Can Modern Neuroscience Change Our Idea of the Human?

The paper briefly reviews the contribution of recent neuroscience findings to our understanding of our human nature – more exactly, to the understanding of the three properties that we conceive of as highly-specifically human: consciousness, freedom, and language. The analysis yields rather surprising results. Self-consciousness is possibly not the highpoint of our sophisticated cognitive functions, but rather the basic pre-reflective self-other distinction intimately related to body control and affective states, within whose limits cognitive processes become possible. Freedom is not a violation of natural (biological) laws, but, in contrast, a necessary attribute of complex behavior; it roots in the fundamental biomechanical freedom of biological movements. Language comprehension is neither an instinct nor a set of complex inferences, but a behavior based on learnt hierarchy of predictive, anticipatory processes. Thus the answer to the question formulated in the title is positive: yes, it can change. From the author’s viewpoint, these changes emphasize embodied, enacted nature of the specifically human functions.