Is a Human Being Itself Also a ‘Group’?

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In the previous chapter we more or less stated that a human being is an existing, tangible thing, but that the concept of a group is an idea and therefore not something that can be touched. Yet even here we can add some qualifications.

As we will later argue in “The Mortality of the Human Being,” from an evolutionary perspective the transmission and preservation of genes appears to be more important than the preservation of the human being as an individual. The human being is mortal and serves as a vehicle for passing genes from one generation to the next. But if we examine the human being at a microscopic level, we see that a human consists of an assembly of organs. All of them are meant to give the human vehicle the possibility of sustaining itself as long as possible in order to pass on enough genes. Thus we have legs to flee when danger threatens; we have eyes and hands to obtain food and to judge whether it is edible. Internally we have various organs and systems that cooperate to allow the body to function. These organs and systems form an integrated whole that is necessary for the survival and functioning of the individual.

But can we also view one individual as a system of organs, systems, and limbs that together form one group? In the previous chapter we argued that a group is a concept, an idea, but in reality it consists only of separate individuals or entities. For completeness, however, we may ask to what extent a human being itself might also be considered a group. At a microscopic scale, does that individual itself form a group consisting of individual elements such as organs and so forth?

When we observe a large flock of starlings swarming in the sky, they must, for example when threatened by birds of prey, frequently change direction. They have a collision-free solution: each bird keeps track of at most seven neighboring birds and ensures that it does not collide with them. If a few starlings change direction, that movement spreads through the entire cloud because they all adjust extremely quickly to their seven neighbors. From a distance such a group appears like a single flexible cell.

It seems as if there is a force between the starlings that keeps all elements together. This appears to be a programmed instruction in each bird to stay close together while still leaving enough space to continue flying. Due to the movements of the swarm, a starling will sometimes be on the outside and at other times within the swarm. It is not clear whether this behavior is encoded in the genes and thus developed evolutionarily, or whether it is imitation behavior and “copied” for example from the mother.

In the human being itself all internal elements, at the micro level, are held together by atomic forces and thus electrical forces between atoms. So here we are dealing not with virtual but with physical forces.

Other virtual forces can also be considered, such as in the case of two people playing tennis. Here the behavior of the players is determined by the ball moving from one side to the other and thereby pulling the players across the field. It appears as if the players are connected by an elastic line.

Another example is two separated parents with a child. In this case one parent remains connected to the other parent through the existence of the child. Again this occurs through a mutual virtual force.

In groups of people there are also virtual, psychological forces that act attractively on those individuals in order to keep the group together and functioning well.

All these forces are virtual and mentally programmed here, through innate or learned behavior, or as the English say: “nature or nurture.” The difference from the individual person is that within that person a physical force exists between the elements themselves. Therefore perhaps we should indeed not see one human being as a group of organs but as an individual, an entity, physically held together by electrical atomic forces. For groups, however—two individuals or more—there appears to be a more virtual force at work. This virtual force would then be an innate or learned drive in humans.

We can also define a group as a collection of things in which those things themselves can function independently. If we separate the flock of starlings into individual starlings, those birds can still survive. The same applies to humans: a human can also function independently, perhaps with a reduced chance of survival. But if we separate a human into his individual organs, his survival immediately ends.

It may therefore be somewhat far-fetched to view a human being, as an individual, as a group in itself.