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Add a digital avatar to your videos

The future is here. Here's what makes our digital human technology stand out from the rest.

Digital humans with realistic movements

Our AI-powered avatars were created by filming real actors and look remarkably life-like compared to computer-generated humans.

• 160+ avatars
• Unique and diverse selection
• New avatars added regularly

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As members of the Content Authenticity Initiative, we take pride in being an ethical deepfake software .

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Create your own virtual person

With Synthesia you can easily turn yourself or a team member into a custom avatar that you can use in your videos.

• Paid add-on feature
• Only 15 minutes of footage needed
• Ready in ca. 10 business days

Communicate in 120+ languages

Add a human touch to your videos with talking avatars. Make your digital human speak in 120+ languages using text-to-speech technology.

Business-oriented use cases

Virtual assistants are useful for explainer videos, employee training videos, corporate digital communication, and more.

Make videos at scale

Use digital humans to scale your business video production. No actors, cameras, studios needed.

Synthesia's digital humans

Below you can demo the digital humans currently available on Synthesia.

How to create a virtual person for videos

Here's how easy it is to create videos in just a few clicks using AI video editors.

Step 1. Choose a digital human

Choose from 160+ AI avatars. Diverse styles, ages, and ethnicities available.

Step 2. Type in your text

Make your digital human speak using our integrated text-to-speech engine. We support 120+ languages, so your digital human can be a polyglot.

Step 3. Edit video

Personalize your video by changing the background, adding screen recordings, images, videos, shapes, text, animations, and even music to liven up your video.

Step 4. Generate and share your video

You can download, share, or embed your video into the streaming platform of your choice.

See how 50,000+ companies use digital humans

Add an (almost) human interaction to training, how-to or product marketing videos.

Replace boring text, PowerPoints and PDFs with engaging videos your team will love

"Usually, our colleagues don't jump in the air when they hear e-learning, but the AI videos created with Synthesia have sparked motivation that we haven't seen before."

Create high-quality sales enablement videos your team won't skip

"Sales people require engaging training content. With Synthesia's AI avatars and voiceovers, we can now facilitate quicker knowledge transfer."

Transform your help articles into short videos and improve your customer experience

"Using Synthesia, we effectively transformed dense help articles into user-friendly videos, significantly enhancing our customer support experience."

Create engaging information security training videos, without relying on 3rd parties

"The avatars look real and I can choose from many different languages. Synthesia is solving 2 key problems for me: I can use the in-built AI to generate my script and then make an AI avatar speak it."

Create your professional-looking product explainers in minutes, not months

"Thanks to the role-specific product explainer videos made with Synthesia we booked 35% more meetings compared to previous trade shows."

customer stories

See why people like you choose Synthesia

Faster video creation.

"Synthesia’s AI voiceovers sold me instantly. They give us the ability to pivot and create video content much faster than before"

No actors - no costs

"Relying on external agencies and hiring voiceover actors in multiple language was extremely costly. So it would either mean stretching the budget or no video at all."

Speed, simplicity and ease

"We can record anytime and anywhere with greater speed, simplicity, and ease. It not only optimizes work schedules but also increases productivity and benefits the quality of our educational materials."

All your digital human questions answered

What is a digital avatar/digital human.

A digital avatar is a virtual representation of a person, often used in digital platforms and environments. These avatars can mimic human actions, emotions, and interactions, providing a personalized and immersive digital presence.

What is the difference between a digital avatar, virtual person and AI avatar?

The terms "digital avatar," "virtual person," and "AI avatar" often mean the same thing. Depending on the context they can be applied to a visual representation of a person, ranging from simple icons to complex 3D models, for representing users in digital spaces.

How do I create a digital avatar/digital human?

With a tool like Synthesia, making a digital avatar for videos is incredibly easy.

Here's how you do it:

• Make a Synthesia account. Or make a free demo video if you don't want to commit just yet.
• Choose an AI avatar. We have 160+ built-in avatars to choose from, but you can also generate a digital version of yourself.
• Customize your video. Type in your script, add any images, shapes, audio, and backgrounds to personalize your video.
• Download your first digital human video . Download, upload, share or embed with ease.

What can digital humans do?

Digital humans are used for a variety of purposes, from advertising and entertainment to education and customer service.

In many cases, they can provide a more lifelike and personal experience than traditional computer-generated characters.

For example, digital humans can be used to give tours of museum exhibitions or deliver presentations in online courses. They can also be used to create realistic 3D avatars for video games or virtual reality experiences.

As digital technology continues to evolve, it is likely that digital humans will play an increasingly important role in our lives.

What are the benefits of using a virtual person in my content?

Using a virtual person in your content offers numerous benefits, including increased engagement, the ability to produce content without needing physical presence, and the opportunity to present information in a more interactive and personalized manner. Virtual persons can also be used across various platforms and media types, making your content versatile and innovative.

Can I customize the voice of my digital human?

Yes, our platform allows for comprehensive voice customization. You can choose from a range of voice types, accents, and languages. Additionally, you can adjust the tone, pitch, and speed of the speech to match your digital human's personality and the context of your content.

What is the best digital avatar creator?

The best digital avatar creator platform is Synthesia. It's rated 4,7/5 stars on G2, with 1200+ reviews to back up the claims.

Ready to make a digital human video?

Click on the link below and get started using Synthesia with full access to all 140+ avatars and 120+ languages.

The Human Person: Nature, Ethical and Theological Viewpoints

Philosophical meaning of Person . The Person as a living concrete reality: its origin and constitutive elements. Logical, ethical and social consequences. Theological implications .

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The concept of Person needs to be clearly established by philosophical considerations that go farther than the merely measurable parameters of the physical sciences. We use the term in everyday life and we seem to be clear about its meaning, even if we do not define it explicitly: a person is not a thing in the wide sense that includes mostly inanimate objects, but a living reality, thus implying a source of activity that is self-originated and that shows a spontaneity not found in the physical laws by themselves.

But this is just the first step. Nobody thinks of microbes, insects, fish or even other larger and marvelous living things as persons. While there is a common tendency to describe some animals –mostly in mythological or poetic terms- as fictional characters speaking and acting as we do, we do not take this seriously, except –perhaps- when regarding house pets or primates as basically so similar to ourselves that we uncritically attribute to them our own vices and virtues.

In our experience and common language we encounter persons, and describe them as such, only when we consider human beings. Something new is present in the way Man acts that is the common root of self-appreciation, culture (both in the sciences, the humanities, the different religions) and of the structure of society at all levels. This basic and universal root we call human rationality and thus we define Man as a Rational Animal .

A Person is thus defined by an activity in which ends are freely sought after being known as concepts (containing information that goes past the data of the senses), and valued as good. Rationality is expressed and realized in the search for Truth, Beauty and Goodness, a multiple activity that corresponds to the two powers of the human spirit: intelligence and free will, to know and to love. Knowledge in this case is not a mere reaction to an external stimulus (this is the first source of our acquaintance with the world, through sense impressions), but a process where the data are consciously analyzed to obtain ideas of universal value, and inferences or deductions that apply to them well beyond the direct experience.The person is conscious of multiple possibilities, both of representing reality and of acting, and looks for the best explanation of facts and for the consequences of various courses of action, either as ends in themselves or as means to other ends. This leads to value judgments that embody purpose and free choice . Thus we apply to the person’s activity the categories of truth-error and of suitability and “goodness” that presuppose ends and means in acordance with the nature of things.

The philosophical concept of nature expresses the essence of a given reality in so far as it is the sufficient reason for its activities: acting should be tied to what the agent is. This is applied in science when we define matter –at any level- precisely by its form of interacting with other matter, including our laboratory instruments. An unnatural behavior has the connotation of error, it is something wrong and inappropriate, that is never found in the simple processes of the inanimate world, but that can be due -in the case of a person- to a free decision. In such a case we speak of right and wrong, the basis or moral judgments and of the concepts of rights and duties both at the personal level and also in the context of society.

Only Man, in our known Universe, has the power to know and choose in this way. While animals exhibit wonderful behavior, their acting cannot be attributed to a free choice arising from the conscious and free selection of alternative paths. A genetic program, coupled with conditioned responses from experience, rules animal activity. Consequently, no animal is bound by “duties” nor can it be the subject of corresponding rights, but we can be bound by duties towards animals even those that are not considered property of another human person.

Summing up : t he human animal is “Person” because human activity includes new concerns , due to intellectual powers and free will. By itself, intelligence is not a new way of acting but of knowing, and it is this new knowledge that should direct the free actions of the subject. Because the activity is not automatically predetermined, Man is held accountable for those free acts and is judged ethically good or evil. But the coexistence of biological conditioning and personal traits makes the human animal a profound mystery, frequently expressed in the terms of “the Mind-Body problem”, where the findings of different sciences have to be brought together into a satisfactory synthesis. We need to look at rationality –personhood- from different viewpoints to inquire about its origin and consequences, at the individual and the social level.

Inputs from the fields of Biology, Metaphyics, Ethics, Theology and History, will lead to a better understanding of how the concept of Person has been incorporated in different cultures, in codes of Law and in patterns of behavior. From Biology we should clarify the role of bodily structures, of genetic programming and conditioning,, of possible malfunctions at the organic level that will influence human behavior. From physical and metaphysical considerations we have to establish a logically sufficient reason for the traits that define a person, thus providing a basis for the concepts of rights and duties (human dignity and responsibility).

This will be clarified and extended by the theological ideas of personal relationships with a Creator who is also personal in nature, and both the first source of being and the final end that constitutes our eternal destiny. How these ideas have in fact appeared in different cultures through human history should be taken into account as well, not to make our reasoning depend upon a kind of democratic consensus, but rather to see the limitations and even errors of restricted ways of thinking in merely natural terms. It is obvious that a complete development of this outline would require a very extensive treatment by different experts in all those fields, something clearly not possible within the limits of this essay.

SOURCES OF PERSONAL ACTIVITY – THE ORIGIN OF MAN

We are part of the panoply of life forms at the animal level here on planet Earth, the only place where we have data and where scientific studies are possible. It is well established from biology that there is an intimate relationship among all living beings in the sense that all use the same set of aminoacids with the same chirality, the same cell size, the same basic chemistry in a liquid medium (carbon compounds in water). From the first cells of 3500 million years ago an unbroken process of development can be traced up to the present variety of orders, genres and species, culminating in the primate level that includes Man. Even if five great extinction events (some of astronomical origin) have eliminated perhaps 90% of all previous living forms, there are no indications of multiple starts from inanimate matter. The tree of life has lost many branches and has sprouted new ones, but there is only one trunk. Both the geological record and comparative anatomy support this view of a common origin and progressive development (evolution), even if many details have to be worked out to establish genetic descent and the concrete steps that led to each species.

The two key questions that cannot be answered in a scientific way by the available data concern the steps from inorganic material to the first living cell and from non-intelligent primates to Man. We are interested at this point in the second one: what is there that explains the difference between instinctive behavior (no matter how wonderful) and the new way of knowing that leads to purposeful and responsible acts, thus establishing the personal character of the human animal. Is it logically possible to say that organic evolution suffices to expect the emergence of intelligence and free will as the natural outcome of brain development and other anatomical changes? This is the hotly debated problem of Body and Mind, that we can clarify by accurately defining both terms with the methodology of the physical sciences and our own subjective experience.

The study of the material world begins with our sense reactions to external stimuli that impinge upon our sense organs. This implies a form of energy , understanding this term as the capacity to change in some way the state of a recipient (doing work). In fact, all of physics –from astronomy to chemistry and atomic theory- is the study of interactions ruled by conservation laws , the most basic of them being that in any material process there is never a creation from nothing nor a reduction to nothing, but only some change of a previous reality of the material world. The effect of material activity can only be found in something that will have material properties and that will be able, in turn, to cause further material interactions: from matter, one can only expect to obtain matter.

Modern science attributes all interactions to 4 “forces”: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear. They have different intensities, ranges and outcomes, as well as the possibility of affecting only specific types of particles under concrete conditions. A common view that makes science possible as an objective description of the material world is stated as the “Cosmological Principle”: matter is the same everywhere in the Universe and it follows the same ways of acting under the same circumstances, so that the “Laws of Nature” are applicable everywhere and at all times. No cultural or personal conditionings or preferences will change the outcome of an experiment: human psychology has no influence outside the human person when we study the physical world. Scientific methodology requires that all processes be reproducible by any scientist using the correct experimental technique.

The only logical basis for this view is that human thought and free will cannot be considered as matter, endowed with the energies that cause the 4 interactions previously mentioned. This is also underlined by the obvious fact that neither can be measured in any experiment, since there are no parameters of mass, electrical charge, spin, wavelength, or anything else that physics uses to describe the components of matter. And if we deal with a new reality that is immaterial , we have to admit a source for it that is also immaterial: a human spirit that cannot be the result of organic evolution, even if it is found after matter has evolved to the highest degree of structure and complexity in the human brain.

A new spiritual element in Man needs a creating Spirit, a Creator who with a free act determines when and where the first Man appears on Earth after evolution has prepared the suitable organic structure. We can infer the presence of this new element in the life chain from evidence of rationality in the assembly of complex tools, the decoration of instruments and caves, the burials that include offerings for a mysterious life beyond the grave. Once the organic basis is sufficiently developed to be joined to the spirit, it is out of the realm of science to decide if the first Man had to be only one or several, at one point on Earth or many. The biological compatibility of all humans presently on Earth is a persuasive argument towards the acceptance of a single origin, geographically and in time. We are thus led to the statement that all human beings on Earth share the same nature, belong to the same species, have the same basic abilities and are subjects of the same rights and duties. They are Persons in the full sense of the word, without distinction of color, race, or culture.

Our conscious identity implies the unity of subject for all processes, material and intellectual, so that body and soul –matter and spirit- form a single unit in a mysterious but undeniable whole, excluding any accidental dualism. The human Person has to include the totality of Man, with mutual conditioning between matter and spirit, but with end-products of two clearly distinct levels. Any attempt to reduce Man to just spirit or just matter is unacceptable when applied to our total experience. Since our reasoning leads to a non-material (spiritual) reality as the source of thought and free will , we have the required reason for considering Man as a Person.

One rarely finds a denial of our body, but in some environments it seems logical to say that intelligence and free will can be explained in terms of electrical currents in the brain or quantum-mechanical effects in cellular structures. This is to reduce the real problem of sufficient reason to ways of detecting the presence of mental activity or of purposeful behavior. One cannot attribute the informational content of a TV show (interesting or boring) to the properties of the electrical currents in the receiver, or the poetic meaning of a literary work to the cellulose and ink of a book. The simple bending of an arm when I want is more important than the release of energy in the muscles and the leverage exerted by tendons and bones. The dependence upon a free decision excludes the deterministic process of simple physical forces, and the obvious fact that our will is not random but purposeful makes its operations incompatible with the probabilistic fluctuations of quantum-mechanical systems.

We know ourselves, and the world, by experience, by reasoning from sense inputs, and by acquiring knowledge from others. We first become aware of our thinking and of bodily changes from interactions between sense organs and “forces” in our surroundings. When the senses perceive and quantify inputs beyond their normal range of responses –with the help of instruments- we enter into the methodology of “science”, as applied to the properties and interactions of matter.

Intelligence looks for relations of cause, order (Beauty) and desirability (Goodness) in the data. This implies the use of the principles of identity, non contradiction and sufficient reason , that necessarily underlie all aspects of rational thought, be it in the development of science or in philosophy or theology. From the principle of identity we derive the constancy of behavior in non-living matter: things are what they are, and their properties determine their activity, thus supporting the objectivity and constancy of the laws of nature. The principle of non-contradiction requires self-consistency and the absence of absurd consequences in any reasoning process, so that in pure Math the only criterion of correct deductions is that they do not lead to a contradiction in their development or necessary consequences.

The search for a sufficient reason leads to hypothesis that should be examined in their theoretical sources, their logical consequences, and in the actual experimental checks when these are possible. We never accept as a sufficient reason a “just because” that doesn’t satisfy even a small child. This is frequently the real meaning of attributing to “chance” a physical result for which we have no known cause, as is the case when we try to establish a relationship between events that really have no logical connection. We should remember that chance is not experimentally measurable, it is not a parameter of any elementary particle or material structure, it can never be the cause of any event, and still less of order at any level.

The innate desire to find order in our knowledge is expressed in the search for patterns –physical or conceptual- where one finds the special satisfaction that we express with the general word beauty or harmony . It can be the simplicity and power of a mathematical expression or a generalized understanding of diverse aspects of nature previously unconnected in our experience: we can appreciate the beauty of the Law of Gravitation, applying to common objects, to planets and galaxies, and expressed with a simple equation by Newton. It is not uncommon for scientists to judge a hypothesis or theory in terms of its beauty: it introduces nothing superfluous or contrived or, on the contrary, seems cumbersome and arbitrary.

The same is true in the world of nature or art: combinations of shapes, volumes, lines and colors can give the pleasure of balance, proportion, contrast, gradual development, even just marvelous complexity at the microscopic level or overwhelming majesty in the grandeur of the heavens. It has been said that science develops from the sense of wonder that the thinking person cannot avoid feeling when studying nature at all levels. And it is well known that cave Man left paintings of great skill and beauty, as well as carvings and even primitive musical instruments: activities that have no relationship with mere survival or other practical concerns. They might have been considered of some magical value, but this is precisely the new “spiritual” aspect of human activity that includes symbols and concepts that are not found in any other species in the living world.

The search for Goodness is due to a value judgment regarding the suitability of some action to obtain a desirable end. Anything that is consonant with our needs, either at the biological or spiritual level, constitutes a good, from survival (which includes food, shelter, rest) to the fulfillment of our desire for affection, companionship and even knowledge and beauty, can be classified as a good that attracts and leads to activities ordered to obtain it. Whether those activities are consonant with human dignity –of the subject and of others- or opposed to it, determines the ethical value of an action.

ETHICAL CONSEQUENCES

Since the human person has some activities of a private order, while others impinge upon other members of the human family, the way human activity is subjected to norms and value judgments will address the question of what is consonant with human nature at both levels.

The development of rationality requires the constant search for Truth: no responsible decision can be based on wrong knowledge. This implies rights and duties concerning education, beginning with the family and continued at higher levels, made possible by society, not to impose any “brain washing” but to open all legitimate avenues of learning. Professional activities require competence that has to be acquired by learning in the proper institutions, and that then implies the right to compensation for services in any field.

The right to the necessary sustenance, to health care, to housing and work opportunities, will also be a consequence of the need to develop the individual, both physically and culturally. Society needs laws that ensure that this is the case for all citizens. International bodies are legitimately entitled to regulate commerce, travel, exchange of information, in order to achieve equal opportunities for everybody. Echoing Pope John Paul II at the UN, “society is for the individual, not the other way around”.

This is stated in the Declaration of Human Rights signed by members of the UN in 1948. These rights are not due to some concession by any kind of government, and they cannot be legitimally abrogated or conculcated. Because those rights are rooted on the very nature of the human person, they have to be respected at any stage of natural life , from conception to death, even if age, sickness or genetic disabilities make the full use of intelligence and free will impossible in some cases or circumstances.

The Person can never be reduced to the level of a “thing” to be manipulated or disposed of for economic or scientific reasons. This is especially relevant in the fields of Medicine or Biology: no treatment can be allowed for any other purpose than the good of the patient. Laws that ignore this norm cannot be legally binding, but must be resisted and repelled.

Because ethical considerations flow necessarily from the sense of dignity and responsibility of an intelligent subject, this aspect of human life must be present from the very moment that Man appears on Earth. Primitive burials are a clear sign of the conviction that other humans are different from animals and that somehow their existence after death must be helped by rites and objects that must accompany the deceased. The evidence of protracted care for the sick (for instance, when people subjected to a trepanning of the skull lived long enough for the bone to heal and close the opening) is another indication of family and social ties that imply a common feeling of dependence and duties for those unable to survive by themselves.

Still, in a primitive world where small groups lived in almost total isolation from other tribes, ethical norms developed in many different ways. Science, philosophy, art and ethical norms, form human culture , that is not inherited genetically, but transmitted by signs, endowed -arbitrarily and freely- with meaning : sounds (speech), visible forms (writing, comprehensible images) or gestures that convey information, a new category not found by any experiment. Because cultures evolved independently, different places and times gave rise to codes of ethics and laws that –in many cases- contradicted each other.

We can simply mention how all over the world we find indications of past slavery,, caste systems, denials of rights to women and children, human sacrifices, war as the common state of confrontation with nearby groups. But this kind of behavior is akin to the modern control of the individual by totalitarian regimes (Nazi Germany, Communist societies) and it is necessary to state that a significant number of signatories of the UN “Declaration of Human Rights” still fail to comply with the solemn compromise accepted in 1948. In those the human Person is rather considered only as a productive element for the impersonal State, and it is subjected to a control that restricts even the most basic rights of education, work, marriage and free movement, the practice of religion and association for legitimate ends.

In modern times, where the constant exchange of information and world-wide travel tend to create a uniform way of life, the final outcome of such contacts might lead to a common “culture” where the individual is led to think that whatever others do is correct for everybody. An implicit “relativism” will finally deny that there are ethical norms that arise from human nature itself and that anything that is not forbidden by law is morally acceptable. This is the underlying justification for abortion, euthanasia, genetic manipulation: instances where the person is degraded to the level of laboratory guinea pigs, useful as “things” to be manipulated for the benefit of others or destroyed when they become cumbersome and unprofitable for society.

A common statement that expresses this attitude is that “all cultures are equally to be respected”. If the word “culture” is not defined, the statement is meaningless: it can mean the way a group builds homes or entertains their citizens with music and dances. The most basic meaning should rather be the “system of common ideas that structure a given society”. Those ideas should determine personal and social behavior, thus being incorporated into codes of law, administrative and practical structures, rules of personal behavior. Over the course of time, the “way of life” transmitted from one generation to another within a human group, can also be termed a “culture” in so far as it incorporates commonly held values and concerns.

But the appreciation of a culture cannot simply rest upon its existence through a short or long time. If the culture leads to the denial of human rights to any kind of member of the group, or it incorporates a negative and hostile attitude toward other groups, the culture has no right to be respected and preserved. We must remember again and again that the human person is the subject of rights and duties by the dignity that is rooted upon the unique power to think and act freely. No external imposition can legitimately deprive a single person of what nature implies. Even civil disobedience might become a moral duty, no matter what the consequences, when moral good and evil are concerned.

One should also mention that the right of every person to have access to education, health care, modern developments of a kind that improves substantially human life, should take precedence upon considerations of an egotistical nature even if they seem to be justified by the desire to maintain primitive tribes in their original state to allow for their scientific study. To deny to a sick child the life saving attention that it needs and the opportunity to learn and develop fully as a human being is not acceptable from the moral viewpoint, either in a slum of a modern city or in the jungle of the heart of Africa. We might be unable to provide that help everywhere, but it should be our impossibility and nor a false respect for a primitive culture the deciding factor.

Governments everywhere have the duty to eradicate every type of exploitation of the weak and poor, be it through some kind of slave labor or its equivalent, or the demeaning traffic of drugs and prostitution, or racial and religious intolerance. The human person –every person- is the highest value we find on Earth.

Global concerns –about climate, overpopulation, famine, migration – are clearly in need of ethical rules that should look at the good of the persons affected, now and in the future, but destroying lives or condemning undeveloped nations to hunger and ignorance cannot be an option. The resources of our planet are more than sufficient to give every human being a level of nutrition, housing, education and medical care suitable for human dignity.

THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The human spirit, created by a Personal Creator, intelligent and free, appears as the apex of the development of the Universe. The Anthropic coincidences, at the very first instant of the Big Bang, can only be explained by a purposeful plan of the Creator to establish a meaningful relationship with personal beings. To invoke for their existence either a childish ”just because”, or to have recourse to chance within an unverifiable multitude of universes, is unscientific and totally empty of explanatory power. On the other hand, an intelligent and infinite Creator will not act without a purpose, and this cannot be an empty desire to watch how stars burn or lizards scurry over a planet. A Person is not satisfied with anything less than other persons.

This means that the “deistic” God accepted by some scientists as the final reason “why there is something instead of nothing” ends up by being absurd. Such a Supreme Creator would create a marvelous Universe just as a banal exercise of omnipotence, without caring for the persons who are able to reason to a First Cause and to be grateful for their existence. This is still more absurd if we extrapolate the evolution of the Universe to remote future ages when all the stars will be dead cinders and no life can survive anywhere.

In some Eastern philosophies, the final state implies the dissolution of individual persons into an undiferentiated “something”, not truly divine in a transcendent sense, where personal identity is lost. This is philosophically untenable and incompatible with the true idea of a Creator who is always infinitely superior and different from any creature: one cannot take seriously the proposal that finite and infinite will become an undifferentiated mixture and that the very notion of person will no longer be applicable. The same can be said of the recycling of human beings through reincarnations where the distinction between persons and animals is erased. And the final state, after the supposed purification attained in those reincarnations is described once more as the cessation of personal existence and activity.

In the Christian Creed, God is confessed as a Trinity, where the concept of Person surpasses our philosophical intuitions by presenting a unique Nature realized in three distinct Persons, with only one intelligence and will, so necessarily related that no single Person can exist or be described without reference to the other two. Thus the unicity of the Divinity is insisted upon, while stressing the divine life as a total and necessary communication of the entire nature from the Father to the Son and from both to the Holy Spirit. We cannot understand this, but we cannot understand matter either, when we try to reconcile the particle-wave duality into a single picture of elementary units of everyday matter.

No human philosophy or poetic effort could have imagined the Trinity, and we can only accept it through a Revelation that was not present in the Old Testament books of the Bible but that was gradually uncovered in the teachings of the New Testament. As we develop Theology –the effort to understand the revealed truths- we come to appreciate the depth of this mystery where the most intimate nature of the Godhead, while still incomprehensible, appears as the logical source of God’s relationship to humankind. If in the creation of finite spirits (angels) God can be said to seek living images of the divine nature, endowed with intelligence and free will and existing without constraints of space and time, their perfectly simple nature is so completely indivisible and self-contained that the communication of life –the very essence of the Trinity- cannot be shared by the created beings. They are incomplete images of the living God in that respect.

The creation of matter does provide the possibility of finding complex structures that can give part of themselves as a seed for new members of the species. But matter cannot have intelligence and free will, thus precluding the existence of Persons within the realm of pure matter. Without those attributes, there can be no meaningful relationship with the Creator.

The further step of joining matter and spirit in Man does achieve the complete image of God as a reality endowed with intelligence, free will and the ability to communicate life. Thus we find the description of the origin of Man in the poetic language of Genesis. Everything leads to the masterpiece of divine power, an Image and Likeness of the Creator, destined to share the divine happiness in a final state of intimate knowledge and love, outside the limits of space and time.

The Incarnation adds another mystery regarding the concept of Person, while underlining the infinite love of God and the dignity of Man. Christ, as God-Man, is adored as God, while being true Man, with soul and body on a par with ours. But we profess only one Person, divine, as the ultimate subject of activity and attribution, so that human activities are attributed to God and divine activities to the Man Jesus. Again, we cannot truly understand the mystery, but we can say that God has entered the human family, and that no greater glory can be imagined for any possible created being than to have God as brother.

It is true that we cannot do more than to accept a mystery that has baffled the best minds through the centuries, giving rise to all kinds of efforts to avoid the true divinity of Christ or to attribute to his humanity a nature that ultimately would deny his common descent from other human members of our race. Councils and Church Fathers were adamant in their insistence on the dual nature of Christ in the unity of a divine Person. Only thus could the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption be truly maintained.

Christ’s Resurrection is the final act of the saving and transforming plan of God for all mankind. A divine Person, with a body taken from the ashes of stars that formed our Earth and with a human mind and will, encompasses all levels of existence and carries our human nature to the intimate essence of the Godhead as the first fruits of the new kind of life that God wants for all of us. As individual persons, we are destined to exist forever, attaining the fullness of life with unlimited knowledge satisfying our minds and infinite love giving us the happiness proper of God in an unchanging eternity. The incredible variety of each human being through all of history will be a galaxy of lights, each different in a unique way of reflecting the perfection of the Creator, thus expressing as persons the multiple ways of sharing in the generosity of the Father from whom all good things come.

In terms of physical laws, the future of the Universe, with its predictable final state of emptiness, darkness and cold, seems to make its existence pointless, and the fact of the creation by God so that human persons will appear would no longer seem its sufficient reason. The only answer to the apparent absurd could be found in the immortality of the human spirit, not tied to the laws of physics by its very nature. But Theology goes farther, asserting for the human Person, body and soul, this new life inchoated by Christ’s resurrection and promised to all those who are joined to Him in a new kind of activity that is proper to God alone and that will be shared outside the limits of space and time.

Only in Christian Theology, based upon clear concepts of God and Man, of matter and spirit, is the unique dignity of each Person conserved.

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THE HUMAN PERSON IN SOCIETY

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

Student Name: ________________________________________ Year & Section: _______

Date Answer Sheets were Submitted: _____________________ Teacher: Dr. Eric Agustin

Introduction to the Philosophy of the Human Person:

An Examined Life is ( Perhaps ) Worthwhile

MODULES 13 & 14: The Human Person in Society

2nd Quarter, 1st Semester, SY 2021-2022

MELC-based Weeks 13 & 14

Learning Objectives (What a student needs to know)

In this module 13 & 14’s content standards, the student (“YOU”) should understand the interplay between the individuality of human beings and their social contexts. In addition, under this module 13 & 14’s performance standards, the learner should evaluate the formation of human relationships and how individuals are shaped by their social contexts. 

The most essential competencies are for you to: 

(7.1) Recognize how individuals form societies and how individuals are transformed by societies; 

(7.2) Compare different forms of societies and individualities (eg. Agrarian, industrial and virtual); and, 

(7.3) Explain how human relations are transformed by social systems.

A. Lesson Proper (What’s new?)

Introduction

An individual person is a separate, single human being distinct from a family, group, class, organization and other collective entities. As an individual person, you have self-hood (that is, individuality). You have individual aspirations, needs, rights, responsibilities, inter alia. Individual rights, for example, that are enshrined in the United Nations and the Philippine Constitution include, but are not limited to: protection/non-deprivation/right of/to life, liberty, and property (“The 1987 Constitution of the Republic of the Philippines | govph” 2020), as well as, security of person (“Universal Declaration of Human Rights” 2015). 

Specifically, under the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, every individual person is protected universally, among many, by these fundamental human rights:

“…recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.”

Based on the references above, each individual has all the rights of a human person in relation to all of his/her kind.

Interplay Between Individualities and Social Contexts

A person has individuality or self-hood. In like manner, a person also has collectivity or other-hood since he/she lives in association with other people. His/Her self-hood remains the same; whereas, his/her other-hood is oftentimes influences by his/her milieu. Starting from birth onward, an individual child experiences enculturation where he/she is introduced and becomes familiarized with the process of observing, knowing, learning, adapting, and acquiring one’s culture, tradition, mores, and custom. He/she learns about his/her expectations, position, roles, and related behaviors in the community and larger society where he/she lives in. On the other hand, an individual person undergoes the process of acculturation when he/she has the motive to learn, adopt and adapt to a more dominant culture, such as a Filipino migrant who has to live in an American soil – or any foreign land, for that matter. When such a Filipino wholly embraced a foreign culture after a long time as if it is already his/her own native culture, assimilation occurs. Hence, an individual’s unique selfhood as a human person can never be subsumed under any social contexts, except perhaps one’s other-hood or collective belongingness.

How Human Relationships are Formed and How Social Contexts Transform Individuals

Even when an individual child is still in his/her mother’s womb, an attachment/bond is formed even in his/her earliest development as a human being. Continuously throughout an individual person’s lifetime, typically, he/she forms human relationships. A baby is a child to his/her parents. A child may also be a sibling to his/her brothers and sisters. As a playmate, he/she can be a friend, too. In school, a person can also form bonds with his/her classmates to become his/her business partners after college. While being a married individual, he/she can be a spouse and parent to his/her children. As an individual person continues to work before retirement, he/she can be a colleague, co-worker, boss, etc. to others in the same company. In a nutshell, an individual human being has a variety of positions and roles to play in various social contexts throughout his/her life’s continuum. The possibilities are endless as to who he/she would become as he/she progresses in life. The need for an individual to have interrelations with others is an innate individual ability and social sensibility. Generally, to top it up, most individual persons need a long-lasting, healthy and loving relationship no matter what the social contexts may be.

Different Types of Societies

According to Dr. Nestor Rodriguez (2020), there are five (5) types of societies:

• Hunting-gathering society is the earliest of human society. Their size is known as a family band. As nomadic or wanderer people, most of the time, they are food seekers. Since time immemorial, they are the longest lasting of all the types of society.
• Horticultural society is a semi-nomadic family clan or village that number in less than to several hundreds of individual inhabitants. Their domestications of plants and animals as a main source of their food is primarily a social effort. Aside from gender-based division of labor, they also have developed religious and military leaders.
• Agrarian society consists of multi-ethnic, large communities and even cities. There is a large division of labor given their large-scale agriculture. Every sector – public/government to the private religious, business, etc. – they have roles in various farming/agricultural implements and technologies. 
• Industrial society refers to nation-states with mega-populations and advanced technologies (such as, factories, machineries) in various fields/industries (for examples, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transport, retail, finance, and a lot more.) Only a meager number from its total population is involved in food production. They also harness the power of technology to their advantage to destroy other societies.

Although not included among Dr. Rodriguez’s types of society, other experts include the post-industrial society whose prominence is on its information and communications technology and service sectors (key thinkers, intelligent technology designers and users) that generate more wealth than those in the industrial society (such as in the manufacturing of goods) (“Postindustrial Society | Britannica” 2020; “Post Industrial Society” 2020). 

How Social Systems Transform Human Relations 

First, let us define what a social system is. According to many experts, a social system is an orderly, interrelated part of society each of which has functional roles to play. Like the human body for society, it has many parts and subparts/sub-systems (such as, digestive, circulatory, respiratory, etc.). Each part and sub-system has active roles to play for society to live and subsist. So, how do social systems transform human relations?

Well, just as societies are formed by individual human efforts; societies in turn mold individual human beings. A human person is innately a social being with social needs, aspirations, expectations, goals, and the like. Because of his/her innateness for belongingness, he/she forms or becomes involved in a group. There are many for his/her sociality – whether it be personal or social. Personally, he/she simply wants to belong; on the other hand, socially, he/she needs to be in his/her kind.

For social systems to transform human relations, it requires a dynamic force. Either you belong to a system or not. If you belong, you get the benefits for you as an individual. If not, its extreme form is ostracism. Because a human person becomes part of a social system, he/she is expected to behave accordingly. As such, he/she is bound by the rules, norms, standards, and related requirements of the society where he/she belongs. As the individual mingles with members of the social system, each of the individual members influences the relations between or among them. There is power use, power maneuver, power tripping, power wielding, and all sorts of power for human relations to be transformed by social systems.

Summary/Generalization (What a student learned so far?)

The human person in society is the most essential entity. Individual or self-hood is uniquely its own, but may be influenced by other-hood or collective whole. Despite the individual human person in society, it has its innate and inalienable rights protected by national and world government. Since an individual is bound by the social context, normally, he/she interacts with it throughout his/her life.

As individuals create human relations, they are consequently transformed into social beings. Through enculturation, acculturation, and assimilation, a person becomes familiarized with his/her social environment, whether that environment is a hunting-gathering, horticultural, agricultural, industrial, or post-industrial society.

No matter how we see individuals create societies and are transformed by them, they have their self-hood combined with other-hood.

B. Written Task (Quiz)

Multiple Choice: Instruction: Choose the correct or “best” answer by encircle your letter of choice. 

1. Is defined as a separate, single human being distinct from an aggregate of people.

• Individual human person
• Collective entity

2. Which of the universal, fundamental human rights of individual persons are protected by most nations? 

• Right to life
• Right to liberty
• Right to property
• all of the above

3. The firsthand familiarization of a human person to his/her particular culture is known as _____.

• Enculturation
• Acculturation
• Assimilation
• None of the above

4. The process whereby an individual person’s culture has been subsumed to a more dominant culture.

5. The total embracing of another culture as if it is already his/her own native culture?

6. Generally, human beings are innately bond by sociality. Which does not exhibit such social bond/attachment?

• A child whose parents died at a young age naturally.
• A parent who worked all his/her life to provide love to his/her special child.
• A bystander who does not care to much about being a family man.
• An indigenous person who excelled in his/her law studies for his/her family and tribe.

7. This society is the most advanced so far given its information technology and service sectors.

• Horticultural society
• Agrarian society
• Industrial society
• Post-industrial society

8. This society boasts mainly of its advanced technologies, such as factories and machines.

9. In which one of the following situations does NOT describe how a social system transforms a human individual?

• A person is born into a community and acquires its culture, traditions, and the like.
• A person lives as a hermit away from other people and civilization until his/her last breath.
• A person marries an foreign man/woman, rears their children, and put up a charitable institution later in life.
• A community of learners and practitioners in the field of education gather annually to celebrate the World’s Day of Open Learning and Achievements.

10. Why is a social system likened to a human body?

• A human body is a masterpiece like Monalisa.
• A human body has parts and subsystem with individual and collective roles and functions. 
• A human body lives and dies so it must be taken cared of no matter what.
• A human body is a physical entity whose aching parts must be replaced with better parts.

C. Performance Task

Performance Task: Collage about “Universal Human Right to Life and Its Relation to Capital Punishment”

Make a collage about the ‘universal human right to life as it relates to capital punishment / death penalty’s  pros and cons to an individual human person.’ Remember to include a general description under your collage. Good luck!

Note: Before making a collage, please refer to the criteria below:

Generic Grading Criteria for Collage Making

40% Originality 20% Creativity 20% Craftmanship 20% Balanced Treatment of the Topics

(Please use additional sheet, whenever necessary)

Answer Key 

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PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN PERSON

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Tech Forum Presentation - Deciphering Fire Engineering Requirements for Architects (In-Person Registration)

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The fire engineer wants me to do what !!!

Deciphering fire engineering requirements for architects

Robert Peart and Chris Field -Fire Engineers with NDY

A talk on gnarly fire issues for architects including:

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The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility,   2024

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor the extraordinary courage and contributions of transgender Americans and reaffirm our Nation’s commitment to forming a more perfect Union — where all people are created equal and treated equally throughout their lives.  

I am proud that my Administration has stood for justice from the start, working to ensure that the LGBTQI+ community can live openly, in safety, with dignity and respect.  I am proud to have appointed transgender leaders to my Administration and to have ended the ban on transgender Americans serving openly in our military.  I am proud to have signed historic Executive Orders that strengthen civil rights protections in housing, employment, health care, education, the justice system, and more.  I am proud to have signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, ensuring that every American can marry the person they love. 

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation.  Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive.  They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.  But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families — silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children.  These bills attack our most basic American values:  the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child.  It is no surprise that the bullying and discrimination that transgender Americans face is worsening our Nation’s mental health crisis, leading half of transgender youth to consider suicide in the past year.  At the same time, an epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, especially women and girls of color, continues to take too many lives.  Let me be clear:  All of these attacks are un-American and must end.  No one should have to be brave just to be themselves.  

At the same time, my Administration is working to stop the bullying and harassment of transgender children and their families.  The Department of Justice has taken action to push back against extreme and un-American State laws targeting transgender youth and their families and the Department of Justice is partnering with law enforcement and community groups to combat hate and violence.  My Administration is also providing dedicated emergency mental health support through our nationwide suicide and crisis lifeline — any LGBTQI+ young person in need can call “988” and press “3” to speak with a counselor trained to support them.  We are making public services more accessible for transgender Americans, including with more inclusive passports and easier access to Social Security benefits.  There is much more to do.  I continue to call on the Congress to pass the Equality Act, to codify civil rights protections for all LGBTQI+ Americans.

Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans:  You are loved.  You are heard.  You are understood.  You belong.  You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility.  I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

     IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.

                             JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

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The horror of the Key Bridge disappearing overnight

The bridge symbolized technological prowess and human connection. its collapse triggers darker emotions..

The video of the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s collapse now exists as a global icon, giving several billion people a seemingly intimate and shocking memory of a bridge they may never have seen or heard of until social media and journalism made it ubiquitous.

The video is fascinating, terrifying, mesmerizing, and it may confirm superstitions we often feel about things beyond our individual comprehension. How is it that airplanes stay up in the air, and tunnels don’t collapse under the weight of water and earth? Even the most agnostic brains will make quiet and reflexive supplication for protection before crossing a bridge as dramatic as the one that collapsed this week.

The loss of the bridge is first a human tragedy, for those injured or killed by its collapse. And then it is an economic shock, with a radiating toll that won’t be fully understood for years , and perhaps decades. But it’s also a powerful symbolic shock, given the metaphorical power of bridges as a form of connection, a symbol of our technical prowess, a point of civic pride and persistent desire to master and reshape the landscape.

On the day the Francis Scott Key Bridge opened in March 1977, the Baltimore Sun celebrated the views from the top of its giant steel-truss crossing: “In every direction from the harbor span lie dramatic vistas of the Port of Baltimore.” That included a marine terminal, the giant Bethlehem Steel plant and the Penn Central Canton rail yards. After delays and cost overruns, the new bridge was welcomed as yet more proof of the city’s ambition, its engineering prowess and its economic might.

The city hasn’t fared well in recent decades, and the newspaper’s breathless boosterism for new infrastructure sounds strangely dated. So, too, the name the bridge bears. We remember Francis Scott Key not only as the author of our national anthem’s lyrics, but also as an enslaver and staunch opponent of abolitionism. There is little enthusiasm for creating new memorials to him.

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But the Key Bridge was a marvel, and it remained a high point of any drive around the city of Baltimore until its collapse, early Tuesday morning, after being struck by a giant container ship. Since the middle of the last century, American infrastructure has been laid heavily and bluntly on the social and natural landscape. Interstate highways were plowed recklessly and cruelly through urban areas, too often dividing and polluting neighborhoods of the poor and people of color. Outside of cities, the standardized width, grades and slopes of the interstate highways seem designed to deny any connection to topography.

The Key Bridge, however, was a rare moment when your car seemed to soar, giving you a not-quite-bird’s-eye view of the peculiar geography and history of the East Coast. Any trip by train or highway along the heavily populated Mid-Atlantic seaboard involves myriad long bridges and tunnels to cross the bays, estuaries and wide rivers that stretch deep into the coastal plains. Baltimore is situated where it is because it provides safe harbor for ships. And many seemingly landlocked cities, like Richmond and Fredericksburg, lie near the last navigable point of major rivers that stretch fingers of trade and commerce into the country’s interior. Unlike the tunnels that carry Interstate 95 and I-895 across the harbor and Patapsco River, the Key Bridge offered an exhilarating experience of the landscape, and its connection to the early economy of colonial America.

A symbolic shock like Tuesday’s tends to lead the public toward darker emotions — horror, of course — but also fear, suspicion and even cynicism.

Like the photographs that emerge from wars or disaster, bombings, floods and earthquakes, the video of the bridge collapse doesn’t explain the things that feel most inexplicable. The more you watch it, the less it yields, until finally the mind flirts with some kind of metaphor or parable to make sense of it. Perhaps there is a fable of American decline or corruption or incompetence. It’s best not to amplify or extend the toxic theories that circulated in the immediate aftermath. But they are symptoms of the same phenomenon, a sudden, overwhelming craving for meaning, into which unscrupulous people will project their ugliest fancy.

In the video, the bridge faltered first on the left side of the frame, then in the center, and then its long truss snapped and the right span fell, all in a matter of a few seconds. The speed of its failure offers the first of the fables, that something must be desperately wrong with the design for it to collapse so quickly. But its rapid failure is directly related to the properties of a long, steel-truss bridge. Put simply: Each part of this bridge’s main span is helping the other parts do their work. Its elements are integrated into a whole, which allows less steel to bear more weight.

The engineering is fundamental to the bridge’s beauty. The main span of the Key Bridge, the one that flew high above the river allowing passage to ships beneath, sat on its four piers like a bird. Seen from a distance, it looked spidery and delicate. For centuries, advances in bridge technology have created a tension between efficiency — the ability to span greater distances with less structure — and an intuitive belief that bridges should be solid, heavy, formidable in their construction. When 18th-century London debated the design of a new Blackfriars bridge, Samuel Johnson argued vehemently for a heavier structure of semicircular arches, rather than what was built, a series of slightly more graceful semielliptical arches.

“The first excellence of a bridge built for commerce, over a large river, is strength,” he wrote in a 1759 public letter. He lost the argument, but his appeal to what seemed common sense — the old, round Roman arch was stronger and thus always preferable — still haunts our thinking about infrastructure, if we think of each project individually and unrelated to larger needs and systems.

But infrastructure isn’t just a collection of individual projects, but a larger collection of problems and responses. And to meet those demands efficiently, you build not the strongest bridge possible in every case, but the strongest necessary to meet a reasonable set of expectations and risks.

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The giant steel bridges the world began building in the 19th century embody the man-made sublime, delighting the eye and terrifying the mind with their ambition. Walt Whitman used to visit the great Eads Bridge in St. Louis to feast on the poetry of its design: “I have haunted the river every night lately, where I could look at the bridge by moonlight.” It was, he said, “a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable,” a sentiment more common when this technology was still new, and dazzling, and wasn’t routinely value-engineered out of the final design.

But when Benjamin Baker and John Fowler designed the equally beautiful Forth Bridge in Scotland, they had to demonstrate the engineering in a way that made its forces of tension and cantilevers intelligible to ordinary people. So, they had a picture taken of three men using chairs, broomsticks, weights and their arms to reproduce the logic of his design. In the middle, miraculously suspended in midair, sat Kaichi Watanabe, a Japanese engineer who was studying in the United Kingdom.

The image not only explained the bridge, but also made it human, extending its metaphorical power as a collective human project with collective benefits. It enacted in an almost comical way the basic trust we place in engineering that defies our individual comprehension.

There will be investigations and essential lessons learned from the tragedy earlier this week. People trying to bypass Baltimore will be inconvenienced, and people who live there will be unnecessarily burdened , but there will also be workarounds and adaptation. And slowly, the images, fables and analogies that govern our thinking about bridges will revert to where they have been for centuries: They are a means of connection, essential, often beautiful, sometimes terrifying, and never more so than when they are miraculous in their efficiency of design.

Baltimore bridge collapse

How it happened: Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being hit by a cargo ship . The container ship lost power shortly before hitting the bridge, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) said. Video shows the bridge collapse in under 40 seconds.

Victims: Divers have recovered the bodies of two construction workers , officials said. They were fathers, husbands and hard workers . A mayday call from the ship prompted first responders to shut down traffic on the four-lane bridge, saving lives.

Economic impact: The collapse of the bridge severed ocean links to the Port of Baltimore, which provides about 20,000 jobs to the area . See how the collapse will disrupt the supply of cars, coal and other goods .

Rebuilding: The bridge, built in the 1970s , will probably take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild , experts said.

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Man Arrested After Allegedly Taking and 'Eating' Leg of Person Injured by Train at Accident Scene

Resendo Tellez was arrested Friday on several charges, including "removal of human remains from other than cemetery"

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A man has been arrested in Kern County, California, for allegedly removing human remains, a leg, from a location other than a cemetery.

According to eyewitnesses and video given to several news outlets, the man was also allegedly eating the human leg he removed from the scene of a train collision.

According to Kern County records viewed by PEOPLE, Resendo Tellez was arrested on Friday on one misdemeanor charge of "removal of human remains from other than a cemetery," a misdemeanor charge for possessing controlled substance paraphernalia and a felony charge related to violating probation.

Tellez, 27, reportedly removed the human body part from the scene of a train collision in Wasco, California, that resulted in the death of one unidentified person. It is unclear if the leg in question belongs to the individual who was killed in the incident.

An eyewitness near the scene told KBAK that Tellez was waving what appeared to be a human leg around and allegedly biting it.

"I'm not sure from where, but he walked this way and he was waving a person's leg. And he started chewing on it over there, he was biting it and he was hitting it against the wall and everything," Jose Ibarra told KBAK.

Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up for PEOPLE's free True Crime newsletter for breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.

CBS affiliate KBAK and ABC 23 Bakersfield published censored video footage of the man allegedly eating the leg.

Police arrived at the scene of the train collision that killed the unidentified person and severed their leg at about 8 a.m local time on Friday.

Tellez was arrested at the scene without incident.

He's scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday.

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Watch Neuralink's first human patient play 'Mario Kart' with his mind

• Neuralink shared a video of its first human patient  appearing to play "Mario Kart" with his mind.
• The patient, Noland Arbaugh, is paralyzed from the neck down.
• Arbaugh said during a Neuralink all-hands that the brain implant increased his independence.

Neuralink has shared a video that appeared to show its first human patient using his brain-chip implant to play "Mario Kart."

During an all-hands meeting with Neuralink staff, the company brought its first patient, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh, onstage to describe the brain chip's capabilities. A video of the meeting was posted on X by Arbaugh on Friday.

Arbaugh, a quadriplegic who has said he was paralyzed from the neck down due to a swimming accident, said the device has allowed him to participate in some of his favorite activities from before the accident, including gaming.

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"It makes — this is going to sound really kind of crazy — but it makes being paralyzed really not that bad," Arbaugh said. "Anything that makes me more independent I'm all for and this is probably going to make people like me the most independent that they might ever be until it all gets cured — and I think that's a very real possibility," he added.

Bliss Chapman, Neuralink's brain interface software lead, said playing "Mario Kart" — or a drinking-game variation called Beerio Kart that involves finishing a beer while racing — was one of the first things Arbaugh said he'd want to be able to do with the implant.

At the all hands, Neuralink showed a split-screen video of Donkey Kong and Bowser racing in the Mario Kart game. Chapman said he'd previously posted the video in an internal company channel and asked people to vote on which player they thought was being controlled by a brain-computer interface (BCI). In the video, Arbaugh, who Chapman said was racing Bowser, was not only able to follow the lines of the track, but also shoot another player down using only his mind to control his player in the game.

Neuralink was kind enough to open their doors for me to tour their headquarters a few weeks back. It was an amazing experience and a day I'll never forget. This was at a company wide meeting at the end of the day. Thank you to everyone who made this possible. Hope y'all enjoy!… pic.twitter.com/YNa2Jtjhnk — Noland Arbaugh (@ModdedQuad) March 22, 2024

The Neuralink worker also showed a separate video of Arbaugh playing "Mario Kart" alongside his father.

"What you see is a dad and son playing 'Mario Kart' — something I grew up doing all the time with my parents, something that I did a lot with my friends growing up and something that wasn't possible until this happened," Chapman said. "I just think the normalcy of it contrasted with the absolute absurdity of doing it using the BCI is something to just marvel at and take in and soak in for a second."

Since Neuralink unveiled its first human patient earlier this month, Arbaugh has shared all kinds of tasks he's been able to perform with his new brain implant — from playing "Civilization VI" into the wee hours of the night to posting on X .

Have you applied to Neuralink's human trials or do you have insight to share? Reach out to the reporter from a non-work email and device at [email protected]

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