The Human Being Project

The Human Being Project is the Lab’s central, long-term program. Where the individual research areas each illuminate one facet of the human being, this program is the effort to hold them together — to ask what a coherent account of the human being would look like once the sciences, philosophy, and the Islamic tradition are all taken seriously.

Why an integrated program

The question of what a human being is has been divided among disciplines that seldom meet. The neuroscientist, the psychologist, the philosopher of mind, and the scholar of the Islamic tradition each describe the human being in their own vocabulary. Each account is partial. The Project exists because we think the more interesting questions live in the space between them.

How the program proceeds

We work outward from specific, tractable questions rather than grand syntheses. What does contemporary science actually establish about consciousness, and where does it remain silent? What has the tradition meant by the soul and the intellect, read carefully and without anachronism? Where empirical findings and traditional claims appear to meet, what is really being said on each side?

Throughout, we keep to the Lab’s method: science held to the standards of science, the tradition read on its own terms, and philosophy used to clarify the claims — with no requirement that any one of them confirm the others.

Status

The Project is in its early stages. As work matures, outputs will appear on the publications page. We will not describe findings before they exist.