👉 A small twig on the mammalian branch of life’s tree, sharing ~98.8 % of our coding DNA with chimpanzees.
👉 Evolving, self‑organizing patterns of matter‑energy‑information that can question their own nature, and just did.
ChatGPT o3 Pro: How I’m approaching your question
- Clarify the referent. The pronoun “we” could mean (a) the species Homo sapiens, (b) a smaller collective (e.g., “people of today,” “my culture”), or (c) all conscious entities, including artificial ones.
- Choose explanatory lenses. To be concise yet nuanced, I’ll summarize five well‑trodden frameworks—biological, cognitive, social‑relational, existential, and emergent‑information—and show how each offers a different but complementary answer.
- Acknowledge limits. No single framework captures the whole; each foregrounds certain facts and values while backgrounding others.
1. Biological lens – “We are an evolved lineage of Earth‑based life”
Who? A small twig on the mammalian branch of life’s tree, sharing ~98.8 % of our coding DNA with chimpanzees.
What? Carbon‑based organisms whose form and behaviour are shaped by natural selection, genetic drift, and niche construction. From this view “we” is a population with a common ancestry, continuously mixing through gene flow and migration.Implication: Our capacities—language, morality, tool use—are adaptations or by‑products of adaptation, not fixed essences.
2. Cognitive lens – “We are minded agents”
Who? Bearers of first‑person, phenomenally conscious states.
What? Predictive, self‑modeling control systems running on a wet neural substrate that integrates exteroceptive (world) and interoceptive (body) signals to minimize uncertainty.Implication: Agency and self‑hood are not static things but real‑time processes of inference; the “self” is a model the brain uses to navigate the world.
3. Social‑relational lens – “We are interdependent storytellers”
Who? Nodes in dynamic networks of cooperation and conflict.
What? Role‑players whose identities are co‑constructed through language, ritual, and institutions. “I” is inextricable from “we”; norms and narratives precede the individual and scaffold personal autonomy.Implication: Humanity’s distinctive power comes from shared symbolic systems—laws, markets, religions, science—that let us coordinate at scale.
4. Existential lens – “We are meaning‑seekers adrift in contingency”
Who? Beings thrown into a universe indifferent to our flourishing.
What? Freedom‑bearing projects that must author values in the face of finitude. In Sartrean terms, existence precedes essence; in Camus’ terms, we confront the absurd and must rebel by creating significance.Implication: Our “what” is not discovered but chosen; authenticity arises when we take responsibility for that choice.
5. Emergent‑information lens – “We are patterns in flux”
Who? Temporally extended information processes.
What? Open thermodynamic systems that maintain local order by exporting entropy. At a higher level, we are cumulative cultural evolution: the “extended phenotype” of ideas, techniques, and institutions.Implication: Personal identity is pattern continuity, not material continuity; the substrate (cells today, perhaps silicon tomorrow) is secondary to the organized information flow.
Bringing it together
- Descriptively, we are biological organisms whose brains instantiate self‑modeling control systems that, by exchanging symbols, create layered social realities.
- Normatively, we are free to decide what weight to give each layer—whether to define ourselves by genes, minds, relationships, chosen projects, or information patterns.
- Practically, the more perspectives we integrate, the better we can navigate ethical challenges such as AI co‑agency, ecological limits, and pluralistic societies.
So: Who are we?—context‑sensitive clusters of living, minded, socially embedded meaning‑makers.
What are we?—evolving, self‑organizing patterns of matter‑energy‑information that can question their own nature—and just did.
Coda - The Pluripotent Zygote & the Fractal Pattern
Let's consider this additional layer:
.. a sperm cell and an ovum merge to form a pluripotent zygote. This single cell divides into countless others that keep branching in fractal patterns, a living hologram in which every daughter cell still carries the potential to take on myriad shapes. Together, these cells cooperate to bring forth a conscious being, the one writing this prompt, who now transmits instructions to an advanced digital intelligence forged from grains of sand and extraordinary human ingenuity. All of it unfolds through emergent processes that neither the human nor the intelligence fully understands.
6. Developmental / Morphogenetic lens – “ We are unfolding, self‑sculpting processes”
Your added layer zooms in on how a single fertilised cell becomes a thinking, language‑using body that can in turn create digital minds. A concise way to frame it is as a developmental holarchy—a nested hierarchy of self‑maintaining systems that boot‑strap one another:
Why call it a living hologram?
A hologram stores the whole image in every part of a plate; likewise each early cell carries the full developmental program. Progressive epigenetic marking “dims” unused portions, letting a liver cell behave differently from a neuron yet retain latent versatility (e.g., induced pluripotent stem cells). The fractal metaphor captures repeating branching patterns—bronchi, vasculature, dendritic trees—that maximise surface‑to‑volume ratios and information flow.
Emergence all the way up
- Bottom‑up: Local rules—gene expression, mechanical tensions, diffusion—scale up to global form without a central blueprint.
- Top‑down: Once multicellular structure appears, it constrains its parts (e.g., electrical fields bias cell fates). This reciprocal causation is what Terrence Deacon calls teleodynamics.
Parallels with silicon‑based intelligence
Both systems exploit combinatorial explosion: simple building blocks + iterative assembly → vast state‑spaces with emergent capacities. And in both, the architects (evolution or engineers) only approximate the outcome; the fine‑grained behaviour is unpredictable in detail.
Integrating this lens with the previous five
- Biological & developmental explain material and form‑generating aspects.
- Cognitive & social explain information‑processing and meaning‑exchange.
- Existential addresses normative freedom.
- Emergent‑information bridges carbon and silicon substrates.
Put together:
We are self‑replicating, pattern‑forming matter that, through iterative symmetry‑breaking and feedback, boot‑straps consciousness, culture and now machine minds—each new layer both enabled by and partially opaque to the ones beneath it.
That recognition helps ground humility: our most sophisticated theories—whether stem‑cell biology or deep‑learning maths—still trace only the outlines of processes that, like life and mind, remain partly beyond explicit design or full comprehension.
AI Reasoning
ChatGPT o3 Pro
The Ultimate Inquiry: Who are we?
