What do you consider human?

Originally posted by cking
were we basically nothing.

Exactly my point, we had no emotions before we became humans.

Originally posted by alcoholicpoet
No we didn't, at the beginning of time when we were all scattered cells and atoms we had no emotions.

Yes, but that is not proved. There is some studies where it was verified some kind of instinctive behavior in a protozoan.

Conditioning isn't neccessarily a sign of instinct... Human children and adults can be conditioned and show responses similar to love or attachment. I think you need to redefine "love" in order to make that definition of "human" stick. And then you'll need empirical evidence, sources... etc.

This is a question older than any of us. What is the truth, you may as well ask. The answer to this question is not as straightforward as a few sentences...

I have´t read all the post already.
But, what am i think human is?,, I would say that human is a being with feelings, thoughts and a reasoning capability. And many others would say that a being without those, is not a human.

So that means that a being without those capabilities is not a human, despite of have been born of a woman?....

true

There are a lot of good points here. I especially liked the blueberry/bear comparison. This is a very good point. Every organism that exists is uniquely qualified to live in the manner that it lives. Nothing, and no one, can be better or worse than anything else.

But that has nothing to do with why we are human. In the simplest answer possible, we are human because our parents were human. A more religious answer is that we are human because God wishes us to be. I myself don't buy into that kind of religion, I am just expressing one point of view. You may have heard of someone being referred to as an "inhuman monster." Perhaps it was your history teacher speaking of Adolf Hitler. This brings this topic to a more philosophical tone.
Was Hitler human?
I'd say yes. His parents were both human, and he made moral decisions. They may have been immoral, but he was certainly not amoral.
Now another question: Does proving Hitler to be human mean all homo sapiens are human?
If you want to get all technical like that, then yes. All homo sapiens are in fact human. Some humans make really crappy choices that a lot of other humans don't like, but they are still human.
So my personal conclusion is this; to be human is to have 23 chromosome pairs and be able to make decisions more difficult than those that fullfill basic needs.

i dont consider anything truely human. everything is made of atoms. humans are just atoms assembled in a certain way by electric impulses. these same atoms have been assembled in so many ways over the millenia, they are only part of a "human" for an incalculable amount of time.

When these atoms were part of a star, was that star not a star simply because its atoms hadn't always been so?
That's silly. Atoms are the building blocks of the universe, but after you build something, it has its own identity. An identity such as "star" or "human."