I believe you must have heard this saying: Man is the soul of all things. Intelligent humans have long discovered that they are different from other species. But what exactly separates humans from other species?
You may get many different answers, such as that humans have intelligence, that humans can use tools, that they can walk upright, etc.
But strictly speaking, the above is not the essential difference between humans and other species. At best, it is just the characteristics of the human species.
From a biological perspective, modern humans and orangutans both belong to the primate order , and their genetic differences are very small, only about 1%.
In other words, the difference between humans and orangutans is caused by 1% of genes. So what exactly does this 1% of genes determine? What characteristics are expressed?
After different attempts, scientists believe that self-awareness may play a decisive role. Scientists have discovered that although humans are intelligent, humans as infants do not have self-awareness. To put it bluntly, babies do not know "who I am." When a baby of a few months old looks in the mirror, he does not know that the person in the mirror is himself.
Moreover, most animals cannot find that they are themselves in the mirror when they look in the mirror. They will think that it is their companion, so they will play happily with their "companion".
Of course, there are also a very small number of animals that have "self-awareness" and know that they are themselves in the mirror when they look in the mirror, such as dolphins , elephants, chimpanzees, etc.
Biologists have discovered that when doing the "mirror experiment", neurons in a certain area of the human brain are very active, called "mirror neurons." Are these neurons the material basis of "self-awareness"? There is no definite answer to this question yet, and scientists need to continue to study it in depth.
Maybe we can think about the problem from another angle, for example: the nature of human beings.
A famous scholar in ancient Rome Plutarch once raised an interesting question: the ship of Theseus. To put it simply, it is this: There is a ship, and if the wood of the ship is replaced piece by piece, all of them are replaced, will the ship still be the same ship?
Similar problems have been playing out in the human body: the human body is made up of cells, and human cells are replaced about every seven years. So, are we still the same people today as we were seven years ago?
From a purely physical point of view, it is true that he is no longer the same person, because all the cells have been replaced. But more people think that they are still the same person, which means that it is not the cells themselves that determine the same person, but the "human consciousness" formed by cells and other microscopic particles in a specific arrangement.
Just like a computer, a computer is essentially a pile of "scrap copper and iron", but after combining it in a specific way, we found that this pile of "scrap copper and iron" has super computing power, and will be able to do so in the future. It is possible to have "consciousness", and the same thing, combined in different ways, may bring about completely different results.
Although the computing power of the human brain is not as good as that of a computer, its complexity far exceeds that of a computer. The sophistication of the human brain is astonishing. Any tiny disorder may lead to complete "paralysis" of the brain. There seems to be a pair of "invisible hands" behind it. The human brain has long been designed. If measured according to the complexity of the human brain, there is still a long way to go for computers to have the consciousness of humans!
