Thank you for the direction. These articles seem to be the ones I were looking for. (Plato's work and Diogenes' answer is worth further investigation)
Human beings may not be that special. This search of mine may be futile, it being a remnant of my believer times (and I being raised in Eurasian soils).
Even so, "what is a human being" seems to be the right question to further investigate. I guess this will immediately be useful (if not already is) at information security: "is perfect authentication possible?" (with protection against rubber hose technique, or clones etc.)
I am trying to establish what (if anything) makes human beings superior to other organisms.
I have a hypothesis that, the only thing at which human beings are "superior" to other organisms is that we can transfer information without a loss to other human beings.
This difference may already be well established. I couldn't find a good read on this, so I wanted to ask your opinion.
Many organisms seem to have superior capabilities than human beings; strength, speed, agility, vision, hearing, regeneration etc. And even high IQ (at least on a hardware level on dolphins etc) may not be unique to humankind.
So, my first suspect, high IQ alone does not seem to be a... (read 309 more words →)
Hello. I am from Istanbul, Turkey (A Turkish Citizen born and raised). I came across LessWrong on a popular Turkish website called EkşiSözlük. Since then, this is the place I checked to see what's new when there's nothing worth reading on Google Reader and I have time. (So long posts you have!)
I am 31 years old and I have a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Computational Sciences (Research on Bioinformatics). But then, like most of the people in my country does, I've landed upon a job where I can't utilize any of these information. Information Security :)
Why did I complain about my job? Here is why:
I've been long since looking... (read 403 more words →)
I actually am very curious to hear about your techniques, so much so that I registered to add this comment :) It is an art to manage your mood swings I believe, much like "air bending". So, please keep them coming.
Sorry, I couldn't get what do you mean by "We're the only species that acquires it automatically". Does it mean human beings have language skills by birth and other animals don't?