what is human nature?

i recently got into a discussion about human nature, and towards the end of the discussion, after we hadn't made too much progress in spite of the length of my arguments, i realized i had made a lot of relevant points but had not hit the nail on the head. so, afterwards, i dissected my arguments, refined them, and combined them with some new ideas i had. the outcome was the following:

1) usually, when we talk about human nature, we don't realize that we are actually talking about animal nature; in most situations, human nature can be reduced to animal nature. animal nature is fairly straightforward: the primary goal is survival, and then power and pleasure are secondary goals. so what separates human nature from animal nature? the answer is obvious: consciousness. reflexivity -- the ability for us to look in the mirror and say, "that is me" -- is what separates us from almost every other species. reflexivity allows for us to take certain actions that would appear to contradict our animal nature, with suicide being the most obvious example. there are other psychological/psychiatric cases or states that would also qualify as existing in opposition to our animal nature, but for the most part, it seems that consciousness just seems to exacerbate and complicate the secondary goals of power and pleasure, expressing them in the most convoluted, subtle, and/or incomprehensible ways. sometimes this can cause the secondary goals to interfere with the primary goal, but in most immediate situations, people's instinctual drive to survive seems to successfully prevail.

2) "human nature" = genetic predispositions resulting in behavioral tendencies; in a real world sense, it is genetics as manifested within the spectrum of interactions with environment that are culturally "acceptable" (acceptable meaning functionally realizable and also deemed "neutral" during developmental years and only later, at an arbitrary point, be pitted against an environment and viewed in this context as human nature vs environment). the arbitrary point seems to tie in with consciousness -- one doesn't blame a 2 year old for creating a mess because it is part of "human nature", but rather attributes this behavior to a developmental stage at which the person acts like an animal in a raw and vulgar sense. however, when two players from different teams get in a fight during a game and the teammates of each person come out to protect and support their team's player, this is deemed as "human nature". so, asking when "human nature" is established in a person is rather arbitrary, kind of like asking, "at what age do we really become adults?", but i believe the emergence of memory in a person around ages 5-6, and thus a person "knowing" his/her own consciousness in addition to just "experiencing" it is the deciding factor. in reality though, "human nature" never reaches a true point where it emerges in a person the arbitrary point is artificially determined by society. i would say that people would tend to acknowledge that "human nature" is formed more during developmental years, but that doesn't mean that it ever truly stops developing and that we can at some point put a person in a situation and see how his/her "human nature" causes him/her to act. before we continue, i'd like to unify the definitions of human nature in both point #1 and point #2 as the same under the term "human nature", so please take both those definitions into consideration and update your perspective accordingly.

now, i would like to illustrate "human nature" in a theoretical sense. as a starting point, you have to consider the entire genetic diversity of the human race -- isolate these genes in a dark room and have those people live their lives there. although this is a flawed example because there is still sensory perception besides sight, the idea is to eliminate the existence of an environment for genes to interact with. then theoretically, simulate all possible environments in which every possible person (every possible genetic combination) interacts -- this, if broken into infinitesimally small time periods so as to constitute a continuous flow would literally allow for an infinite amount of possibilities -- but for the sake of the example assume that a simulation of this is possible. after simulating this experiment, you should be able to determine a range of conditions for which human survival is plausible from generation to generation. now, you have the most ideal states at one end of the range wherein people's life expectancies are optimized from generation to generation and secondary goals of power and pleasure are also optimized, and at the other end you have people who live barely long enough to reproduce and live feeble and miserable existences. this is the range of human genetic flexibility interacting with environment and can loosely be conceived as "human nature", and represents all of the possible gene-environment interactions that could keep the human species going.

3) human nature in a strict, abstract, absolute sense will be termed here as *human nature*. *human nature* = genetics evidenced through an environment as the result of a prior genetics/environment interaction in which the environment revealed the genetics manifested through the environment's interaction with the genetics without "coloring" the genetics at all. as such, *human nature* is by definition not just a realistic impossibility, but a theoretical impossibility as well because, in short, the synthesis of genes-environment (occurring at point x) causes genes and environment to simultaneously affect each other while producing a gene-environment state that follows (occurring at x + 1 where integers constitute discrete existent states, positive ones meaning time going forward and negative ones meaning time going backward). for *human nature* to actually occur, there would need to be a "backwards" (perhaps "retroactive" is the word i'm looking for?) synthesis of sorts (occurring at point x - 1) wherein the environment did not "color" the genetics but still interacted with it in order to constitute a genes-environment interaction, with the resulting synthesis leading to *human nature* at point x. with pure *human nature* existing at this point, all interactions between person and environment for the rest of that person's life could be traced back to *human nature* and point x and a causality could, in theory, be determined regarding *human nature's* role in every event of that person's life.

so the following is what happens because of the impossibility of *human nature* in an applied context. because it cannot be accessed unless it interacts with an environment, thus becoming "colored" in the process, *human nature* is ultimately located in genes, viewed as potential that will be "tainted" the moment they interact with any environment. once it interacts with the environment, it ceases to be *human nature* in an abstract/potential sense and because "human nature" in a physical/realized (really metaphysical for consciousness, but physical as manifested through behavior) and the totality of the initial genes-environment interaction creates a state of genetic realization via the environment that establishes how this person will interact with future environments.

i will now further elaborate on the idea of *human nature* and attempt to expand on the austere, abstract definition of *human nature* that shows why it can not actually exist as "human nature", and that "human nature" is thus a convenient compromise that is inherently misleading. another problem with *human nature* in that environment always "colors" genetics is that you cannot separate cause and effect even in a single state or infinitesimally small states as they interact and affect each other simultaneously. but "human nature" is assuming that you can establish a "neutral" baseline with genetics/environment interactions up to a point, then drop that person into a situation and assume at that point that *human nature* -- existing as the totality of genes-environment interactions up to that point -- confronts a situation in the environment. but in reality, "human nature" is never a state of being that can be determined for certain periods and pitted against the environment during other periods; "human nature" is always in a state of becoming, thus being unable to be defined. furthermore, this state of becoming cannot be defined -- it could be infinitesimally small or it could be the entire duration of a person's life or some period of time in between those two extremes. as such, it is misleading to simply attribute anything not just to *human nature*, which is by definition an impossibility, but "human nature" as well due to its constant state of becoming and thus having an undetermined ontology. with such precarious denotations, it leaves one to wonder why people so frequently refer to things as being due to "human nature". i believe the reason for this is that "human nature" is actually mistaken for "cross-culturally accepted human behavior" (as both a range and a norm), in which case there exists an error in that "cross-culturally accepted human behavior" (as a range only) is simply a subset of all possible human behavior that allows for society to successfully function; a real world range is simply a subset of a theoretical range, and to assume that the two completely overlap is incorrect. the second glaring mistake is that "human nature" seems to have the connotation that it somehow transcends the genes-environment approach and even consciousness, perhaps due to some inherent human ability to pre-determine the limits of acceptable environments -- an ability possibly attributable to culture -- and in doing so, create a developmental spectrum wherein environments can be considered conducive to having a "neutral" effect on genes and thus circumventing the problem that prevents "human nature" from being *human nature* in reality. a better substitute for "human nature" would be "human tendency", which is really just a more concise but less informative way of saying "cross-culturally accepted human behavior (usually as a norm, although as a range is possible, but is not likely to be the intended definition communicated) when facing possible situations".

so, how can we better phrase our questions and arguments when asking things like, "is human nature compatible with such-and-such?" now, on a rather basal level, we can simply say that human nature has been mistaken for genetics, and that such-and-such is an environment of some sort, so we could change the question to, "are genetics compatible with such-and-such in a manner that the interaction between the two synthesizes a result that is deemed acceptable to us?" now, while technically correct, since "human nature" often entails social situations, for them we would have to expand upon this in order to make to integrate the genetics in a manner that someone could interpret from a social perspective. we can apply this to an example i had earlier proposed in a conversation. ultimately, theoretical simulations of human nature could determine whether people are compatible with marxism. but without the ability to do these theoretical simulations, we are left with the question: with marxism as the environment, is human genetics, through its interactions with this environment, capable of developing people who can act in society to reasonably perpetuate the existence of the human race and protect the well-being of everyone (both in terms of length of life and quality of life) while at the same time being inherently self-sustainable? notice how i not only addressed the genetic and social aspects, but also the original qualities of "human nature" as an extension of animal nature as was discussed at the outset of this piece. thus, we have successfully come full circle in defining what "human nature" is while having learned along the way what *human nature* is (and more importantly, is not).