What Does it Mean to Be Human?

This post is effectively part III in our recent series on AI. We started by talking about AI in education broadly. Then, we talked about AI in teaching. In those posts, I kept hitting at a more central question, “What does it mean to be human?” For, if we want to know the place of the machine in earthly life, we have to know the place of the human being.

But, what is a human? Countless thinkers have offered philosophical, religious, artistic, and scientific answers to this question, and I will offer another. At least, I will try. This could be the subject of an entire book, so forgive such a brief digestion of a vast topic.

Human Intellect and Human Intuition

Some thinkers describe the human being as having right brain and left brain capacities. We see the right brain is as intuitive, creative, and non-linear while the left brain as mathematical, logical, goal-oriented, and linear. We may perhaps loosely refer to these as feminine and masculine energies. (I use those terms loosely since they are politically charged these days, so take it with a grain of salt). I will also suggest the distinction of intuition and intellect, or heart and head.

If we understand these two forces and their proper relationship, then we can approach the question of what does it mean to be human?

What is human intellect?

As an historian, I assert that never before in human history has the intellect been so well developed. I would say the acceleration began in Ancient Greece, continued through the Middle Ages and especially through the Islamic Golden Age, and began accelerating exponentially during the Enlightenment.

What exactly IS the human intellect? It is a tool to grasp the sensory-material world. This physical plane operates in a linear, cause-and-effect way. (Algebra expresses these relationships beautifully.) Naturally, a left-brain based, empirical approach has become the way to master this material world. It helps us make and keep appointments, drive to the grocery store, and build aircraft to traverse the globe in a matter of hours (amongst other things). Hooray for the intellect! Material life has become much more comfortable than it’s ever been because of our extraordinary powers of sense and reason.

And…the intellect has also become a jail keeper. How so? you may wonder. Well, if your constant focus is on the outside world, you can become a prisoner to sense experience and the logical, linear, calculating thinking that grasps it. It becomes so easy then to neglect the inner heart-dimension of life. You may even forget who you really are, for such a thing is never found from the outside in but from the inside out.

So, what is human intuition?

Some things in life defy the intellect. My students and I in the Live Teen Empowerment Class just finished reading a book called Dying to Be Me. It’s about a woman’s near death experience from stage 4 lymphoma. She died, heard a profound message on the other side, and came back to tell the tale. What’s most remarkable, however, is that her cancer was gone in days. This baffled her attending doctors to the highest degree. It broke the mold of their intellectual understanding. Obviously, more exists than meets the eye.

Now, have you ever thought of someone only to have them call or text you moments later? Or, have you ever had a hunch about something you could not have known that later came to pass? Almost everyone has, and these experiences undeniably suggest that we have another mind alongside the intellect. This must be a mind that doesn’t operate within the same time-space limitations as the intellect.

Once we admit this to ourselves, we can take even more steps on our quest to understand, what does it mean to be human? We can ask deeper questions and start to free ourselves from the jail keeper.

So, what is the proper balance between intellect and intuition?

Obviously we need both intellect and intuition. You wouldn’t want your pilot closing his eyes on final approach because he has a “hunch” about where the runway might be. We all need our intellects to navigate daily life in a physical-sensory world.

Yet, if we want to achieve the heights of human wholeness, we must put the intellect in its place as the servant of intuition. In other words, the head has to serve the heart. The heart is the king, the head is the worker. It cannot be the other way around, because the human heart is where the moral convictions come from. It’s where you know right from wrong. The head’s job is to figure out how to execute what is right and correct what is wrong.

Yet, if the head were allowed to work independent of the heart it would create all sorts of chaos. In fact, it does everyday in places like Wall St. where geniuses spend all day creating algorithms to make more and more money, but for what? Or, it happens in military-industrial-complex factories where increasingly sophisticated weapons of war are being designed all the time. Again, for what? Eckhart Tolle might say this is intelligence in the service of madness. Yes, we all need intellect, but head without heart is a recipe for disaster.

What it Means to Be Human

My answer to the question, “What does it mean to be human?” is just this: that we make the head to serve the heart. That is why in Waldorf Education we place such an emphasis on preserving the faculties of imagination, inspiration, and intuition in the child. Children come with these things naturally, but we can beat it out of them through an overly-intellectual education.

That’s why art is so important in this process because it preserves those imaginative faculties. Then, even as they learn things like math and science and other traditionally “intellectual” subjects, they will learn them artistically. They will learn how to bridge the objective and the subjective in ways only the most brilliant scientific minds have been able to do, like Einstein who said, “If you want your children to become brilliant, read them fairytales. If you want them to become even more brilliant, read them even more fairytales.” Einstein was a deeply intuitive intellectual genius, who understood the necessity of preserving this deeper human dimension.

So, what about AI?

AI is the outermost projection of human intellect. It is like superhuman intellect. Yet, it remains in that realm and always will. AI is the calculative quality of human intellect on steroids. It will never have intuition. Why? Because it doesn’t have a body which can live and die. It doesn’t respirate, doesn’t feel. It only calculates.

In our age where human intellect has developed to the point of becoming decadent, we must be careful not to see intellect’s creations as gods. Yet, AI is quickly ascending the ranks to become another human idol. Will we keep it in its proper place? Will we make AI serve the higher moral aspirations of humanity, the promptings of the human heart? Or will AI be allowed to operate like a disembodied intellect, creating chaos and havoc for the species who created it?

AI can never be allowed to lead the human being. Be careful, O Human Being.