Who are we as humans?
Herman Cappelen, Chair Professor of Philosophy and Director of AI & Humanity Lab at the University of Hong Kong: We are linguistic creatures. Language shapes how we think and talk. It’s what enables us to plan and coordinate actions, and as such it is at the foundation of how we live with others. Language connects us to concepts, and when we communicate, we share concepts. Some concepts are particularly important to us, for example “person”, “agent”, “rationality”, “morality”, “freedom”, “consciousness” and “responsibility”. These concepts are under great stress because we are becoming increasingly entangled with non-human intelligences, which are also linguistic creatures of an alien kind. Their “language” emerges from a high-dimensional statistical space that is fundamentally opaque to us. As we integrate these systems into our lives, they will inevitably begin to shape our own linguistic environment. They will subtly alter the meanings of our words and the extensions of our concepts in ways we do not control and may not even perceive. If our world is built with words, the most critical human task is to take ownership of our conceptual toolkit. Our future will be determined by our skill, or lack thereof, as conceptual engineers.
Orit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany: One question we could ask is “Who is ‘we’, and who is human?” This question has animated the past 300 years of liberal political thinking and been the source of many of our greatest achievements in statecraft and democracy — and many of our worst horrors in genocidal killing, labour abuse and colonial extraction.
The most interesting thing in our present is that perhaps no one cares any more, and the real question has become “What is a machine that it might recognise (or imitate) a human?” and “What is a human that it might know a machine?” This is a different set of questions that sees “human” and “machine” as processes of learning and knowing the world. Such equivalences open to deep problems in standardising, automating and rationalising people, thinking, learning and even living, but it also opens to the possibility that neither humans nor technologies are stable entities but rather relational ones that are constantly evolving dependent on environment, society and culture.
The environment, or perhaps more appropriately the Anthropocene, extends this idea of machinic humanity. The idea of an Anthropocene (despite being scientifically challenged) inaugurates the idea that the fact that the “human” is now bequeathed new forms of agency to transform Earth systems and evolution itself. This is, again, not a category assigned to all humans in all geographies, but it is a new imaginary of what the human might be. This superhuman is linked to superintelligence, all ideals of exceeding or evading limits to biological systems through technology, that itself is now ordained to command evolution itself.
David Ludwig, Associate Professor at Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands: Philosophical debates about human nature often revolve around the opposition between universalism and relativism. While universalist visions of human nature are expressed in both monotheistic religions and Enlightenment philosophies, their current articulations are most clearly rooted in the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s: psychologists developing theories of the universal structure of the human mind, linguists hypothesising that a universal grammar underlies the surface diversity of human languages and anthropologists speculating about universal principles of organising human societies. In its secular version, universalism explains who we are as humans by pointing to our shared evolutionary history, which shapes how our brain and mind function, which in turn shape our cultures and societies. The cognitive revolution responded to a culturalist relativism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that questioned narratives of universal rationality and civilisation by pointing to the striking diversity of cultures and societies around the world. For cultural relativists, diversity itself was the answer to the question of who we are as humans. While the cognitive revolution pointed to commonalities underlying this diversity, it was not the last word in the debate but rather produced a fierce backlash among postmodern and post-structuralist philosophers aiming to deconstruct claims of universality as cultural ideologies.
Addressing the question of human nature in the 21st century requires that we think beyond this legacy of contrasting universalism and relativism. In their generalised form as philosophical doctrines, both universalism and relativism lack credibility. Sure, we’re all members of the same species and therefore share basic bodily structures from our brains to our genes. Similar minds emerge from similar bodies — humans’ affective and cognitive worlds also exhibit striking resemblances if described at a sufficient level of abstraction. No matter the cultural context, humans are a unique species with a unique profile of capacities including intellectual curiosity, caring affection and cruel violence. Describing universal human nature at such a high level of abstraction, however, also runs the risk of obscuring the diversity of human experiences and the radically different ways in which human societies organise themselves and engage with the environment. At the same time, pointing to this diversity does not provide justification of cultural relativism as a general philosophical doctrine. On the contrary, the ubiquity of intercultural encounters in the 21st century demonstrates that it is equally insufficient to exclusively focus on difference. Understanding who we are as humans requires that we pay equal attention to our similarities and differences rather than pitching them against each other in generalised doctrines of universalism and relativism.
In our philosophy of intercultural encounters,1 we propose a framework of “partial overlaps” as an alternative that explores overlaps between knowledge systems, values and world-views while taking the partialities of such overlaps seriously. It is through the interplay of overlaps and their partialities that we reach beyond simplifying doctrines that are affirming or rejecting universality. A perspective of partial overlaps allows us to ask how to facilitate meaningful intercultural dialogue and build multilateral solidarity without downplaying differences and tensions between us. The human condition is about our ability to understand each other and struggle together, but also about our diversity and capacity to envision radically different futures. Any attempt to address human nature while focusing exclusively on similarities or on differences will result in an impoverished picture of this complex and messy reality.
Yasuo Deguchi, Professor in the department of philosophy and Dean of the Graduate School of Letters at Kyoto University, Japan: Nowadays we are so accustomed to the modern ideal of the human being as an autonomous, self-standing individual that we often forget that it emerged only in the course of modern Western philosophy. According to this self-understanding, humans occupy a privileged position in the universe, thanks to the impressive intellectual capabilities we supposedly possess.
This might capture some essential aspects of our self-understanding, but it is questionable to suppose that it gives the full picture of who we really are. To elucidate this, I would like to suggest that we are essentially beings marked by two fundamental ‘incapabilities’: no individual can perform even the simplest somatic action alone and no individual can fully control the others upon whom that action depends. These amount to saying that any action is fundamentally collective, achievable only through an inherent mutual reliance with a vast array of others. Thus, every action — such as playing football, riding a bicycle to a destination or even quietly thinking to oneself — is made possible only through the cooperation of somatic systems, material implements, civic infrastructures and non-human partners that lie beyond any individual’s control.
Accordingly, the fundamental incapabilities lead us to the realisation that the true subject of an action is not a self-sufficient “I” but what can be called a multi-agent system — that is, a coordinated whole comprising all agents whose involvement is necessary for a particular somatic action. As such a system indispensably includes “I” as a member, its proper pronoun is not “it” nor “they” nor “you” but “we”. In view of this, I call this shift of the subject of somatic action from “I” to “we” as the we-turn of action, and insofar as the self is essentially the subject of an action, the self itself should be shifted from “self as I” to “self as we”. From this perspective, humans are not “self” but “members of self” that consists of human and non-human lives, inanimate natural phenomena, artefacts, and so on.
Does this shift undermine our dignity? Not at all. Our dignity does not rest on sovereign capability but on the openness revealed by fundamental incapabilities. What makes us who we are consists in being part of the whole to which we pertain, and this opens up radical equality among the members of any given “we”. Each of the members is equally a necessary partner in the action at hand, whether human or non-human, such as animals, artefacts or the natural environment.
Thus, to ask, “Who are we as humans?” is to recognise ourselves as part of a multi-agent system—“we”. It is to reconceive our identity not as self-sufficient individuals but as beings fundamentally constituted by and open to our inherent relationships with a vast and diverse network of agents. To understand humanity, then, is to situate ourselves as equal, co-dependent partners within this broader network of “fellows” — human and non-human alike.
How can we live together as societies?
Herman Cappelen: A central challenge for any society is navigating the conflicts that arise from competing interests, differing values and scarce resources. These tensions occur between individuals, across groups and increasingly, between humans and the non-human agents. Faced with such conflict, we have two fundamental options: force or talk. We can let might make right or we can use language to deliberate and seek common ground. The path of talk is the foundation of all civil order. It is the work of law, politics and diplomacy. But for talk to function, it requires a shared language. This means more than a shared vocabulary. It requires that we assign shared content to our key terms. Without a common understanding of what constitutes a promise, an agreement or a right, deliberation is simply an exercise in talking past one another. This shared understanding, however, is never permanently fixed. Language is dynamic.
We are in a constant state of linguistic negotiation over the boundaries of our concepts. The great risk is that these negotiations can fail. When they do, we face communicative breakdown. If we can no longer agree on the meaning of the words we use to resolve our disputes, language ceases to be a useful tool. Deliberation stalls, trust erodes, and the space for peaceful resolution shrinks. At that point, the alternative of force becomes increasingly attractive. This is how civil societies begin to unravel.
Next, we must project this dynamic onto our future with AI. Disagreements with and about these systems are inevitable. They will arise from their misuse by humans in warfare and for social control. They will stem from direct competition for resources and the economic disruption of job displacement. More fundamentally, conflict could emerge from a basic misalignment between their goals and our own. We must try to resolve these conflicts and align these systems with our values, a task that, at its core, is a form of “talk”. But what happens if our linguistic negotiations with these alien intelligences break down? A communicative breakdown with a powerful autonomous system would be a failure on a different scale entirely, potentially a catastrophic one. Our ability to live together will depend on a commitment to the continuous, difficult work of linguistic negotiation and conceptual coordination.
Orit Halpern: There is obviously no one answer, but one way to think about this is through the political promise of ubiquitous computing and AI.
At the start of the cybernetic revolution, Norbert Wiener raised a concern—what did it mean to learn? In a famous book I Am a Mathematician, published in 1956 at the start of the civil-rights movement in the US, Wiener wrote that at the age of 11 he had already recognised the limits to the idea that mathematical logic might be able to represent the world and that the systematic and systemic application of rules might equate with education. Education is of course beyond learning: it’s an institutional and social practice, “man’s engagement with his environment”, to quote Wiener.2
Wiener only repeated a statement made two years before concerning the Brown vs the Board of Education lawsuit that “separate” education cannot be “equal”. The case put before the courts was that the very institutional and structural separation of Black children from white produced a sense of inferiority, and deprived Black students of their potential to become part of the demos; to enact political will and to become full citizens. This reduction of learning to rules, it can be deduced, forestalled the possibility of the US realising its potential as a diverse democracy. Simply learning the same thing in a different (and impoverished) institutional setting would not result in the same future.
These concerns appear distant from our present, but they are not. The myth of technocratic solutions to political and social challenges obscures the social context — that is, histories, ideologies, aesthetics and institutions — that shape what is learned, how, for whom and to what ends. To return consciousness to learning — that is to say history, knowledge, difference and above all an idea of futurity — is the only thing that might also enable equity and democracy. There is no discussion of artificial general intelligence that includes the question of where and how one learns, or that understands learning beyond the ability to adapt to change to an existing condition. There is no concept of smartness that includes projection — the ability to imagine counterfactual and alternative realities. There is no possibility within our technical imaginary of a machine learning that can envision political possibility. The discourse of smartness has merged technical and bio-determinism and replaced the language of education with that of adaptation and evolution. The idea of change is now in the language of self-organising systems.
So perhaps attempting to live together means not thinking about technology as a solution to politics, but as itself political. Cybernetics, in turn, made governance explicit. The cybernetic city of the future should be one that does not automate the social but reflexively seeks to experiment and consciously reflect upon the political. Ultimately, the challenge we face is how to learn in new ways, beyond the parameters of our own conditioning, to envision new forms of connection to the machines, humans and animals with which we share our world.
David Ludwig: Societal challenges, from biodiversity loss and climate change to economic inequality and malnutrition to pandemics and pollution, are globally intertwined. Living together requires addressing these problems together. In times marked by adversarial economic and geopolitical competition, however, it is salient that current ideologies and institutions are fundamentally inadequate for fostering positive coexistence on a global scale. That we’re still organising our moral commitments and political strategies along the borders of nation states is the source of deep dysfunctionality and endless suffering. We are consuming products that have been created in violent working conditions outside our own nation states, we’re waving our hands at overconsumption because climate change can’t be resolved on a national scale and we’re depriving immigrants of empathy and solidarity because they happen to be born in different nations.
It is often easier to diagnose a problem than to solve it. The nation state is largely an invention of the 19th century and carries much of its historical baggage — for example, the idea of a national identity defined by a dominant ethnic group and the focus on competition between nations for global influence. But globalisation does not provide a simple remedy for living together on a global scale, either. Rather than fostering positive coexistence within and across societies, globalisation risks directing decision-making processes away from people to large technocratic organisations and well-resourced corporations.
Living together in a Planetarised Humanity therefore requires strategies for navigating scales, becoming more local and global at the same time. To live together well, we need to scale down — allowing for meaningful participation and decision-making at local scales. A Planetarised Humanity cannot be governed top-down but requires bottom-up organisation at the community level. At the same time, living together in a Planetarised Humanity cannot be organised exclusively on a local scale — many challenges from climate change to pandemics are global and require global coordination.
A transformative perspective for living together needs to be organised across multiple scales, challenging the dominant perspective of the national scale both by scaling down to the local and scaling up to the global. Such a perspective is not only central for societal coexistence but also for understanding the role of science in a Planetarised Humanity. As an instrument for national competition, science often exacerbates socio-ecological crises by accelerating destructive competition — think of an “AI race” or a “biotech race” between national innovation systems — rather than positioning science in the service of positive coexistence. In contrast, science for planetary humanisation needs to be decisively community-based (asking how science can be useful in addressing local challenges) and internationalist (asking how science can be useful in addressing global challenges).
Yasuo Deguchi: The foregoing discussion might make it seem as if recognising our true agency as consisting in a holistic, interdependent network of agents immediately guarantees societal flourishing. The we-turn’s suggestion is not such an optimistic idea. Indeed, the kind of egalitarian vision of beings that has been described above is often hampered by the existence of a “we” that is apparently evil. Thus, the we-turn of action is only the beginning of the story, and it is followed by a series of we-turns of values.
As the basic unit of action shifts from “I” to “we”, we need to reconceptualise various axiological notions that shape our society. Articulation of what a good “we” is assumes the pivotal importance among these. The we-turn claims that a better “we” is a larger “we” that transcends opposition, conflict or hostility between smaller “wes”, achieving the fulfilment of all its members in a non-asymmetrical way.
This stands in stark contrast to a bad “we”, which often manifests as a totalitarian “we”. Totalitarian “wes” are characterised by external exclusivism and internal oppressionism. External exclusivism involves arbitrarily hardening the boundaries of a “we”, leading to hostile attitudes towards its outsiders and treating them as enemies. Oppressiveness, on the other hand, imposes specific interests, values and principles on internal members, suppressing dissent and creating a hard “we” that binds its members tightly.
A common feature of bad “wes” is “centre-occupiedness”. This is a state in which a specific individual or group monopolises the centre of the “we's” interests and values, marginalising others and forcing them to serve the interests of the centre in a unilateral, asymmetrical way. Thus it represents a state of zero-sum games over the centre — if someone takes the centre, someone else is excluded. Examples include dictatorships and social discrimination. On a larger scale, anthropocentrism is also a form of centre-occupied “we”, where humanity monopolises the centre of an ecosystem.
The alternative, and the essence of a good “we”, is “empty-centredness”. In an empty-centred “WE,” the centre is kept open, not occupied by any specific member, values, doctrines or customs. This deliberate or unintentional avoidance of centre-occupation means there are no one-sided, asymmetrical relationships between members. It is a concept that goes beyond various forms of centre-occupied “wes”, including anthropocentrism and speciesism. In an empty-centred “we”, all we-members simultaneously withdraw from zero-sum games of incessant competitions.
Historically, there have been attempts to overcome various forms of centre-occupied “wes”, such as the abolition of slavery, the rise of feminism, the promotion of animal rights and increasing concern with the natural environment. With the rise of AI, our task is supposedly to extend this emancipation to them, welcoming them as our fellows.
To live together thus demands that we make continuous joint efforts to make sure nobody monopolises the centre of power, benefit and value. Only through such efforts can we attain a society in which humans and non-humans, whether natural or artificial, can flourish together.
How can we ensure a sustainable future for the planet?
Herman Cappelen: The problem of sustainability is not, at its root, a technical one. We treat it as an issue to be solved by better engineering or smarter economics, but these approaches only address the symptoms. Our unsustainable trajectory is the logical output of the conceptual software our civilisation runs on. We are not failing by accident: we are diligently executing a flawed program. This program is built on defective conceptual tools. One is our concept of “progress”, defined as limitless growth. Another is our concept of “nature”, which frames the planet as an external resource. But the most fundamental flaw may be in our concept of “the human agent” itself. We operate with a model of a discrete, biologically bounded self, a “natural” human distinct from its tools. This concept is already crumbling as our minds extend into our technologies, and it becomes incoherent as AI is woven into our cognitive architecture. If the problem is conceptual, the solution must be as well. Securing a sustainable future requires a planetary project of conceptual engineering. We must redefine progress as resilience and well-being. We must cultivate a concept of “nature” that reflects deep interdependence.
Crucially, we must engineer a new, more fluid concept of the self — one that acknowledges our existence as cognitively extended beings, inseparable from the technological and ecological systems we inhabit. This project is made urgent by AI. If we build AI systems based on a sharp distinction between “human” and “machine”, we will create brittle and adversarial relationships. If we ask an AI to “optimise for the user” based on a narrow, individualistic concept of the self, it will do so at the expense of the cognitive and ecological systems that actually sustain that user. We cannot align AI to a sustainable future until we have first aligned our own concepts. Ensuring a sustainable future is therefore the ultimate test of our capacity as linguistic creatures. It demands that we move beyond using our concepts to describe the world and toward taking active responsibility for their design. True planetary stewardship is not just the management of physical resources. It is the conscious, careful stewardship of our conceptual ecosystem, starting with the very concept of what it means to be human.
Orit Halpern: Stop burning carbon-based energy sources! That’s obvious of course.
The larger question is one of value. Ensuring a sustainable future for the planet entails reimagining economy above all. “How we produce value, for what and for whom” transforms how we build infrastructure, use energy, construct technology and to what ends.
This also means reimagining what sustainable denotes. Is it the continuation of the same social, political and economic orders we have in the present?
Arguably we have been given vast technical powers to be able to evaluate, model and understand Earth and human systems at new scales and temporalities — and these must be used in new ways. Not to continue the past but to invent futures. This means that we need to understand technology as augmenting and assisting us to become human. Therefore sustainability needs to be about sustaining life’s possibilities, not conserving the present.
And technology must be reframed not in terms of replacing the human. Replacement theories are theories of extinction and violence; they assume some will make it and some will not, and they assert technology not as a choice but a predetermined force. This also imagines the future as already preordained rather than emergent.
A sustainable future is thus a future that is understood in terms of change. And sustainability must define a process and potential, not an existing state.
David Ludwig: We can’t innovate our way into a sustainable future if we don’t fundamentally rethink our relationship with nature. Sustainability discourses are everywhere, from the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations to the corporate responsibility goals of major companies. And still planetary crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss continue to unfold at a rapid pace with dramatic and unmitigated socioeconomic consequences around the globe. The status quo of sustainability discourses has become part of the problem rather than the solution — while another sustainability report or summit may provide participants with the comfort of “doing something”, they will not generate transformation for a sustainable future.
“Sustainability” is not a neutral label but emerged from a deeply modern discourse that primarily relates to nature as a resource system. As a natural resource system, nature provides modern societies with raw materials for economic growth and commodity production. However, many of these resources are depletable: there is only so much oil we can extract, only so many trees we can cut down, only so much arable land we can turn into farms, only so many rivers we can dam and only so many fish we can take from the ocean. Sustainability discourses reflect both a modern understanding of nature as a resource system and a recognition that resource systems can be depleted when extraction exceeds their self-regenerative capacities. While sustainability discourses remind us of the need for careful resource management, they do not tell us how to avoid resource depletion in a modern economy predicated on the promise of indefinite economic growth. We are at risk of building our future visions on an intellectual chimera — a modern version of the perpetuum mobile, an impossible machine that creates more energy than it consumes.
Paradoxically, a sustainable future may require us to move beyond the very notion of sustainability. Recognising that sustainability is itself a relatively recent and deeply modern invention also opens space to envision other futures. For example, we may call Indigenous communities “sustainable”, but their understanding of nature has little to do with modern ideas of managing depletable resource systems. In Indigenous philosophies, non-destructive relations with nature are based not on instrumental management demands but on norms of respectful engagement based on reciprocity and interdependency. Non-humans appear not only as resources but as ancestors and friends with mutual commitments. As humanity is stumbling through failed promises of perennial growth and progress, Indigenous philosophies provide powerful lessons about the possibility of building different relations with nature. It would be too simple, however, to assume that Indigenous philosophies can be taken out of their local context and simply transferred into non-Indigenous societies. Instead, the lesson is about building different relations through mutual learning. A sustainable future requires that we (re)learn to relate to nature as more than a resource system and develop novel ways of co-creating positive coexistence.
Yasuo Deguchi: Sustainability, in the we-turn view, is nothing but a planet-scale empty-centred “we”. Ecosystems themselves display this logic: if any species monopolises the centre, collapse follows. Resilience comes from holistic interdependence. Our task is to generalise that pattern to human social-ecological systems.
We can find a tangible image of what such generalisation entails in the ancient cedar forests of Yakushima, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located off the southern coast of Kyushu island, Japan. There, not even the thousand-year-old Yakusugi cedars claim the centre of their ecosystem; should any organism attempt such dominance, the system would unravel. The cedars are not forest dictators but members who step back from the centre and thereby maintain collective flourishing.
Recently, I had an occasion to visit Yakushima. My own immersion in those forests, guided by Yakushima’s residents, confirmed that one can feel the release from zero-sum habits when the surrounding “we” remains open-centred. The island’s people, organisms and circulating ocean–atmosphere currents together form what I call “Greater Yakushima”, a multi-agent system that constantly reasserts its empty-centredness.
In this empty-centred “we”, humans recognise themselves not as planetary sovereigns but as “paracentral” beings — entities that exist in the neighbourhood of the centre, playing a vital role but never monopolising it. This reorientation from a centre-occupied human-centric view to a paracentral one is essential for achieving the fulfilment of all members within the planetary “we”.
So, what does it mean, in concrete, practical terms, to act as paracentral beings and ensure the planetary centre remains open? It means initiating a series of interlocking commitments that form the basis of a new movement. A primary task is to refound our legal systems on the principle of the we-turn, moving beyond the anthropocentrism that currently occupies the centre. Concurrently, we must catalyse a shift in our economy, moving away from zero-sum competition over profit towards a system where value is co-created within an open centre, dismantling the asymmetrical relationships of a bad “we”. And, perhaps most fundamentally, this involves reforming educational models built on a narrow meritocracy. We need an education that illuminates our fundamental incapabilities, fostering the humility and mutual respect required to build a truly multilayered society of values.
Through these commitments, sustainability ceases to be a managerial project of “saving” an external nature and becomes a reflexive discipline: the art of continuously keeping the centre open so that the entire assemblage can co-flourish. Climate mitigation, biodiversity restoration and equitable transitions are thus facets of a single architectural practice — guarding against any resurgence of centre-monopolies. When humans accept the role of paracentral participants rather than planetary sovereigns, creativity is released from zero-sum constraint, redundancy replaces fragility, and the tranquil breath beneath Yakusugi crowns becomes a model for the atmosphere we share.
1 Ludwig, David and Charbel El-Hani (2025) *Transformative Transdisciplinarity. An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy*. Oxford University Press. 2 Wiener N (1956) *I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy; an autobiographical account of the mature years and career of Norbert Wiener and a continuation of the account of his childhood in Ex-prodigy.* Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday.: 323-325.
