Is there a cognitive test (or series of tests, all of which must be cognitive) that can with nearly 100% reliability, given a set of organisms that are capable of reproducing, determine which of those organisms are human and which are not? I’m mainly concerned about the possibility of a developmentally disabled Homo Sapiens being incapable of passing such a test, but still possibly reproducing and doing their part in creating a being that would pass such a test. I don’t know for sure, but I have this background notion that effectively all disorders that would cause a biological human to fail cognitive tests of this sort would also render them sterile. Is that the case? Are there even such tests in existence, regardless of the “developmentally disabled” loophole?
Huh? Which ones are the non humans?
As opposed to a genetic test? How about the ability to speak a human language?
yes and no. Someone born with microphaly can be really really stupid … . They might have some human intelligence somewhere, but unused because of there inability to communicate or move their arms,fingers in a coordinated way… They might just be disheartened by their initial failures and give up trying out their theory ,eg of patterns or good choices.
someone so badly brain damaged they are on life support, perhaps for breathing and pace maker, might still be fertile.
The idiot savants, autistic people demonstrate the idea that they can have difficulty with ordinary things but be able to perform highly intelligent things that would be human level intelligence.
What I am saying is that they might be doing multivariable calculus in their heads, but unable to communicate it looks like they are just as intelligent as a slug or jelly fish.
Another issue is that of the NP-complete “intuition” problems. An animal might solve such a problem , but you might put it down to instinct… insinct could be said to be not intelligence… but its hard to split… the pattern matching to revert to the instinct is itself both instinct, and intelligence.
The entire premise of this is flawed; homo sapiens (or any other species) are grouped together by ancestry, not cognitive similarities. A smart dog isn’t more human than a stupid man, because speciation has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with sharing an evolutionary lineage.
What you’re asking for is a variation of a Turing test, but all that proves is the ability to mimic human responses; it tells you nothing about the ancestry of that particular test taker (and really, that’s the whole point of a Turing test).
To take this a step further, the very concept of “species” is itself vague and ill-defined. A common definition – but a necessarily incomplete one – is the largest group of individuals who can produce fertile offspring with one another. But a woman after menopause is still homo sapiens, a man in a coma with his sperm extracted could still reproduce, and at some point in our ancestry there were other homo species that interbred with ours and were not homo sapiens but could probably still pass many of these same cognitive tests, and mutations still occur in homo sapiens, but usually not enough for us to consider them anything other than human. Not yet, anyway.
Speciation is really just a rough tool used to approximate genetic similarities between individuals. It is not a purist-friendly philosophical tool, just a shorthand for understanding complex evolutionary ancestries. You don’t really get a clear idea of any one species until enough time has passed and it has diverged enough from its ancestors/siblings/cousins to be worth grouping into a different name.
Non-humans can speak a human language. Birds such as parrots, mynahs, and ravens. A better test would be to see if they can initiate and follow a conversation as a human would instead of repeating a few phrases by rote.
As an aside, you might find ring species interesting if you’ve never heard of them: it’s this idea that a+b can breed, b+c can breed, c+d can breed, but d+a might by then be too far apart to breed anymore, either behaviorally or genetically.
There does not and cannot exist a test that each and every human being would pass while each and every chimpanzee would fail.
It’s a flawed concept because what makes someone a human being is not their ability to pass a cognitive test, but their shared ancestry with other Homo sapiens.
If you’re looking for a way to detect the aliens secretly walking among us, you’re going to have to find some other way.
You’re trying to re-define what a human is, but that doesn’t work. Look for the definitions that already exist, instead.
“You’re in a desert walking along the sand, when all of the sudden you look down and you see a tortoise. It’s crawling towards you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”
Tortoise, what’s that?
Do you have a good definition of what a human is? I ask because many years ago I read an essay that speculated that the tricky part of Asimov’s First Rule of Robotics would be how a robot would determine whether a being is human or not.
As technology advances, we’ll have more and more people with more and more mechanical/computer parts. Even computer enhancements to the brain have been suggested. Is there a point where someone born a human would have received so many enhancements that she would no longer be human?
Then there’s genetic manipulation. I’m sure there would be controversy over in utero genetic engineering to prevent something like cystic fibrosis, but I suspect no one would claim the resulting being wasn’t human. But I also suspect that there would be a point at which the genetically-modified being would no longer be considered human.
To take this out of what should probably be a GD topic and put it back into GQ – What is the currently accepted scientific definition of a human? As science advances, would the definition still hold?
Human: a member of the species Homo sapiens. There’s your scientific answer.
OK, I hear you objecting, what about Homo neanderthalensis?
Good question. And if Neanderthals were alive today, it would be an important question, and one which we would probably eventually decide in favor of Neanderthal humanity. But since there are no Neanderthals today, it’s an academic question rather than an important one.
Likewise, there are no cyborgs with computer brain interfaces alive today. In the future this could be an important question, but it’s not important today because we’re not going to mistakenly put a cyborg into the wrong category because no such cyborgs exist today.
I really had no idea there was an actual correlation. Huh.
you know what a turtle is? Same thing.
Tell me about your mother…
Let me tell you about my mother! shoots md2000 with seltzer bottle
I suppose that the answer to the question is then “no, there does not exist a cognitive test that can do such a differentiation.” Can one conclude then that the only way to reliably distinguish humans from non-humans is DNA?
Really you would have to define what you think is human first.
Empathy, language, forethought and other traits aren’t unique.
Lacking a definition on what it is to be “human” makes it impossible to create a test against that said, missing definition.
For the biological, non cognitive specific categorization DNA and/or biology are the best options. But those aren’t test of cognition.
I’m not sure what you expected. Some human beings are brain damaged and in a persistent vegetative state. What cognitive test do you think could be done on a person like that?
Also, you don’t have to do a DNA test. You can just look at them. There aren’t any non-human organisms that are so similar to human beings that they can’t be differentiated without a DNA test. Likewise, there aren’t any androids or shape-shifting aliens that can mimic human beings perfectly.
Only human beings have a human phenotype. You only need DNA if you’re talking about tissue samples.
No, it’s even wackier than that. The only way to tell apart a human from a non-human is to wait long enough (or go back in time enough) to find a distant enough relative that most humans would not consider kin, or that we cannot routinely interbreed with. That’s it! But that only works at a population level, not the level of an individual organism. You cannot definitively say, given two individuals of those border species, whether those particular two can produce fertile offspring (or how many), and whether their offspring would likewise be fertile, etc. Whether you want to classify them as the same species or not, then, would really be a subjective description and not some sort of scientific prescription.
To be really succinct, something is human only when enough other humans agree that it is human. Something is homo sapiens when, to the best of our knowledge, it is descended from the same close ancestors as we are, and has not mutated enough to either cease to be able to interbreed with us, or else bother enough racist scientists that they want to speciate it just because (happens a lot with birds, for example).
It’s nuts, but there is really no such thing as a “species”. A species is an approximation of similarities between organisms, usually with the expectation that they can produce fertile offspring. It is an open, unsolved problem in science: Species - Wikipedia
And of course, sociologically, that’s a whole nother can of worms… whether different races are different species or otherwise less-than-human has been the cause of genocides untold. AI is already facing this sort of discrimination, even in its infancy. God help us when one day we are able to interbreed with AI, or with humanlike clones imbued with AI brains.
Forget everything you know about species. It’s just a percentage similarity that’s high enough to usually be successful in breeding, but that particular percentage changes between any two individuals and changes drastically over time and geography. It’s just a shorthand. It is not the rigorous concept you imagine it to be. The idea of speciation was created before we really understood how DNA and evolution worked, and so we just keep using it out of habit, but evolution is nowhere near that neat.
It’s like asking whether something is “round”: there are no perfect circles in our world, but many things look round if you don’t look too closely. It’s only when you see an oval than you start to wonder if it, too, is round like a circle.