Thank you Aushaf for a great article. I too have read Harari’s book and as a graduate student in Anthropology I’ve had the benefit of listening to the world’s leading Anthropologist-Archeologists on the hunt for the “earliest” humans which leads them to, of course, the question of what markers in a find of habitation can be used to declare the long ago inhabitants “human”. They pretty well go along with your idea of art or jewelry (non-utilitarian artifacts), some evidence of complex multistage process (a type of chemistry) and various types of organization or behaviors (culture) not found in other mammals. I’m sure I’ve missed some things or misrepresented them in correct fidelity.

Since my graduate work is liberal arts I also have been exposed to the queen of all sciences, Philosophy. The exposure has been enough to have left me with the generalized bias that most serious philosophers seem to journey to a place of suicidal depression, rejection by society sometimes to the point of death, often poverty and misery, lots of loose ends and frustration and a psychological burden of knowing they are a 20 foot pier into the ocean of infinite unknown. Of course research physicists and astronomers have the same situation as philosophers but they focus on what they can do with the math and just the next step and don’t dwell on the awkward things like infinity so by my estimation they seem to laugh a lot more than the philosophy folks.

I have a loose and un-crisp guess about humans that incorporates your ideas. Through consciousness, culture and science I think we have developed a inordinate ability to create, each of us, what generally gets called “stories”. Not just superstition and myth — even stories such as algebra, language, geometry, agriculture, beauty, chemistry, morality, electrical engineering, biology and astronomy. I think there are some quantum physicists who would support the possibility that we are using these stories to participate in the creation of what we think of as observed, measured and documented “reality”. Put simply, we are not nearly as rational as we think we are but are “making it up in our minds” a lot more than we think we are. Since I am in this ilk I move from thinking of human as a separate individual entity to a collective whole of any and all things that do this. The way this translates is that everything from a star to time to space to an element to a giraffe to a nematode to a Homo sapiens are all part of making up the story and so to will be machine learning and emerging artificial intelligence. It’s unwieldy I grant you but the timeless seamless whole is making all of it up and wherever that element is most acute that point assigns itself ego centric distinction and elite status. I’m just another bozo on the bus.