> Other than the instinct to survive, just what IS "human nature?"
We can view human nature as either some kind of observable behavior or
predictable behavior, or as some kind of design (not necessarily deliberate,
so no one assume I'm a deist). On the behavioral side, you have things like
survival instinct, nurturing young, eating, excreting, sex; all things that
can be reliably predicted of human beings or observed in them throughout
their lives. Most of these, I think, lack any kind of explicitly "human"
descriptors. In these respects human nature is just nature nature.
Where humans get interesting, I think, is on the design side, and how that
design contributes to behavior in a way that is human, even though the
behaviors themselves might fail to pass any kind of exclusivity test. It's
not simply a matter of saying "humans are more intelligent than other
creatures", since that statement wolud provide a characteristic without
providing any behavioral consequences. Nor is it interesting to say "humans
have unique DNA", since that does not give us any behavioral consequences
either. The way humans are designed (which just means "most consistently
structured" as I'm using it) is to have way way way more neurons than
anything other thing. I've had it described as the approximately the number
of pixels you would get if you covered the Two Towers (WTC) with television
screens. Well, so what? Isn't that just another way of saying "humans are
smarter"? Isn't that uninterstingly vague and lacking in behavioral
descriptions? No. All human behavior is an output of a process that starts
with some input (sensory stimulus or mental stimulus) that activates neurons
in some pattern, which pattern then produces an output pattern. So, an input
pattern on the optic cells (say, the "sight" of a chair) produces a
complicated neuronal pattern that eventually leads to output patterns (like
"I can sit in the chair", or even other, non-normative outputs like "there's
a chair"). The difference in the number of neurons between human beings and
other things means there is an exponential difference in the number of
"patterns" the human brain can be trained to activate given certain stimuli,
which means that there is an increased number of output options available to
the human brain as well ("trained" is a loose term that can be used to
describe a lot of techniques for "tuning" the neuronal pathways to produce
certain patterns rather than others). Human nature, then, is to be
exponentially more varied, and more potentially unpredictable, than any
other creature (with fewer neurons; so I guess I can't exclude Dragaerans,
or Serioli, or Jenoine, since I don't know how many neurons they have by
comparision). Society contributes a lot of inputs, and contributes to the
training of the network, so that human beings acquire regular behaviors that
are observable and predictable, but it is the design of the brain that
allows that training to happen. Given other inputs, humans could behave
completely differently than we can imagine, and with more possibility of
variety than creatures with fewer neurons and so fewer possible patterns of
neuronal response to stimuli.
Human nature is possibility. Other kinds of nature are possibility too, but
humans are *more* possibility. :}
Shawn