Buddhism says that this isn’t at all what being a human is. It says that the feelings and narratives are an aspect of the human mind, but not core to it. My conception is they are like feedback sources/optimizers and constraint engines. The worries, narratives, voices, chattering are self important feeling and trick us into believing they are who we are. However, a key aspect of vipassana and related mindfulness is building the ability to be aware of those processes from a part of us that has no voice, has no experienced feelings, but is able to be aware of them independently and control them. This source is where our agency derives from, and it does not have to be driven by feelings or the narratives, it is in fact able to suspend them and simply exist as it is. This is what is known as nirvana, which has attained weird mystical meanings in our culture, but essentially means attaining and maintaining a mind that has fully subordinated the “self” driving narrative and emotional soup. The loudness of feelings and our chattering monkey mind self support themselves internally as being “who we are,” but, again my own conception, their importance is an illusion they create internally. All this said, they are
certainly a part of what makes us human, in so far as a foot makes us human. But you can function and live a full and complete life in the state of nirvana without losing anything.
In fact in my 30 year practice at one point I was scared to bring the practice into my daily lived life fearing being uncompelled by these processes and having a clear mind would make a robot or something - but the opposite was true. At some core level I knew my experiences and connections deeper than a feeling, and the people around me felt I was finally with them for the first time.
My point here is that the western conception of what it means to be a human is not particularly simple and it’s not the case, assuming thousands of years of Buddhist practice isn’t a crock, that our feelings and thoughts are the core of what it is to be human. Further - if they are illusions and feedback systems, they can be simulated as constraining feedback systems in an artificial mind just as easily.
I think the nature of what is human is much deeper in our minds, but because it’s not easy to examine like feelings and thoughts, I think we really do not understand it very well. This leads me to my long labored point - I agree with the original poster that we don’t understand consciousness. I believe we over estimate our understanding of what it means to be human. I do not however think our machines will achieve it either. But I don’t know why we need to make an artificial human. AI means intelligence, not human. A natural human takes 9 months and we have too many of them, let’s try for something different.
