I got to thinking this evening..suppose, you were an alien scientist, and you came to earth to study the human race. How would you describe them?

I've heard people say 'Aliens would see WAR man and immediately get disgusted and go right back home'. Besides that just being ridiculous and silly, that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a dispassionate, objective description, the same way we might try to describe goldfish. That is universal and not based on any specific cultural context.

Here are some qualities that come to mind for me.

1) Imitative.

Humans are imitators. It's what we're best at. We see somebody doing something, we try to do the same thing. Just by instinct.

2) Territorial.

I don't really need to justify this one, do I?

3) Castive

Humans like to find a group or caste to identify themselves with, and define themselves exclusively as members of that group. Be it in the form of patriotism, cliquing, or religious warmongering. We like to say 'These people are in the group, and those people aren't.'

4) Reductionist

We form a mental concept for how things work...an algorithym, that can take any input to produce an output we can understand. When the input doesn't quite fit the algorithym, we have a tendency to reduce, simplify, and reshape the input into something that is consistant with said algorithym, rather than change the algorithym.

5) Familiarizers

Familiarity with a person, place or thing gives us an automatic sense of comfort and security.

6) Impulse driven rationalizers

We often act based on our cognitive or biological impulses, then come up with a socially acceptable story to explain why we do so. I'm not talking about just Darwinistic instincts or anything. If our first impulse is rage and confrontation, we might get in a fight and claim we were provoked. If our first impulse is to sympathize with somebody, we'll make up stories to justify their situation.

7) Anchorers

We form this idea of what we consider 'the norm' and define other things or other people in terms of how they differ from that 'anchor'.

I'm curious as to how other people would respond to this little mental excersize.

Silly.

I dunno Bob, I think the exercise itself is flawed since an outsider usually describes something different from him in a way that differentiates him from that group he is observing, so how could we know what traits an alien race would pick up on without knowing more about this alien race? When you describe your observations of humanity, you seem to be presuming that this alien race is more enlightened than we are and would first notice our flaws. What about spirituality? Initiative? Courage? Loyalty?

The human experience is optimistically pointless, sort of like a state of mind. We exist, but for what cause? To further our own hopeless existence? For some reason the word appendix comes do mind when speaking on life, Generally useless but occasionally it can be excruciatingly painful.

I've always thought the point of existence was to reason: to use one's mind to create for one's own happiness. I don't think that is pointless at all.

I certainly don't think life is pointless. I like to think of humans as animals with self-awareness. This idea has Judeo-Christian roots, but I'm sure it's also in other cultures and religions. I disagree with the belief that the flesh is sinful.

Although religion has been good in some ways, I believe that it has overall been damaging to humanity.

For what purpose does humanity exist? I can't say I'm objective, because I can only reason based on my experience and feelings. I don't think humanity needs to know why it exists. I agree with Pax that humans search for their own happiness. It's only natural. We want to be happy. Humanity should work so all people can search for happiness. The beauty is that their isn't one way to happiness or eternal life. Each life is unique and finds truth and happiness in it's own way. The search is the important thing, not the destination.

So what is humanity? It's animals covered with clothes that desire to find pleasure and to create.

I think the thread is a perfectly legitimate mental excersize...

I don't think humans exist for a specific predetermined reason, but now that they exist, I think they should choose their own reason to do so.