Twelve Hallmarks of Humanity
--by Robert Arvay

Were we to discover (or when we do) that on an exoplanet, there exists a civilization comparable to our own, or even much farther advanced than us technologically, our initial impulse might be to declare that, “We are not alone!”  “We,” being humans.

But not so fast.  Despite such a discovery, we might yet be alone after all.

What if, on further investigation, we discovered that what we had thought to be sentient exo-creatures were instead, merely beings that had none of the inner thought processes that we have, but were instead organisms which were only outwardly similar to us, but otherwise mindless, with no true awareness of the technology they were creating—somewhat like bees building a beehive, but on a vastly larger and more complex scale?

Although this is extremely unlikely, the question forces us to ask, what quality truly separates us from other creatures? What makes us human?  Are we truly apes which took an unlikely turn in the purposeless path of evolution?  Or are we more than that?

Let’s take a look at a few of the most important features, discoveries or inventions, that might, or might not, distinguish us from other biological creatures.

1.       Fire

2.       Wheel

3.       Art

4.       Writing

5.       Agriculture

6.       Mathematics

7.       Worship of God

8.       Scientific Method

9.       Relativity and Quantum Theories

10.   Electric Motors

11.   Space Travel

12.   Anti-gravity (?)

In each of these categories, there are those who might quibble over this or that similarity to be found in various animals—but in humans, these characteristics are far more definitive of us than they are of any animal.   

1.        Fire

As far as I know, there is no known life form apart from humans which can deliberately start and control fires as a useful tool.  This essential ability both encompasses and enables our technological advance beyond that of, say, the chimpanzee, or any other creature.  (While a chimp may be taught a rudimentary form of this skill, it is at most only a pale imitation, and could quickly turn to disaster for the chimpanzee and others.)  There is much more to fire technology than starting one.

2.        Wheel

The pre-Columbian natives of Central America managed to build very large stone structures without using any wheeled devices—not even a simple cart.  This demonstrates that the invention of the wheel was not necessarily inevitable, not even in an advanced society that was skilled in mathematics, astronomy and architecture—not even when necessity might have been its mother. 

Despite this, it is all but unthinkable that modern technology could have been developed without the invention of the wheel.  Sorry, chimps.

3.        Art

While some purists might dispute the importance of art as a technology, art is not necessarily always for “art’s own sake.”  It has a dual importance.  First, of course, it is expressive of the human spirit in its many dimensions, from the earliest cave paintings onward.  This feature of art should not be underestimated.  Art expresses humanity, both for better and worse.

But, very importantly, the ability to interpret the existing world through art, is also connected to the ability to imagine, design, and innovate new technology.  Many artists would not connect their work to that of the engineering draftsman, but his drafting skills would likely never have been developed without the artistic impulse that is unique to humans.  And without this skill, especially before computer assisted design, technology would have remained far less advanced than otherwise was the case.

4.       Writing

Writing is so common today that we often do not appreciate its truly revolutionary impact.  Writing was the first significant, precise means of mass memory storage external to the brain.  It allows communication across not only vast distances, but across centuries, from generation to generation.  No animal apart from humans has ever developed writing.

 

5.       Agriculture

The ability to grow food and store it, in quantities to last an entire year, freed human society from the need to hunt and gather food each day.  It became a safeguard against short periods when wild food was utterly unavailable, during which time hunger, perhaps starvation, might destroy a clan or tribe.  Although there is a kind of ant (leafcutter) which seems to cultivate fungus for food, this is a far cry from the complex ability of humans to schedule food production.  Society’s customs and laws are traceable to the social structure imposed by agriculture.

 

6.       Mathematics

Mathematics gives humanity not only the ability to count, but also, to measure indirectly, in cases where direct measurement is impossible.  For example, the Pythagorean theorem allowed men to calculate the distance across a river, before ever having crossed it.  We were able to calculate the distance to the moon before ever getting there.  Mathematics is so foundational to physical reality that one prominent physicist (Dr. Max Tegmark) has stated that mathematics does not merely describe the universe, it is the universe.

 

7.       Worship of God

No creature other than humans has a well-developed sense of the Creator, the Supreme Being, the source and foundation of all justice, mercy and salvation from sin.  While it is fashionable to credit primitive superstitions with the origin of human worship of God, this is an explanation more of convenience than demonstrated fact.  Modern philosophy and science have both struggled and failed to explain why there is something instead of nothing.  They cannot explain how consciousness arises, nor even what it is.  Physicalism denies that free will can possibly exist, which of course would make all human activity a farce, the acting out of a script that nobody wrote.  In the context of God, life has plan, purpose and meaning.

 

8.       Scientific Method

It is likely that few non-scientists understand the critical role of the scientific method in modern civilization.  Introduced late in human history, it imposed strict discipline on human thinking.  Until then, brilliant minds had generated strong advances in science and technology, but they had mistakenly believed that thought and contemplation alone could unravel the mysteries of the universe.  The scientific method is highly structured.  It depends on physical proof, repeatable by skeptics.  Science is not all encompassing, and its methods do not always work well in, for example, areas of philosophy and religion, but even so, the scientific method has revolutionized our ability to comprehend and even predict, physical phenomena, with amazing detail and accuracy.

 

9.       Relativity and Quantum Theories

These two theories are counter-intuitive, meaning that they defy ordinary commonsense.  Even so, they have proved themselves to be demonstrably accurate and predictive explanations of physical phenomena.  There are of course many other areas of science which might fit this description, but these two in particular reshaped scientific thinking in the early years of the twentieth century, and have prepared the way for many other innovations among scientists.  So there, chimpanzees.

 

10.   Electric Motors

Nicola Tesla was the applied scientist’s equal of pure scientist Albert Einstein.  In a sense, Tesla invented the wheel.  Remember we said that the invention of the wheel was not inevitable.  This is also true of Tesla’s electric motor.  Tesla’s motor is at the heart of modern technology, and had it not yet been invented, we would probably still be struggling to implement a practical electronic technology.

 

11.   Space Travel

Clearly, no creature on earth, other than humans, has ever developed the ability to travel to the moon and back, or to send photo reconnaissance space-ships to Mars, Titan and beyond.

 

12.   Anti-gravity (?)

But wait, you well might say, humanity has not yet developed a true anti-gravity device, something which harnesses an as yet undiscovered law of nature, one that allows us to negate the local effect of gravity, without using the brute force of rocket engines and the like.

Indeed, we have not done so, and who knows, may never.  I include this final characteristic in the list for reasons that are partly symbolic, partly prospective.  Humans have the ability, unique among animals, to imagine doing things that have never been done before, that defy the limitations of the possible—and then to make them possible.

 

Are humans special?  If so, in what way?

Characterizing humans as being at the center of nature, or even above it, has been scorned by many who see us merely as yet another physical phenomenon of the universe.

Such scorn is often primarily emotional.  On the other hand, those who regard humans as spiritual beings inhabiting a physical body, often fail to make a persuasive case to skeptics.

It is important for each human to humbly admit that he cannot answer the eternal questions, and to remain inquisitive about them.  That is a lifelong endeavor.

 

Overlooking the Obvious in Science
 
      Not long ago I was repairing a leaky water tank.  At first, I imagined that the job would be straightforward:  find the leak, and patch it.  But after trying everything I could think of, the leak persisted.  I soon reached the point where I thought, half seriously, that I had encountered the physically impossible.  There seemed to be no possible way that the water could just disappear from the tank at the speed it was doing so.
      I finally was forced to consider the impossible, which involved the one component of the tank system that I had ruled out from consideration from the very beginning.  That component was the input valve.  It was not possible, of course, for an input valve to function as an output valve, but just to make sure, I had to carefully inspect it, to prove that the impossible was really happening.
      As you have already guessed, the input valve was indeed causing the leak, but not in a way that was physically impossible.  It simply involved a complex siphon effect, whereby the leak could “work around” the input system, by means of what I now consider to have been an ingenious, unintended “trick,” or a defect, in the system.  Once I addressed the siphon effect, the leak stopped, and the universe became, once more, possible.  Of course, I laugh at myself for having ignored it for so long.
      Science has been doing something like this for a long time.  It is not that science itself is defective, but rather, that we as humans are—including scientists—able to overlook the obvious.  Science, when confronted by mysteries, attempts to solve them, and frequently succeeds.  Yet there do remain some profound mysteries about which science can only speculate.  These mysteries will never be solved by the methods which have always worked in the past.  We have to look at the obvious, and investigate new ways of studying them.
      One of the most obvious facts, indeed the most obvious fact, that all of us encounter, is the fact that we are living, conscious beings.  Yet there has been found no possible manner in which the inert atoms of the universe can form conscious creatures.  Have we ruled out the (so to speak) input valve?
      Let us propose a new paradigm, one which incorporates the following idea:

Life, consciousness and volition are fundamental realities.  They do not arise from physical reality, they are an integral part of it.  This is the new and necessary paradigm that is emerging from science.
 

      Life, consciousness and volition are physically detected phenomena that defy purely physical explanation, but which can be better understood in terms of the new paradigm.
      The current paradigm, or philosophy, upon which modern science is based, is called physicalism.  Physicalism declares that everything in the physical universe can be described by, and only by, other physical things.  It is circular logic. 
      Simply stated, physicalism finds that it is handy to think of the physical universe as an intricate composition of its fundamental constituents.  It declares those fundamentals to be space-time and energy-mass, along with basic forces and mathematical constants, all of which are governed by natural law.  This is the natural-material, or physicalist, universe.  Science has found no practical reason to look outside of, or beyond, any physical explanations for physical phenomena.
      Until now.

        Currently, the science establishment regards life, consciousness and volition (free will) as arising from physical reality.  They do not.  Instead, they are at its core.  If anything, physical reality arises because of them.  The failure to recognize this, is a serious error which limits the potential of physicists to comprehend how nature really operates.
        Among its errors, physicalism denies that true, free will can exist.  In addition, it fails utterly to explain inward consciousness, and it incorrectly defines life as merely a chemical process.  These errors have profound consequences, as demonstrated in the following:

1)      If there is no free will, then there is no true science, because without volition, scientists could draw only those conclusions which nature forces them to draw, regardless of their accuracy or inaccuracy.  Free will is forbidden in the physicalist paradigm.

2)      Inward consciousness permeates our entire waking lives, and yet it is a total and complete mystery to science, not only as to how it arises, but even as to what it is.

3)      Life, although it is the most studied and best understood of the three, is considered to be only a chemical process, nothing more.  Its intricate connection to the very foundations of the universe is considered to be nothing more than happenstance.  The false perception is, that life is the chance byproduct of an unknowing, uncaring cosmos. It isn’t.    

Natural Materialism (Physicalism) is a False Paradigm.                                                                        

 

        The current paradigm, known as natural materialism, or physicalism, explains physical reality only in terms of itself.  Any evidence that cannot be explained in physical terms is disqualified, based on the rules of physicalism.  The physicalist paradigm admits of no plan, no purpose, and no objective standards of morality underlying nature.

        The circular rules of physicalist science define physical things only in terms of themselves.  Therefore, they automatically exclude, or at the least discourage, investigation into avenues that could otherwise help explain certain experimental results that are currently puzzling scientists.  They do nothing to explain inward consciousness.  They deny that true volition even exists at all.  A new paradigm will, at the least, free scientists to consider possibilities that are currently forbidden to serious investigation.

        The new paradigm might be called “Cosmic Intent,” but let’s not play with words.  The clear implication is that physical nature was created.  The Creator cannot be adequately described, except in terms that recognize it as God.  The new paradigm, then, is best termed, “The God Paradigm.”  It rejects the old idea, the idea that the universe is the product of an unknowing, uncaring complex of chance and purposeless natural laws.  The arguments against the old idea are so numerous and systematic that one must be chained to a physicalist ideology to believe it.

        God is alive, conscious, and exercises divine will.  He does so with a plan, purpose and meaning that we are given the power to investigate—by means of our own life, consciousness and free will, with which He has endowed us.

The God Paradigm Incorporates Life, Consciousness and Volition, Not Random Chance, as the Underlying Principles of Reality

 

        Life is not merely a chemical process.  Consciousness is utterly unexplained by physical science.  Volition (free will) allows us to make decisions that are not dictated by the physical chain of cause-and-effect.
        The universe was created.  It did not create itself, nor was it created by blind, indifferent forces, nor by chance. 
        If chance is invoked to explain our unlikely existence, then we must consider the most likely outcomes of chance, before relying on the least likely.  Were we the product of chance, then the overwhelming likelihood is that we would exist in a universe that is far less elegant, and far less ordered, than ours.  We ourselves would be far more primitive, and far less likely to have produced the arts, the technology, and the systems of ethics and law, that we have.
        The chances of these things occurring, the likelihood of the conditions in which we live, are so low that they cannot be explained by the random interactions of atoms and energy that physicalism relies upon to describe our existence.
        We have barely scratched the surface in debunking chance.  Planet earth is not merely suited for life; it is prime real estate for the development of a civilization that can reach for the stars, while at the same time, asking why we reach for them.
        Far more likely it is that we should live on a planet that barely supports life, that allows us to eke out a meager existence, the atmosphere of which conceals the stars with clouds, and on which none of the minerals and metals exist from which technology can be built.  It is overwhelmingly more likely that by chance alone, a planet would produce a society in which people are mere slaves to tyrants, people who never yearn to be free.
        Those are the overwhelming odds which would decide who we are.  Instead, we have not merely technology, but also poetry, the Golden Rule, and the ability to appreciate the beauty of nature.
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