Human Nature: Unveiling Our Complexities and Origins
**Intelligent Human Being: A Human?**
Can you escape the confines of your environment and rise up to contemplate and comprehend? The fact that animals do not talk does not indicate a lack of reason, that they cannot think, or that they have a rational mind like ours. It follows that being rational and thinking about how you think does not require a voice. It is thought that animals speak. Animal communication systems can be compared to human language. This is a system of signs, open, articulate, flexible, and potentially infinite, an instrument not only to communicate but to express any idea or thought.
**Freud’s Contributions to Psychoanalysis: Understanding Human Reality**
**Freud’s Psychic Apparatus: Disadvantaged People in Rationality? Dementia-Sapience?**
According to Freud, consciousness is but the tip of the iceberg of our personality, that which rises to the exterior, outside of our control. The unconscious, hidden beneath, is made up of an amalgam of irrational impulses. These impulses are closely monitored by censorship, an instance of ideal morality. Dreams or pathological demonstrations are no longer perceived as unexplained anomalies but as a symptom of the fierce fight between instincts and reason. According to Freud, it is not unlikely that rationality will eventually be imposed on destructive irrationality.
**Dialectics of Dementia-Sapience: The Permanent Struggle Between Reason and Madness**
Between the need for order and the spontaneous tendency to chaos.
**The Importance of Human Affectivity: Human Right and a Complex Set of Emotions**
Reason alone cannot explain the vast complexity of human life. An element must be added that clarifies and supplements it: affectivity, feelings, emotions, etc. We approach or move away from things in terms of whether they are pleasurable or painful to us. As we develop our cognitive capacities, we acquire the use of reason. There is a tendency to emphasize the interconnection between various affective and cognitive structures, between intelligence and feelings. Intelligence devoid of affect would be as inhuman as affectivity lacking rationality.
**Angels or Demons?**
- Sociable Nature: People seek each other out, either for pleasure or for needs. Aristotle brings another argument: the existence of language. The word creates links and establishes relationships. The richer the language, the denser our network of social relations. Language provides a new framework of possibilities in human sociality.
- According to Hobbes: Individuals are by nature aggressive and selfish, and only the fear of punishment obliges us to respect the law and maintain ourselves in society. Freud speaks of the primacy of aggressive instincts. These would be responsible for all the violent behavior of humans and might even lead us to our own self-destruction. According to Freud, the source of social evil is not natural.
- Neither Angels nor Devils: We are complex beings where nature and culture intersect. That is what characterizes us in conflict. Kant spoke of the human condition as “unsociable sociability.” With this paradoxical expression, he meant that we cannot live alone but refuse to accept restrictions on our freedom.
**Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, Homo Symbolicus, Homo Oeconomicus, Homo Ludens, Homo Videns, Homo Bellicus?**
- Homo sapiens: Thinking reason to know.
- Homo faber: Making objects work.
- Homo symbolicus: Creating symbols to speak.
- Homo oeconomicus: Producing, consuming.
- Homo ludens: Playing, having fun.
- Homo videns: Watching, witnessing.
- Homo bellicus: Waging war, fighting.
**Soul-Body Relation: Anthropological Theories**
When explaining the relationship between matter and spirit, some philosophers began thinking that we are constituted by two different substances. Perhaps we are a single entity that we call the body and the soul. We call this conception monism. If this principle is conceived as material, it leads to materialistic monism, and if we talk about mental monism, it is spiritualistic. For Berkeley, what we call body or matter has no existence independent of the mind; it does not exist except in the mind. We call this conception idealism or mentalism.
**Behaviorism and Functionalism: The Mind-Brain Problem? Emergentism?**
According to behaviorism, the mind is not a different thing from the brain. To think otherwise would be to commit the same mistake as someone who, having seen classrooms, laboratories, a library, or the rectorate, still wonders where the university is. There are not two separate realities, mind and brain, but one that integrates both physical and psychic aspects. Functionalism denies that the mind is a thing or substance, reducing it to a function or set of functions that the brain carries out. The mind resembles a computer program that receives, processes, and transmits information. Emergentism sees the mind as an emergent phenomenon resulting from the growth process and arrangements of matter. Just as life emerged from inorganic matter, consciousness emerges from unconscious matter. It is evident, therefore, that without the material basis that underpins it, thought would not exist.
**Analogy Between Mind and Computer**
- Man:
- Stimuli reach the brain through the nervous system.
- Processing of the received data in the brain.
- The corresponding response takes the form of a mental act (perception, image, memory, etc.).
- Computer:
- Input: Data supplied by any peripheral.
- Software: Program that processes the received data.
- Output: Response or output information.
**Creationism and Evolutionism: Opposing Theories?**
Creationism says that we are the direct result of the action of a god, or many gods, who have created us in their image and likeness. However, evolutionism defends the evolution of species; we are not created by anyone, we have evolved to become what we are now.
**Lamarckism vs. Darwinism: Differences**
**Example of the Giraffe**
According to Lamarck, current species come from the evolution of previous species. This evolution would be explained by two laws: The law of use and disuse says that individuals’ ongoing efforts to adapt to the environment can cause small changes in their bodies. The second law, called the inheritance of acquired characteristics, says that these changes are transmitted to descendants. Thus, the accumulation and conservation of small changes over many generations explain the transformation of some species into others. According to Darwin, when there are more individuals than resources, a struggle for survival occurs, in which the fittest always win, that is, those who in each case present some favorable characteristics compared to others. Evolution is explained as the result of the successive accumulation of small changes over long periods. Darwin would say that if a giraffe has a longer neck, it will have an easier time reaching the highest branches for food and could survive and have offspring. This is why giraffes have such long necks. However, Lamarck would say that a giraffe’s neck stretched from straining to catch food, and they transmitted this to their offspring, and thus from generation to generation, they have such a long neck.
**Synthetic Theory of Evolution**
The synthetic theory of evolution, or neo-Darwinism, was the result of the discovery of the structure of DNA and the introduction of the concept of mutation. Mutations are alterations in the transcript copies of genetic material or anatomy that determine changes in the physiology of their bearers. Most mutations are harmful, but some may constitute an adaptive advantage for their carriers. These are preserved and transmitted to the next generation. Evolution is basically the result of the interaction between mutation and natural selection.
**Main Features of Human Evolution**
- Bipedalism.
- Liberation of the hands.
- Increased brain volume.
- Slow maturation or neoteny.