S02E02 – What does it mean to be human?

We continued our conversation from last week about what it means to be human. The blog posts and conversations from the kids indicated there was some emphasis on the physical differences. However, some other interesting keywords came up:

• Curiosity
• Adaptability
• Flexibility
• Processing of information
• Social
• Feelings
• Knowledge
• Control

The conversation led us into some new directions today like:

• What does it mean to consciousness?
• How do we know that a rock is not consciousness?
• When we say that we are “better” than dogs, how do we know?
• “We are better than dogs” is it a fact or an opinion?
• Can we ask the question, answer it ourselves and call it fair?
• Do plants have brains?
• What is the ultimate aim of human life? (kids went over what was their ultimate goals)
• If basic needs like food, shelter, and safety are met, what else are we looking for? Are pets better than us because they don’t have to struggle for any of those things?
• Why do we need education?
• Why can’t we just live in the jungle?
• Animals have alphas in the groups too, which means they are competitive as well. However, our competitive mechanisms are much complex e.g. we need a bigger car or a house, etc to show dominance. We forgo our freedom and comfort to achieve those things. Is our way better or easier or simpler?
• Why do we need “good” jobs?
• One kid eventually mentioned that it’s important for us to be happy. What makes us happy?
• When we say we are making “progress”, what exactly are we making “progress” toward?
• We want to be comfortable but we all do things we don’t want to do. Get up early in the morning for school or work etc, yet we talk about “freedom” a lot. Animals don’t have to do any of that, does that make them better than us?
• Humans are striving for control and importance.
• Humans want immortality.

A fascinating conversation today. We will wrap this up next week with some high-level takeaways.

Things to research

Someone mentioned that the theory of “evolution is just a theory“. So the task is to investigate the meaning of the below in scientific terms:

• Law
• Principle
• Theory

Things to think about

• Human progress: What does it mean? What are we progressing towards?

Blog Post

Recap the conversation today and write “what does it mean to be human?” again and reflect on your new understanding.

Maths Fun & Homework

If we start a coffee shop and we start getting one new customer every day who buys one coffee. If the coffee sells for $1 each, how much total money would we make after 1 year?

We focused on the part of figuring out how many coffees we sold in the year. So for instance in 3 days, we would have sold 6 coffees in total.

• Day 1 – 1 coffee sold
• Day 2 – 2 coffees sold
• Day 3 – 3 coffees sold

Now we just need to figure out how many coffees did we sell after 365 days.

Let’s see if we all can figure out a formula that we can use so that we don’t have to do this manually.