“What Makes Us Human?” is a biweekly column in which Emi Sakamoto ’28 investigates the interdisciplinary criteria whereby we might better respond to this metaphysically contested question. Amid our rapidly evolving technological landscape, it is incumbent upon us to do so.
When associate communications professor Angèle Christin referred me to Hideo Mabuchi, professor of applied physics, I expected our conversation to meander into a meditation on the fundamental laws of the universe. My intuition was soon corrected: our conversation suspended this a priori and exceeded first principles.
It became so by nature of the art of it. As a physicist and ceramicist, Mabuchi has led a life committed to disentangling the abstraction which often defines the theory of applied physics. Physics, the foundation of science and, in turn, life itself, is clouded by its own opacity, mystifying qualities which falter from the ground ‘truth’ it hopes to discern under a microscope. I was captivated by Mabuchi’s mastery of both the hard sciences and arts, as they are pronounced by entirely distinct skills and processes: the former, almost strictly theoretical, and the latter, ineluctably physical.
In the quiet contemplation that shaped our conversation, Mabuchi began, “The first time I tried woodfiring — firing ceramics in a woodburning kiln — I realized there’s a depth of knowing and craft expertise for the process which you could pursue forever.” Our time here might be marked by impermanence, but our devotion to craft is anything but bound to the fiction of finality.
Still, craft isn’t about the final form. The final form is what follows the firing of the ceramic in the kiln, polishing its exterior with a celestial marbling. It’s about the friction which is formative to the clay itself. Mabuchi explained this through a delicate balance which must be reconciled during the throwing of clay. “If you use too much water, the clay gets stuck,” Mabuchi said. “But the tradeoff for throwing dry is: there’s a lot of friction.” It is often this seemingly intolerable friction, once overcome, which makes the final form so silky and exceptionally perfect. Friction, I learned, was necessary to ‘final’ form.
Speaking of friction, I struggled with the abstraction of physics — how its lessons could possibly be folded into the physicality of ceramics. Mabuchi discovered the applications of each discipline as a mutual form of shaping, unintended — while somehow still scrupulously tended to.
“I never would have expected that studying electron microscopy would contribute to my understanding of woodfire ceramics surfaces,” Mabuchi reflected. “It turns out that surface color formation and woodfire are really linked to igneous petrology and volcanology. The aluminosilicate melt is compositionally a lot like lava or magma. As it cools, depending on the rate of cooling and how much oxygen is in the kiln, the minerals form different kinds of minerals, which determine the color and surface texture.”
This creation, this craft that Mabuchi has dedicated his life to is well articulated by what he coins the ‘creative cycle.’ This process involves the following: “Seek/make; relate/reflect; teach/write.” When I asked him about what inspired him to develop this framework, he spoke of philosophers who wrote about how “our understanding of what thinking is has collapsed… We have fallen into a habit of believing that thinking is what computers do.”
Mabuchi took care to divorce ‘thinking’ from the human ‘urge’ to act, independent of any algorithmically predicted line of code. “Thinking doesn’t always start with a problem or a question,” Mabuchi explained. “Various philosophers have said thinking starts with an undirected urge to do something. Ever since I was young, I had an urge to do something of a very certain kind.”
Then he said something I’ll never forget: “Making is searching… it’s about getting close to the way it’s supposed to feel.” It is tantalizing, alluring even, to fall into the paralyzing fiction that we must know before we make, or that we must decrypt our life plan before it even happens. What Mabuchi clarified for me, however, was quite the opposite. It is the creative process, not product, which peels away at the core of our purpose here on earth. As students and beyond, it is incumbent upon us to engage deeply in this process because we are fortunate enough to contend with these questions.
This creative process is how we discover, shape and realize our own voice. Mabuchi described the taxonomy of craft as the composite structure of “using natural materials, working largely by hand and being aware of its long tradition, so that you have the sense that you are finding your own voice in that medium… You have to understand what your materials will do, what their qualities are and how you interact with them. It is through developing the craft that you develop the voice.” A deep, aesthetic appreciation, rather than a superficial captivation with the glorified exterior, is how we craft. It is antithetical to how we consume.
The creative process demands work. Mabuchi explained, “You cannot develop a voice in the medium without putting in the hard work of developing the craft. It’s similar to how you deal with difficulty and adversity.” Thankfully, it’s not all work. It’s also play; it’s also art. He continued, “When people are doing things just because it’s fun, cool, or wacky, that’s not a bad umbrella term for art. You may never make a beautiful painting, but you do it just because. It’s an exercise in appreciating the world in all of its diversity and playing around… Art in the broadest sense captures a lot of it.”
How much, then, of this creative cycle has become fragmented by AI? Mabuchi had an unexpected response to my question. He suggested that the advent of capable AI should spur us to rethink the ‘human’ in terms of what makes us so much more than machines and what makes living about so much more than conventional economic productivity.
It almost feels like a Darwinian race of finding the remaining niches that will allow us to survive whatever comes out of this AI arms race. Mabuchi suggested that it is time, whether we like it or not, to rediscover our humanity in the face of AI. Like the Copernican revolution, perhaps we are no longer the center of the universe. It’s as disconcerting a revelation as it is humbling. Who are you? What makes what you can craft so meaningful? It’s a crude, brutally pressing question. It’s the friction, the hard question, we must be curious toward, rather than shy away from.
There is no reason, then, to acquiesce to the nihilism which has begun to seep into our collective posture toward an algorithmically structured future. Mabuchi voiced a clairvoyant, somewhat Cartesian optimism: “AI [agents are] not responsible to the material, cultural, natural world. They are not embedded in society in the same way humans are. They don’t have bodies. They don’t understand embodied things, the kinds of things you experience when working with clay.”
Mabuchi hopes that “what we will see is a swing back towards the importance of the arts, craft, creativity, the humanities and understanding the human,” he continued. “There are things we can do that an optimization algorithm can’t do. The rationality, the capability for logical thought, those things are all important aspects of being a responsible human, but it is maybe not the distinctive thing about being human.”
His last note made my final question all the more pressing. What, then, makes us human? “Recently I’ve been thinking it’s this whole thing with curiosity: the things I am interested in I couldn’t exactly tell you why, and making progress on satisfying that curiosity,” he answered. “It’s about having the urge to do things that are not due to a survival instinct or social conditioning…In our current socioeconomic paradigm, the room for expressing that curiosity largely arises in arts and creative practices.”
In the spirit of Eckhart Tolle, Mabuchi reminded me of the ever-present, inescapable now in interrogating the centripetal force of my question. He reminded me that this kind of question, ‘what makes us human?’ will continue to express its dynamism over time. Like us, it is a question that cannot be reduced to something static, flat, unchanging. Mabuchi said, “Ten thousand years ago, this meant something completely different than it does now…years from now there will be completely new questions in the air. So maybe the question is more like, ‘what does it mean to be human, now, in this moment?’”
I am still in the creative process of seeking / making; relating / reflecting; teaching / writing. And may I, may we forever be.