The Most Human Human: a Defence of Humanity in the Age of the Computer

According to the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, every psychologist must at some point in his or her career write a sentence of the form: "The human being is the only animal that ----". It is not only psychologists who feel impelled to write "the Sentence", as Brian Christian calls these statements of human uniqueness. Versions of the Sentence can be found scattered throughout the writings of theologians and atheists, rationalists and existentialists, revolutionaries and reactionaries and every sort of social and cultural theorist. The attributes that are supposed to make human beings special have varied. Often those who insist that we belong in a different category from other animals fix on consciousness as the definitive human attribute.