UPDATE May 25, 2009
I have been thinking of a new way to conceptualize the difference(s) between human consciousness and that of non-human animals. I claim that one difference (amongst many) between humans and non-human animals is that is it possible for us to be classically schizophrenic, that is to say, capable of experiencing auditory hallucinations of a disembodied(or embodied in the idol of  TVs, air vents, walls, etc) voice that has forceful behavioral influence and is in terms of language, concepts, and personalities; capable, as shown in normal unconscious sleep, of enormous problem solving/rationalization power through whatever modality/context confronted in the environment. Animals, of course, are incapable of experiencing this form of linguistic-auditory hallucination because obviously they don’t have a language complicated enough for the development of personality, complex metaphor, and deeply analogous reasoning. Without a conceptual framework for complex personality narratives, common schizophrenic command hallucinations would not be possible.

Furthermore, I want to claim that the phenomenon of experiencing auditory hallucinations from an authoritative disembodied voice/spirit in response to novel stimulus/stress makes perfect sense in terms of Julian Jaynes bicameral theory of human evolution. He puts forwards lots of neurological/archeological evidence that until the environmental context of advanced civilization emerged, the psychic life of man was divided roughly into a bicameral order between Man and God(s), with the “God(s)” issuing direct behavioral control to the obeying “Man” in the advent of novel, stressful stimuli through auditory hallucination.  Jaynes speculated that the corresponding neural substrate for this bicameral mentality was (roughly speaking) the left/right temporal cortexes respectively. Modern neurimaging studies have corroborated this speculation and we already know from the classic Penfield stimulation studies that if you excite the right temporal cortical area, the majority of right-handed people will experience auditory hallucinations in terms of disembodied/authoritative voices speaking to them in terms of direct behavioral-social control (think of schizophrenics “obeying” the voices they hear automatically). This is also confirmed in modern transcranial magnetic stimulation studies. Furthermore, on the neurological level, we already know that the right hemisphere is better at performing vestigal “God” functions such as synthesizing complex information from novel stimuli and unconsciously “understanding” complex environmental information in terms that are relevant to the behavioral pragmatics of the “person” on the left side of the brain. Obviously this is a bit of a simplification, but behavioral and lesion-studies show overwhelmingly the functional lateralization of the neocortex and I have really seen no good overarching theory to explain why this is so except for Jaynes’ theory.

Accordingly, before modern civilization and its exponentially more complicated social hierarchies become an “input” into the incredibly plastic brain as known by modern neuropsychology, there was a bicameral split in mentality/brain function that was in terms of the synthetic “God” part of the brain providing behavioral input to the dominant “human,” left hemisphere of language/self initially in terms of the hallucinated voices of chieftans within small social groups and only later, dead chieftans and then dead god-chiefs, and finally, gods and god-kings/stewards. This evolution brought with it enormous complexity in social structure, creating the middle men of priesthood and spiritual ritual. This theory explains why it is was an almost universal human ritual to “feed” the dead(with god-kings spoiled with grand presentations of food and wealth) and provide them with everyday items necessary for living, because the progeny still “experienced” those chieftans in terms of prolonged, temporally delayed, auditory hallucinations (again, think of schizophrenics), providing social-hierarchical control which evolved into the elaborate god-kings rituals of ancient civilization and ultimately into the “spiritual” culture we have today, with a fanatical obsession with the afterlife , witnessed in nearly every culture around the world. This explains why our history is filled with stories of schizophrenic prophets who still “heard” these vestigal right-brain auditory hallucinations in terms of the cultural heritage of each individual culture, i.e God or whatever.

I highly recommend The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The antithesis of a crackpot, Jaynes was a lecturer at Princeton for decades, and was invited to lecture all across the world for elite academic crowds.  So while his theory is radical and the implications are paradigm-shifting for almost every academic field, only a few cautious supportors (Daniel Dennett for one, albeit with large reservations) ever caught on to his theory. I think this is largely because of the broadly multidisciplinary scope of Jaynes theory. The over-specialized academic world was simply bogged down by the sweeping nature of the bicameral theory, which requires people to rethink everything they have ever known about humans and human culture.   The broadly interdisciplinary theory links together many diverse, seemingly unrelated phenomena: the possible independence of right and left cortical hemispheres as shown in split-brain patients, schizophrenia and the overwhelming “reality” of their hallucinated voices and why they so often obey them, why so many people are convinced that they can speak/have spoken with dead relatives, God, spirits, etc., archeology and the importance of god-kings and idols for everyday social control in ancient civilizations (most houses were built surrounding a non-functional temple/”house” of their god-king where they offered food/supplies to them, similar to religious offerings today), why something so important as language could have evolved to be so lateralized when every other important function is bilateral for redundancy purposes and many, many other related phenomena. Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness is truly the “Origin of Species” for the 20th century.

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[Original Post]

What does it mean to be a human? What is being? What is the difference between the being of humans and the being of non-humans?

These are all important and difficult to answer questions. Martin Heidegger was one philosopher who took it upon himself to attempt to answer some of these questions. His aim was to work out the general meaning of being and to do so concretely. Did he succeed? Some would say yes, others no. In this post, I’d like to sketch out a part of his answer, focusing on the the last question: the difference between the being of humans and the being of non-human animals i.e. the ontological difference.

The distinction between being and beings is there, latent in [humans] and [their] existence, even if not in explicit awareness. The distinction is there; that is to say, it has the mode of being of [humans]: it belongs to existence. Existence means, as it were, “to be in the performance of this distinction.” Only a soul that can make this distinction has the aptitude, going beyond the animal’s soul, to become the soul of a human being…we call the distinction between being and beings, when it is carried out explicitly, the ontological difference.

I’d like to concentrate on the part I made bold. This is crucial to his definition of what it means to be a human being[Dasein]. Essentially, humans comport themselves toward their own being. Another way of putting this awkward phrase is that humans take a stand on their own being. This is what “being in the performance of [the ontological difference]” means. Through the particular ways in which humans act within the world, we make this ontological difference a part of our existential mode of being. This means we always perceive/conceive and act in the world in terms of the difference between being and beings, between the the ontological being of ourselves and the entities which make up the physical world. There is something-it-is-like to be us, and that something has to do with how we already pre-ontologically make a distinction between being and beings.

Whether or not you think of all this is useless metaphysical mumbo-jumbo or an historical attempt to answer one of the most important questions in philosophy is up to you, but hopefully I made it clear that Heidegger was at least an original thinker.

edit: I have updated the original post to fix the inconsistencies pointed out by Roman Altshuler.

UPDATE: What does it mean to be human: take two