While we have a tendency to define ourselves based on our likeness to other things—we say humans are like a god, like a clock, or like a computer—there is a countervailing impulse to understand our humanity through the process of differentiation. And as computers increasingly come to take on the qualities we once understood as distinctly human, we

Humanity no longer looks at itself with quite as much unabashed admiration as it once did. Fewer people today believe that we are made in God’s image or have any natural rights to dominion over the earth. We are aware of our capacity for self-destruction,

Against this, I take the rather boring view that you and I are human beings and that our mental lives belong to the animals we are. That we are creatures of this kind is not something we should hope to learn by introspection.