#edcmooc What is being human?

I have saved the most difficult subject to last...
Probably because I am not sure whether it is important to me. My first inclination would be to answer: does it matter? It is one of those questions that we will never be able to answer just because we are (caught in the limitations of being) human. It is like asking 'Does god exist?'. To which the only definite answer, to me, can be 'nobody will ever know for sure'. 

Some of the other questions, though, I do have an opinion about. Did we fail at the humanistic project? Yes, we did. Ted Fuller illustrates this beautifully with his statement that ' In the West at least, Christianity is largely responsible for inducing cultural guilt about the failure of all humans to be treated as humans.'
Dear Ted, and others, even Christianity excluded half of humanity by excluding women from all power positions.

In European education we seem to be regressing to a situation were your chances of good education are becoming more dependent on the financial position of your parents (with the reforms of scholarship systems everywhere).

As teachers we seem to focus more and more on honours programs for the smarter students, or if you want to be cynical those students who have time for extra course work because they don't need a side job to pay for their own expenses.

So for posthumanistic... In Badmington's introduction I recognize our own debates about whether computers could ever become a truly human thinker (in the end of the 80's when we were starting to learn about AI). We had a truly inspiring teacher in philosophy of science (Monica Meijsing) and debated about homunculi, Daniel Dennett, Turing machines and Betty, if I remember correctly a computer playing a psychiatrist. We didn't answer the question, although I am personally convinced that the answer must be no:-)

More recently, I have been into contact with many foreign students and colleagues and I have come to realize how truly trapped we are in our own history and language. 'How can your religion not be an integral part of you identity as a doctor?' was a question from a Pakistani female doctor. And I realized that we certainly never speak about this with our student. In fact when one of our professors made the national press with his statement that he be believes in faith healings our board immediately reacted with the statement that 'his personal beliefs had no influence on his professional behaviour as a researcher or a doctor'.

Could outsiders destroy our ideas about humanism (in a way that, I agree with Derrida, we cannot)? It is an exciting idea, but scary as well. Surely, we do not want to risk too much influence from religious fundamentalists or from fundamental maoists (n.b. I have also seen curricula where the study of Mao and marxism was an integral part of a curriculum in Medecine).

Maybe we just shouldn't be so freaked out. Cultures have merged before in our history, 'live' ones and digital ones, and the effects have never been as extreme as we feared...