Korzybski fits into a larger intellectual pattern since the Enlightenment, where smart people think that human affairs have gotten disordered somehow.The intellectual reformer believes he can diagnose the problem, find a solution by arguing from plausible first principles, and then get humanity back on a normative path. Just think of Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, L. Ron Hubbard, Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, etc.

Basically these intellectuals think teleologically, and they assume that humans should have instruction manuals that intellectuals can deduce and make explicit so that humans can fulfill their proper "purpose," whatever that means. Considering that all of the attempts at writing these implicit manuals disagree on fundamental matters, perhaps we should just reject the assumption and acknowledge that we evolved as kludges with conflicting and ill-fitting components, which don't allow for the inferencing of a coherent instruction manual.

I haven't read the book. Here are some of my thoughts on the content in the above post. These thoughts may be invalidated by other parts in the book as I haven't read the book and this is only the first quarter summary of the book.

According to Korzybski, the unique quality of humans is what he calls "time-binding", described as "the capacity of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off".

Robert sussman here posits that there are three human behavioural traits not found in chimps or any other animal; they are unique and exemplify what it means to be human.

• Symbolic behaviour - the ability to create alternative worlds, to ponder about the past and future, to imagine things that don't exist.

• Language - the unique communicative venue that enables humans to communicate not only in proximate contexts, but also about the past, the future, and things distant and imagined, allowing us to share and pass our symbols to future generations.

• Culture - the ability found only in humans for different populations to create their own shared symbolic worlds and pass them on. Although chimpanzees can pass on learned behaviour, they cannot pass on shared and different world views.

Time binding seems to be the same as culture.

But religion is a 'primitive science'

Aren’t religion and science disparate concepts? I get that they both provide theories about how the world is, but to refer to religion as scientific in any way seems strange to me.

Manhood of Humanityis: "What is a human?" Answering this question correctly could help us design a civilization allowing the fullest human development. Failure to answer this question correctly will repeat the cycle of revolutions and wars.

This seems to be a pre 1900 view of the world, i.e. before relativity, quantum mechanics, complexity theory etc.

This book goes over what I mean. Below is part of the abstract that explains it.

“Early theorists believed that in science lay the promise of certainty. Built on a foundation of fact and constructed with objective and trustworthy tools, science produced knowledge. But science has also shown us that this knowledge will always be fundamentally incomplete and that a true understanding of the world is ultimately beyond our grasp. In this thoughtful and compelling book, physicist F. David Peat examines the basic philosophic difference between the certainty that characterized the thinking of humankind through the nineteenth century and contrasts it with the startling fall of certainty in the twentieth. The nineteenth century was marked by a boundless optimism and confidence in the power of progress and technology.”

So, I basically I disagree that knowing “what is a human” is all you need to build a utopia.

Second, I don’t think that there is necessarily any way to set up society so that everyone is perfectly satisfied. People are both similar to each other, but divergent as well. We are individuals, but have an underlying human nature. There is no human template or certain way that things can be so that it is exactly the same for everyone and perfect for everyone as well. There is going to be conflict and this, to an extent, is necessary. Perfection like certainty may be forever elusive. There is of course underlying common patterns or human universals. I take the view that non-teleological evolution means that human nature is not immutable or timeless. Human nature does not refer to an unchanging essence. Instead, it describes what the members of humanity currently happen to be like. People have common propensities, predispositions, norms and needs and these cause a certain probability and likelihood for humans to have certain traits. Another way of putting this is that there is 'species-typical' behaviour, but the resultant behaviour is going to be diverse. An example is laughing. We laugh because of our biology, but what we laugh at is extraordinarily variable. The cognitive ability of human’s means that their behaviours are more diverse than other animals and that their thought patterns have a greater impact on their behaviour.

I do believe that understanding these common patterns or human needs is extremely helpful. An example is that infants who are touched gently on a regular basis gain weight and grow at better rates than babies who lack this contact. If you are designing a society or writing a policy, then understanding these needs can be immensely helpful. Some work I have found on human needs are below:

• Maslows ranking of needs, but I don’t think the current research backs up the order or idea or ranking.
• Manfred Max-Neef talked about fundamental human needs
• There’s also this book by Martin Seligman and others which classifies the character strengths and virtues Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. New York: Oxford University Press and Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Summary here:www.viacharacter.org/www/C...ths/VIA-Classification#nav

I think, though, that people intuitively know the human needs because they are human themselves. The greatest atrocities that are commited by humanity to other humans are not due to a lack of understanding of the human needs, but because certain people are excluded from being deserving of being able to meet these needs. In the past certain discriminating factors, for example, melanin in skin, religion, and patriotic allegiance have been used as indicators of bestiality, lowliness, inhumanity and other degrading qualities. In summary, I think the issue is more of a perspectival one, i.e. with people’s maps. You need to not only ask what are the fundamental human needs, but you need to also ask how you can get people to create maps that allow them to best fulfill these fundamental human needs. I am sure that there are also a multitude of other considerations that you would need to think about if you were to design a civilization that allowed the fullest human development possible.

According to Korzybski, the unique quality of humans is what he calls "time-binding", described as "the capacity of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off".

I hate this definition. At its simplest level, it suggests any creature capable of remembering long enough to do as their parents did, and the capacity to improve on their parent's choices is a human, but that's clearly not what Korzybski means as it would include many animals. A stronger interpretation might be people capable of building up over several generations, but wouldn't this require a writing system of some kind soon enough? African and Native American societies never developed a writing system, and seemed to never get much past very basic agriculture. Indeed, humans prior to 5,000 BC were going nowhere for hundreds of thousands of years. Does that mean they're not human? If we break it down, I bet the majority of progress in our society was achieved by a tiny minority of the population. If say, the top 5% most productive individuals in history were removed, would we as a society have ever reached industrialization before going extinct? I'm not so sure.

I like Robert Sussman's definition mentioned by ScottL better, but I'm still not satisfied. His three are:

• Symbolic behaviour - the ability to create alternative worlds, to ponder about the past and future, to imagine things that don't exist.
• Language - the unique communicative venue that enables humans to communicate not only in proximate contexts, but also about the past, the future, and things distant and imagined, allowing us to share and pass our symbols to future generations.
• Culture - the ability found only in humans for different populations to create their own shared symbolic worlds and pass them on. Although chimpanzees can pass on learned behaviour, they cannot pass on shared and different world views.

There are over 7 billion humans on the planet. 7 billion! That's a lot of room for variation. There are humans in history who never learned a language. Does that make them not human? Then there are many other variations. There are humans who can't remember anything. There are humans who can't count to 10. There are humans with no vocal function to speak with. There are humans who cannot read. There are humans in a permanent coma with barely any brain function kept alive only by machines. How do you create a definition that encompasses all of them?

It's a problem I've thought a lot about, and I don't think there is an answer to it; at least not one that fits normal people's perceptions of humanity. If we investigated, I'm sure we could identify a DNA sequence or group of possible sequences that all humans have at least one of and no animals do. But what if a human is discovered with a mutation that doesn't fit? What if an ape is discovered who has one of those sequences? Does the human lose his/her rights? Does the ape legally become a human?

This problem will become less transparent over time. The population is growing, and our ability to modify people is increasing. The solution is to stop thinking about it in binary terms: humans are 1, not humans are 0, but this is so radical that it's doubtful such an idea will become mainstream any time soon.