Abstract
Besides sharing relations to the world with plants and animals, humans further are able to follow and through time maintain stable relations or bonds to particular and irreplaceable objects, including persons, whether they are distant or not in time or space. This means that the human world has a historical depth and a distal structure of trajectories and threads in time and space unique for the human “being-in-the-world.”
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Notes
- 1.
Although some proposals about this have been made, e.g., by I. Prigogine & Stengers (1984). Reference to life arriving as passenger on meteorites or the like doesn’t answer the question of origin. This does not mean that the “pure” entropic asymmetry as such is a sufficient definition of life. It is possible to construct an artificial devise, with an external source of energy, doing the same, in principle. In fact a modern refrigerator is an example. The important is that for life has the entropic asymmetry from the very beginning been the phenomenon guiding the evolution and individual development of living organisms which could not be understood independent of this guidance.
- 2.
In the same way, this does not mean that motion, or even self-initiated motion, or goal-directed motion, in itself is a sufficient definition of animal life. Artificial devices such as self-driving cars, mobile robots, homing missiles, drones, and lawn-movers are not animals. Self-initiated motion or locomotion, in search of vital objects, is defining animal life due to being the guiding phenomenon for the evolution and individual development of animal life and animals’ organisms. Other features being characteristic of animal life are derived from this fact.
- 3.
This is, in fact, the original meaning of the term “subject.”
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Mammen, J. (2017). A Human Psychology. In: A New Logical Foundation for Psychology . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67783-5_5
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