of every cell in our body. This coding is the blueprint for building proteins within each cell’s cytoplasm needed to build the structure and function of our bodies. Once we are fully formed and are born into this world, unseen coding stored in the minds (nervous systems) of individuals in society is gradually absorbed by us during our lifetimes. I call this coding, “algorithms”, similar to the algorithms that computer scientists use to give direction and purpose to an AI. This coding is unseen, although some of it is written down, but it only matters when it is stored in our own individual nervous systems. Each individual’s coding, once they exit the womb, develops differently depending on many factors, for example our parent(s), our extended family, our particular society, the historical period in which we are born, our gender, our position in society, our health, etc. Because humans are self aware, we have some capability to alter these algorithms as we think necessary. I suggest it is a very good thing to become aware and make changes as necessary to our algorithms.

To begin to capture the idea of being human, let’s start with a contrast with other animals. One of the most poignant expressions of this contrast was written by Walt Whitman in his grand poem, Song of Myself, in the mid-1800s:

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not awake in the dark and weep for their sins …

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.”

Walt is not implying that animals do not have emotions, because their survival coding, just like ours, generates similar emotions, such as fear, anger, attraction, anticipation, repulsion, joy, sadness, etc. They experience the same emotions as we humans, but in a different degree. Rather, in this poem, Walt is implying they have an indescribable ability to relax and chill, as long as there is no impending threat or discomfort occurring. Anyone who has observed nature or their own domestic pets have seen this firsthand. So, what is unique about humans since we both share similar emotions?

One main difference with animals is the human ability to hold in mind much more complex and abstract ideas and thoughts. We can time-travel in our minds by imagining the past, interpreting the present, and anticipating the future. We can imagine a future when we will grow old and die. One can get a visceral feel of this from the image of Brigitte Bardot included in this post. We can also imagine a past where we might feel pride or shame, or lose the magic of the present moment when our minds judge rather than simply observe. Because of this ability to create abstract ideas in mind, such as being able to “time travel”, we are not as able to just chill in the present when there is no imminent threat or current discomfort. Unlike Walt Whitman’s animals, we are not so “placid and self-contained”. Yet it is these human abilities that allow us to better understand the material world around us and develop new technologies. Our emotions are more complicated and mixed compared to animals. These emotions of ours are often interdependent with others in our societies. We are all affected by the opinion of others, and feel empowered and pleasant when someone affirms us or our behavior. The pursuit of “likes” in social media is strong evidence of this. When we hear others express opinions similar to ours we get a pleasant tingle. But when the opposite occurs, for example some talking head bashes what we firmly believe, we can experience emotions ranging from slight annoyance to angry rage. We can lay awake at night anxiously worrying about … you pick the issue, they are inexhaustible! We can also fall asleep with pleasant thoughts of gratitude and deeply held love for our lives. We experience with others exciting, exhilarating feelings of romance, of exquisite, life-affirming pleasure, of contentment and security. We can also feel disgust, revulsion, shame and many other feelings related to others in society. Many times our feelings are not straightforward, but rather are very mixed and ambivalent. We can experience awe, triumph, envy, exhilaration, boredom, nostalgia all mixed together. I suggest that it is our ability to create abstract ideas that lead to more complicated and mixed emotions, especially those related to others in society, that represent a significant difference between humans and animals. Although there are clear differences between humans and other mammals, the question of human treatment of other animals and their perceived “rights” has become an issue for many. I had downloaded the image of Brigitte Bardot to dramatically illustrate the angst we humans have about aging. I didn’t know it at the time, but Brigitte Bardot is an animal rights activist!

We have much more in common with animals than we do with AI robots created by the ingenuity of humans. Despite the surprising ability of interactive AI to create human-like responses to questions asked of it, an AI is not self-aware, nor will it ever become self-aware, IMO. An AI will never worry about its mortality or the robot next door that it has a crush on. As described in Posts 21-24, AI can do what it does because of computers with unimaginable speed, massive amounts of data, mostly from the internet, and some human intervention. For example compute power is now sometimes stated in “petaflops”, 10^15 orders of magnitude. The number is so large as to be unimaginable; think in terms of thousands of trillions of operations per second! So when an interactive AI tries to compute the probability of the next word it will use, it has lots of time! The result is human-like responses that mimic the inherent reasoning of human language that the AI has access to. But, since we are human, we will be anxious and worry that AI might become self-aware, yikes! We should worry more about how other humans might use the power of AI.

What all life forms and AI have in common is that their behavior is driven by coding: DNA in the case of life forms, and computer coding for AI. DNA is the only code that directs life forms prior to their emergence in the outside world. Once outside the womb (for mammals), DNA coding continues to be a major factor in behavior, but another layer of coding also emerges. When a baby tiger emerges from the womb, the mother tiger begins the process of teaching its cub how to adapt to its environment. This learning is somewhat analogous to the algorithms computer scientists use to develop and give purpose to an AI. The process is much more complex for humans, but the coding (algorithms) is essentially the same and is stored in the nervous systems of animals and humans. DNA provides the blueprint for behavior, but it is the algorithms learned from the animal’s society and its environment that also direct behavior.

I have found that examining the differences among humans, other animals and AI, and the different ways coding directs behavior, have led me to a deeper curiosity about human behavior. It becomes even more apparent that our experiences in society throughout our life spans have a tremendous influence on our behavior. This underscores for me the importance of early life experiences as well as later ones. Also, in contemplating what it means to be human, it pops out to me that “affirmations” by others in our society have an outsized role in our development. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all interdependent with others in society. Affirming others who are in sync with us is easy, but perhaps it could also work with those who have different perspectives. I suggest it is a magic bullet that could lead to better connection and understanding. In today’s hyper-divisive society, it would be a good thing to try!

In writing about being human, one other area of curiosity springs to mind: the seemingly endless human violence and wars, with one society/empire trying to conquer another throughout human history. Is there anything we can learn from this? Are we going in the right direction or are we headed for more violence? Does our technology help or hinder this? Do revolutionary changes create more or less violence? Does being human mean we are coded to use any means necessary to secure our advantage in a perceived game of survival? Perhaps these questions are fodder for future posts. We’ll see.