The human is an arrogant animal. It assumes that there is a special place in history for its kind, amongst all the other species that occupy this planet. The human is disinclined to feel anything but superiority towards those other species, as since the dawn of civilization there has been an belief among men that humans were put here with the animals for a purpose, as kings among beasts. This assumption has for a long time been a completely reasonable one to make. For a good many thousand years there have been humans capable of thinking self-consciously about themselves, and it is no surprise whatsoever that the first conclusion to be drawn from this extraordinary fact is that the thinker of self-conscious thoughts is intrinsically better and more valuable than the beasts of the earth who do not seem to think. There is no doubt that the human being is a quite phenomenal (in the literal sense) animal, but we should be cautious when treating 'human' and 'animal' as two seperate things. It does not pay to forget where we come from, going back tens of years or millions.

If we abandon the idea that we were put here for a reason, we are led to reconsider the human ego. I find the following a humbling thought. There will come a time at which all trace that I ever existed will have disappeared. I am as certain of this as I can ever be of anything.

I find it hard to be anything but humbled in the face of such a fact. This might seem to be a reason to descend into nihilism, for what can we hope to achieve in our lifetimes, if our existence must be reduced to nothing? Many have found such a fact depressing, but there are two ways to look at it. We can either spend our days moping about the fact that at some stage we will be nothing more than molecules, or we can rejoice in the extraordinary fact that we are alive. This is a decision that is not made by logical analysis but by character, but we should not fall into the trap of assuming that our thoughts, in either of the two possible directions mentioned here, are inbuilt and immutable. Everything can change. A human may well be depressed by the notion that its existence is short and transitory, but the same human must not lay the blame for this feeling externally. The human is capable of changing the setup of its mind by training. This is not an instant process, but if we accept our ability to change, and we accept that it would be desirable to rejoice in our brief lives rather than despair of them, then we must accept that it is worth the effort to forcefully adjust our thinking over time. I would claim that such change is absolutely achievable.

I mentioned the main characteristic of the human mind being the ability to think self-consciously. This is yet another example of my human egoism. If we remove any notion of intrinsic purpose, such as religion would lay out, we must be forced to accept that there is really no such thing as 'I'. There is matter (it seems pointless to deny this) that exists, and the human fingers that type these words are made of it. They are made of it, in the same way that a table is made of it, the air is made of it, the trees are made of it, and you are made of it. There is much debate as to what a 'table' actually is. It seems to me that a table is no more than a model used by humans to describe certain configurations of matter, in the same way that a 'human' is a model used to describe other configurations of matter. The yard-stick by which a model must be judged is its effectiveness in prediction of future events.

The model 'I' is a very useful one, since there has come about in evolution a sensation of the self, and it would be a foolish decision for a human to refer to itself as a set of molecules. We can easily imagine how that sensation of self could evolve; amongst animals with no concept 'I', the animal with a faint notion of the concept of itself might be placed at an advantage. Perhaps it would be aware that a visible movement of its shadow could scare away prey just as well as its own movement, and adjust accordingly. We can imagine many such scenarios. A sensation of self exists, and, because it does, we are absolutely right to use the model 'I'. We should not however be blind to the fact that it is merely a model.

We should again be humbled by the knowledge that we are no more than configurations of molecules, but we should of course use the model 'I' to describe ourselves for practical reasons, since we have been programmed by the long process of evolution with a sense of happiness, which we should then, by definition, seek. The evolution of happiness is, I feel, a wonderful mistake on the part of our genes, if one imagines their 'purpose' to be their own self-replication. It is not good policy, when you need to get from A to B, to buy a car that loves some roads, hates others, doesn't care a jot for its passengers, and has no steering wheel. The freedom to succeed then belongs to the car, not its occupants. This is what our genes have done, and their loss is our gain.

Our potential for happiness is a fantastic occurence, but it is fragile. If we allow ourselves as humans to be fooled into believing our own hype, then we are opening ourselves up to despair when the realisation finally hits of our mortality. The earlier we face up to the reality, the more we will enjoy what time we have.

Giles Hayter
London
March 2009