"What Makes us Human" - what do *you* think?

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The broadcast was more that 6 weeks ago...it was only put on the web in the past week or so. I would not normally expect a response, except that Prof Fitzgerald is a personal aquaintance, who is fully aware of the intense levels of anxiety no response to a communication like that can cause in me, because I discussed it with him, at length, very recently.

Hold it up to the light any way you like and the only, possible NT emotions he could invoke are in the hostile and prejudicial range. There is no way he could be totally unaware of this.

Reality is that no-one will ever openly advocate rounding people up and placing them in camps, even the Nazis never did it that way, Jews were rounded up for resettlement (which they had been demanding all over Europe), disabled people were evacuated and rehoused, because openly admitting something like that just generates a huge backlash that prevents it happening. Even if people know what is going on in their hearts, as long as they have a rationale on the surface that they can live with, they prefer to get on with their lives and look the other way.

In an Irish context, there is little or no chance of anyone being rounded up, per se, for anything. The agenda here keeps us as disenabled as possible as a rationale for Aspies and HFAs being shuffled off into overpriced residential services that are somebody else's licence to print money, while people like us live out their lives in glorified open prisons totally at the mercy of service providers and voluntary organisations that dehumanise us as a way of life, for power, profit and prestige.

We are just another cash crop.

There are lots of things.

Spiritually, of course, there's the concept of the soul. If you want to translate that into non-theological terms, the soul could probably be defined as the collection of information that makes up a human being--the complexity of it that allows sentience and allows a human to think, feel, and connect to others and to the world.

So I think maybe a human being is what happens when a collection of information reaches critical mass and starts to ask "Why?".

That is exactly it, and besides, there is a lot of irrepairable harm a person can sustain without being shipped off for "special handling" per se.

That is another excellent definition.

Did you see the investigation on rte? It's horrible, in some of the worst ones they don't even allow family visits to the room unless the person there is gravely ill.

Well played.

I'm sticking with the genetic definition because I don't want to exclude those born with sufficiently profound mental retardation that prevents them from asking (even mentally) "why?" It's entirely possible that people with very profound mental retardation do think that question, but I'm not willing to risk it in the definition.

Keeping it genetic avoids any possibility of agreeing with this guy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

well i've always very strongly believed that the one thing that makes us as a race "human" is the ability to form emotional relationships.

but then, there are people like me, who are hardly capable of that...
so eh i'm not sure how to feel about that.

I was saying I would react differently if I heard the quote in a different context. The rounding people up was a political statement meaning if I heard the statement in context of losing basic human rights I would react very differently to the statement. It wasn't an objection. It was a clarification.

I don't have the exposure to society that most people have. The concept of dehumanizing people with disabilities seems alien to me. I've never really experienced it. I have a hard time believing it happens beyond the school yard bully type. I have an especially hard time believing it in the context of an awareness campaign. I know it happens but that knowledge is all theoretical. I think the intentions of why people say things are very important. People sometimes say things that have meanings they didn't intend.

One of the things I learned in CBT was to create alternative meanings to statements like this which is what I attempted to do. The common thinking error this attempts to solve is mindreading, that is, the belief one knows what another is thinking on the basis of what he says or does when in fact, we don't know. The creation of alternative possible meanings allows one to see that possibly their feelings in the situation are misplaced. If the issue is important, one might ask for clarification. It might not be possible in this case though.

I don't deny that there probably was a better way of saying the statement though.

Yep...with tears in my eyes.. and for the past week or so I have, in my possession, a serious complaint, with insufficient hard evidence to proceed, against a totally different residential service provider.

I have even seen convincing complaints that implicate people who have significant influence in the same organisations that claim to be campaigning for inspections and trying to protrect the residents.

(I have to be really careful what I say here.)

Knowing this stuff is going on, and knowing how many people are involved in a culture of conspiracy (where there is no great conspiracy but rather a lot of people covering for each other's little earners and transgressions on a quid pro quo basis) that protects it, without a chance of proving it for years has been killing me. I understand that you cannot proceed without proof, and why, but that doesn't help the people trapped in those dreadful places (that tend to sound like utopia on their websites) or save them from one moment of suffering or fear.

I just have this to say to that : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fAGzY9r ... ture=share

That's horrible, I hope somehow you get some more solid proof. Good luck to you and I hope you get rock solid proof soon.

Thank you...there is more than me involved, and we know we cannot even begin to unravel the whole nasty mess, but if we can pull even one person clear it will be wonderful.

Our hairless humanoid genes?

I have heard opinions similar to the one quoted in the original post in various places before. I agree with those here who say that they are highly flawed.

A few months ago, I heard a strikingly different opinion that caught my attention because it was so different from such conventional opinions. I don't know if I agree with it either, but it was refreshing for the contrast it provided to opinions like those in the original post.

The speaker basically said that what makes us human (or what distinguishes humans from animals - I forget how it was phrased) is how we struggle to understand each other and communicate with each other. Presenting communication as something that everyone engages in with difficulty and pitfalls, but we keep trying at it anyways.

The context for this statement was completely unrelated to autism, though I happen to know from another talk by the same speaker that she has an autistic grandson.

According to Wikipedia, a human is a bipedal primate characterized by a highly developed brain, capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and problem solving. This mental capability, combined with an erect body carriage that frees the hands for manipulating objects, has allowed humans to make far greater use of tools than any other living species on Earth. Other higher-level thought processes of humans, such as self-awareness, rationality, and sapience, are considered to be defining features of what constitutes a "person".