What exactly is the human condition?
Wikipedia says the human condition encompasses the unique features of being human.
It has some suggestions... "meaning of life, the search for gratification, the sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, and the awareness of the inescapability of death."
Popular culture and art has always bothered itself with this question. What does it mean to be human?
Movies like the Matrix have addressed this in spades, where machines conflict with humanity. Fallibility, and the potential to outperform logical perfection, is what separates humans from machines. The mechanism of this weakness and strength, is said to come from the ever-uncharacterizable free will, something that no artificial intelligence can replicate.
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| Free will breaks all computer programs!! |
Free will is one of the biggest tropes in artistic definitions of humanity, followed closely by the fighting human spirit and human mortality. Love is the other contender (the undisputed winner in cinema at least). In the more religious context, the soul is the signature of humanity. Vital essence.
I will ruminate on the various aspects of the human condition in multiple posts. This is the first one, concerning free will.
Is free will human? Can a machine have free will? And what is free will anyway?
