Should We Assume All People Are Similarly Composed?

I'm not sure how far you can get with this one.

Philosophically speaking, "similarity" and "difference" are two sides of the same coin. Trivially, any two items are both similar and different. (They are similar because they are the focus of a particular act of comparison and different because there are two of them).

A pragmatist (philosopher) might argue that it is functional context which stresses either pole, not endemic qualities of the focal object. For example. at the psychological level those philosophers who argue that the "integrated self" is an illusion would point to the common experience we all have of holding dissonant ideas or personality* traits triggered by external circumstances. As for the significance physical similarities and differences you are likely to enter the political minefield of race and gender and inheritance.

Thank you, fresco. I appreciate your pragmatist perspective.

You've also made a good point about my question running into a philosophical problem, and that problem is that my question is just a rephrasing of the "what is life and existence" that has been picked over for thousands of years. It is pretty threadbare by now for those in the field, surely. But I wonder (and had hoped) to find some new-blood, if you will, that will add to the already vast body of knowledge that covers this topic.

I had hoped to make it provocative enough and to add it to enough categories that I'd received some input from some young minds that may have a philosophical bent without all the preconceived notions that come from the learned.

And to that end my plan for this topic was to have more of a brainstorm experience (maybe some added questions for clarity sake), where it isn't about who's philosophy of life is the most correct, but more about finding out what those who make up the greater culture of our world today think it means to be a human.

Yes, we can.

Stupidity is what makes everyone into the science experiments they are now.

Hence, "Great minds think alike".

(Some thoughts to help this topic get going.)

One perspective I've been reading a lot about lately stems from the existentialist view of life, and it asks the question, "What does it mean to live life authentically?" And even within the existentialist community this question takes on different meanings depending on how you define a human wholistically.

For instance if human beings have no soul they have no need to consider an extended existence pass their physical existence.

In another instance a human being with no spirit has no "need" for art or beauty, as these things are superfluous to basic human needs of existence.

Lastly if you accept that human beings exists separate from their physical presence what impact do human beings in this altered state affect the lives of other human beings that retain a physical presence in life?

A fundamental error into which it seems so many young people fall is in assuming that everyone is basically the same, and that they can extrapolate human character and predict human behavior based on what they see around them, or the thoughts which flit about in their own heads. Thus do the great lie and other socially manipulative techniques prosper.

Everyone is functionally the same - biologically altered here and there.

Reactions are slightly different, but excellent psycho-profilers are way ahead in discerning those properties.

The best way to understand "how different" people are from other people, is "elements". Some people are explosive - some people are the opposite, no more; no less. That's why it's so easy still. People who are unaware call it "different", but the psychically informed know it's simply "the opposite of a previous force".

arise superman.
thus sang zarathustra

As you probably know "living authentically", was one of Heidegger's central themes. By that I understood him to mean "being aware of the social conformities we might chose to live by", rather than acting automatically in a conditioned manner. So one feature of "being human" is "having choice".

Those philosophers who concur with the idea of "higher states of conscious" might assign Heidegger's "awareness" to such a state of transcendence. But the dichotomy of whether such states are attributable to physical or mental realms tends to be a non-issue...the dichotomy being too simplistic at such a level of analysis. Similarly, to attempt assign "art and beauty" to one side of that dichotomy is also simplistic, as in indeed would be an assignment to the dichotomy "psychological - social".

As humans with the evolutionary disposition to perceive pattern/make sense of, we tend to try to encapsulate all our experiences under the catch all phrase "our existence". But rarely is that word "existence" subject to analysis in pragmatic relativistic terms rather than absolutist ones. So asking "what if humans exist as...."is couched in terms of absolutist/naive realist concepts of "existence" as though anybody could definitively "know". Relativistically though, "spiritual existence" just works for some and not for others...end of ontological discussion.