A human is a collection of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and intentions — read through the Buddha’s account of how perception becomes proliferation.
TL;DRHumans are Software
What is a human?
A human is nothing but a collection of perceptions, memories, feelings, thoughts, desires, intentions, actions and consciousness. I am not saying this, the Buddha said this.
Dependent on the eye and forms, eye-consciousness arises. The meeting of the three is contact. With contact as condition there is feeling. What one feels, that one perceives. What one perceives, that one thinks about. What one thinks about, that one mentally proliferates. With what one has mentally proliferated as the source, perceptions and notions tinged by mental proliferation beset a man with respect to past, future, and present forms cognizable through the eye.
MN 18, Madhupiṇḍikasutta
We perceive things through our sensory input devices. The six inputs are: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and thought. Sight through our eyes, sound through our ears, smell through our noses, taste through our tongue, touch through our body and thought through our mind.
When we perceive, we feel things like pleasure and pain and all the combinations of pleasure and pain we call complex emotions. We feel good, we feel bad, we feel happy, we feel sad.
When we feel things, we think about them, we rationalise our interests in those things, we like some things and we don’t like some things. The things we like, we want to get more. The things we don’t like, we want to get less of.
So when we think, we desire things. We plan how to acquire said desired things. And plan how to get rid of the undesired things.
And when we acquire desired things or not acquire them, we know. We act. We perceive. We feel. We think. We desire. We plan. We act. Sometimes it feels like all at the same time. Maybe that’s why it gets hard to recognise these processes on their own. It gets so hard to define that we abstract it into what we call a HUMAN, a body capable of above par reasoning capabilities.