To be human is to be aware of your own fragility.
Sometimes references to the delicate nature of our own flesh and blood are stark. Burned into my mind is the image of a small child in an Intensive Care Unit who had breathed in sewege as he floundered in a septic tank outflow. Surrounded by electronics that blink and go ping, he lay entangled in wiring and tubes like the hub of a spagetti-armed starfish, unconscious and paralysed in a fragile interface between boy and machine.
Many movies refer to the fragility of human bodies and minds. Having recently re-watched The Matrix on DVD, my mind drew some parallels between the fictional machine-dependence in the film, and the very real but strikingly similar image of that boy I saw in the ICU.
The Matrix © 1999 Warner Bros.
The Matrix © 1999 Warner Bros.
Although our weakness are both multiple and varied (jealousy cf. a speck of dirt in the eye), the image of machine-dependence is a particularly potent reminder of our vulnerability to forces beyond our control. This is at the same time an indication of our growing power to modify and control our environment, and to use technology to take our bodies places they were not designed to go.
We continue to look for something absolute to define our humanity and our consciousness. Language was a candidate, but it seems that other species can communicate verbally, or in the case of Great Apes, even learn the use of rudimentary symbols. Tool use was a candidate, but even "bird brains" have been observed using tools to acquire food. A number of other candidate attributes have been proposed, such as religion, morality, self-awareness, and the complexity of our societies. Perhaps being aware of our own fragility, and having the power to counter it, are traits that are uniquely human?
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Good points. However awarness of fragility sounds something like self-awareness combined with self-preservation, the latter of which is the single most common trait among all life. To me fragility just falls somewhere along the scale of self-preservation, which isn't very defining.