Being Human is not that we are special. We are simply a living organism as any other animals in nature.
To quote John Gray “Our image of ourselves is formed from our ingrained belief that consciousness, selfhood and freewill are what define us as human beings, and raise us above all other creatures”.
What is different about human animals, is that, we can kill each other in mass numbers not for food but for ideas and destroy the planet.
John Gray wrote: “By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality…claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness. …. What is distinctively human is not the compacity for language. It is the crystallization of language in writing. …. We are programmed to perceive identity I ourselves, when in truth their is only change. We are hardwired for the illusion of self. …. Where humans differ … is that they use language to look back on their lives and call up virtual self. The illusion of enduring selfhood arises with speech…parents speaking to us…by our names: we contrive shifting histories of ourselves in a fitful interior monologue:… we have invented a fictive self, which we project into the past and the future — and even beyond the grave.”
I personally to not toss out the use of self from my thinking about these sort of issues that Gray is writing about. I personally try not to use “I” because it has an ego/personal serving flavor. Self, for me, is the most descriptive term to think about the human who is living this life in this body with all the other organisms that live in our shared body. Self works from the brain, where consciousness’ resides learning to monitor the senses, all, which creates me, that is self.