What is human nature?

A thing’s nature might be defined by what it does, i.e. the nature of light is to travel at 300,000 km/s. On the other hand a thing’s nature could be defined by what it is. Light is that which travels at 300,000km/s. Thus the ancient debate between Parmenides and Heraclites. So is humanness something we do or something we are? Plato attempted to answer this question by giving us a synthesis, or rather making us a synthesis. According to Plato, we are a rational mind (which is immaterial and eternal) and a sensing, emotive, material body, which acts. This paradigm is generally known as the traditional western rationalist view. It is basically dualistic in that it proposes that man is both a material and nonmaterial entity. Aristotle, though a student of Plato, was not an epistemological rationalist. He did however; broadly accept Plato’s dualistic view of humanity. He said “Man is by nature a political animal.”, and his basic political unit is the individual; a sovereign rational mind ruling a subject body. Building upon this principle, Aristotle concluded that the material world was meant to be ruled by rational minds, and less rational minds by more rational minds. The purpose of the mind being to rule all of nature.
Later philosophers such as Saul of Tarsus would hold a similar dualistic view. He wrote, “The spirit strives with the flesh, so that the good I would do, I do not” His writings heavily influenced St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Augustine held that the body was not merely a subject to be ruled by the mind/spirit but is actually inherently corrupt. Thomas Aquinas furthered the concept of mind ruling matter with his thesis that God (the supreme mind) can be known through nature (the material realm). Aquinas also proposed that just as the body is subject to the mind, so should the lesser mind be subject to the greater as all is subject to God. True happiness, he concluded, comes from knowing and loving God and thus submitting to His purpose, just as it is to the greatest good of the body to obey the mind. This is the traditional religious view.
One of the fundamental questions raised by these traditional views is, if the purpose of the mind is to control the body, how does it do it? The modern philosopher Rene Descartes approached this problem by first asserting the primacy of the mind “cogito ergo sum” and briefly it seemed as though he might break into a pure rationalist monism, denying the material world entirely. But in the end he accepted dualism. He proposed that the mind might be able to influence some very sensitive matter and through it the entire material world. I must say, as a fan of Descartes, he should have known better. Looking at it mathematically, no matter how small a number, you still cannot reach it from zero. Using only multiplication, even infinity times zero still equals zero.
This difficulty with dualistic rationalism opened the door for critics such as Thomas Hobbs. Hobbs suggested that the material world is all there is and that the “mind” is merely a function of the body. This view (not too surprisingly) is called materialism. According to Hobbs, the mind/body is a material machine, receiving material data and producing a material response. Sigmund Freud who proposed that the mind or psyche could be studied and predicted like any other natural phenomena advocated this view. Moritz Schlick added that even though the pattern may be complex, the mind is always seen to be aggressively perusing its own gratification, pleasures and desires; that is, the mind serves the body.
Much of this draws on the theories of Charles Darwin, who proposed that all life is the product of random mutations accumulated over time through natural selection. How then could a material process produce something nonmaterial? And if these mutations are truly random how could any of it have any propose?
Of course many traditional rationalist do not believe that the mind is produced by the body, but belongs to a separate realm entirely. If contact between these realms is actually possible (perhaps through a particular configuration of matter or such) then there is no reason why it could not be stumbled upon “accidently” by random mutation. As for purpose, surely matter that is utterly without mind can have no purpose, and virtually every rationalist would agree with that. But if there is such a thing as mind, then the process of evolution through random mutation can be seen as an epic journey of unguided matter seeking its master guided by the only glimmer of eminent divinity, natural selection.
There is, however, a school of thought that proposes that the body does produce the mind, or at least precedes it, the philosophy of existentialism. The existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said man is “condemned to be free” meaning that man can look to neither God nor society for absolutes or values. Even his own identity and nature is a matter of choice. But if this is the case, then the defining predicate for humanness is choice, made presumably with the mind. How then can one’s humanity precede one’s first choice, which is his essence? Sartre further undermined his own position by using ethical language such as “responsibility” and “bad faith”. Responsible? For what, to who? Presumably not God or society if they have no authority over us. Also, how can any choice (even the choice not to choose) be better or worse than any other choice if there is no objective standard by which judge?
More contemporary materialists have suggested the “Identity theory of mind”. This theory proposes that states of the physical brain are identifiable with states of the mind. At first glance this may seem more sophisticated than Hobbs, but under analysis we see that it brings nothing really new. It has always been known that when the eye (a physical organ) looked at something blue, the mind had a perception of blueness. Even Descartes would have agreed that the brain is probably involved in the transfer and that its methods are likely at least as consistent as the states of the external body. The question is, how is the observer contacted/generated? It would seem that studying neurons and synapses can get us no closer than studying eyes and limbs.
The problem of a material body being able to produce an observer (even if it is just “watching a movie” as the mechanistic view asserts) has proven so vexing that some materialists have suggested simply eliminating it. This is called “eliminative materialism”. This view claims that there is no observer, we are simply deluding our selves into thinking we exist. So who is deluding what? Or what is deluding who? Are our brains incapable of producing a thinking mind but somehow capable of producing a non-mind which is capable of thinking it is a mind? If this makes sense to you, perhaps you have been disillusioned and achieved a state of true mindlessness. For me it is still just a bunch of nonsense.
This brings us back to dualism. Perhaps it is our understanding of matter that is flawed. Perhaps advances in M theory or some new theory will give us new insights in this area, or perhaps not. In the mean time how about a quote from Thomas Hood,
“What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. What is the soul? It is immaterial.”

The Numerator

Division by zero is undefined, all math text say so, but why? The typical view of division is simple, how much of the denominator can you fit the numerator? So how many noughts can you fit in a number, say 1. The answer is really no more undefined then how many 2s go into 12. You could say 2 or 3 I suppose, but the correct answer is six. Likewise though you may say we could fit 10 or 20 or a 1,000 0s in 1, the correct answer is infinite.