Homo imaginatus

In philosophical anthropology, Homo imaginatus is a proposed alternative scientific name for Homo sapiens. It means “imaginative man” or “man that imagines”. A similar formulation would be Homo imaginans, meaning “imagining man”.

Overview

In philosophical anthropology, Gregory J. Lobo has proposed both 'Homo imaginatus' and 'Homo imaginans' as more accurate scientific names for our species. It is argued that either would be more accurate than Homo sapiens (“wise man”) in at least two ways. First, because sapiens means wise or possessed of wisdom. While particular human beings in specific situations have demonstrated incredible intelligence, it is not clear that being intelligent and being wise are the same thing. Wisdom, arguably, is a rare thing among humans. As such, it is an insubstantial differentiator for an entire species.

The second and more significant way in which a label of Homo imaginatus (or Homo imaginans) would be a more accurate name for our species is related to the fact that according to the archaeological evidence, our species descends from a homo variation that is notable for being able to imagine things that did not exist in nature. The claim is that it is the capacity to engage in deliberate imagination that distinctively marks us, for everything else that makes us human flows from this adaptation and the mutation that paved the way for it.

In short, the ability to deliberately imagine is argued to be definitive of our humanness because it underlies all the distinguishing characteristics that make us human, including intelligence or wisdom itself. It is imagination that allows us to surpass animal forms of coordination and engage in novel forms of cooperation, which have enabled our species to colonize the earth. Deliberate imagination is not the imagination of dreams, which likely other higher animals experience too. Dreams involve spontaneous, involuntary imagination. It is the ability to deliberately imagine in one's mind’s eye something like a yellow cup being placed inside a blue cup and seeing that the yellow cup is outside, that is evidence of deliberate imagination. More interestingly, it is the ability to imagine oneself doing things that one might do, that one might have done, that one could do. And more interestingly still, it is the ability to imagine oneself in the place of others, and others in one's place. It is also necessary for imagining oneself with others, as a first-person plural, a “we” or an “us”.

While insisting that deliberate imagination is the root of our humanity, Dr. Lobo nonetheless recognizes and emphasizes human continuity with the animal kingdom, suggesting that in addition to replacing Homo sapiens with Homo imaginatus, we use the neologism humanimal to refer to ourselves in the Vulgate.

Origins

Homo imaginatus is formulated and proposed as an alternative to Homo sapiens in the work of philosophical anthropologist Gregory J. Lobo, a professor and researcher at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. In his first work introducing the idea, “René Girard’s Science of Religion: The Scapegoat Mechanism, Prefrontal Synthesis, and Collective Intentionality in the Process of Hominization", Dr. Lobo used the variation Homo imaginans. There, in an endnote, he merely introduces the term, noting that he has not the space to develop a supporting argument.

In scientific articles published shortly thereafter, “Homo imaginatus: Generative Anthropology, prefrontal synthesis and the origins of the human" and “Homo Imaginatus? Mimesis, Violence and Prefrontal Synthesis in the Evolution of a Literary Species (with a Commentary by D. Vincent Riordan and a Reply by the Author)”, Dr. Lobo develops the argument at length, but changes the term to Homo imaginatus, without explaining why one might be preferable to the other.

Sources

Homo imaginatus is conceptualized by Dr. Lobo on the basis of research by Andrey Vyshedskiy, whose investigations in speech pathology led him to propose a theory of language based on the evolution of deliberate imagination. In “Language evolution to revolution", Dr. Vyshedskiy writes that the evolution of deliberate imagination or what is called, technically, prefrontal synthesis (PFS), “resulted in what was now in essence a behaviorally new species: the first behaviorally modern Homo sapiens”. Even though this new species is still reproductively compatible with its immediate ancestors, it is genetically mutated with respect to them. Since the mutation for imagination is what distinguishes this new species from the old, Dr. Lobo argues that Homo imaginatus (or Homo imaginans) is a better and more appropriate scientific name for this new species, emphasizing that which makes it different—deliberate imagination or the ability to imagine, on purpose—from everything that came before, and which truly makes us human insofar as deliberate imagination is at the basis of all human language users. Wisdom, to the contrary, continues to be a rare commodity.

References

This article "Homo imaginatus" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Homo imaginatus. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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