Greta:
Then anthropomorphising is inappropriate, being essentially the positing of transient qualities as fundamental. Humanness is clearly just a phase to be superseded like everything else. We rhapsodise and lionise humanness because we are human; or we did until recent years when ignorance made a comeback.
To add the suffix 'ize" means, I will grant you, to apply the predicate to the thing itself and not the part. SInce being-as-human is a local event, what it possesses cannot be applied a general feature to being, is how I take your objection, much in the way to minimize something applies to all of that thing, and not just a part. But I mean to say by being becoming anthropomorphized is this being, here, at this desk, me (as an example). Being is anthropomorphized in me. It is a fair statement to make that being is anthropomorphized in me, leaving out the localization is just an ellipsis.
"Machine" is just an analogy and does not give credit to the reality creating and transforming qualities of black holes. It's like describing the Sun as a "ball of gas". No, it's not any kind of ball but a monstrously huge area of extreme concentration within largely sparse space, and we are its mere debris. A black hole is not a machine but a piece of reality that consumes its environment and very slowly radiates it back out or periodically blasts it out.
My point being again that we overestimate ourselves and underestimate everything else, and that includes the sense of being.
I won't take issue with the term 'machine'. I meant it in the Hobbsian sense: human mental reality is just more of the bumping and grinding of the stuff of the world. Basic materialism. What I do take issue with is what seems to be an attempt to ignore the qualitative distinctions of being human, in favor of a quantitative reductionism. That universe quantitatively dwarfs local events contained therein, but why does this matter at all? Further, being the "mere debris" of a star furnace is a description that looks only at the star and not at all at the phenomenon of a human being. Thereby, you subsume the depth and breadth of our being in the world under a very simple, scientific rubric, and make a kind of straw person argument against any attempt to establish a qualitative argument underscoring the actualities of being human.
One thing eternity tells us: size qua size doesn't matter, number qua number doesn't matter. Ah, but "mattering" matters. This is what we do: we care, and if we care, Being cares, albeit locally.
It is ironic (not surprising) that the scientific community swells with curiosity over quantum physics and what happens inside a particle accelerator and its challenge to Newton, but has nothing to say at all about happiness, love, suffering. Of course, this, we say, is not its purview. We have psychology, neurology and others for this. But a truly comprehensive physics must account for all.
Of course ideally one learns enough and experiences enough to get a feel for what's going on (in music or in life), and this is the case in all fields that require real time performance - learn the theory until it's so ingrained that you can forget it during performance.
Yet, we most eloquently express ourselves when we forget ourselves, with any instance of self consciousness only adding awkwardness. So this advance in awareness - basically an extra feedback loop - of humans has proved useful. However, the future of moving off-world is unlikely to favour the humanly conscious, with long periods of inactivity in space and conditions that consistently challenge biology.
I do think that extra feedback loop adult humans have - the capacity to control the way we condition ourselves - is a fine and valuable thing, but it's terribly overrated as compared with other species, so often being posited as the pinnacle of being when it's just one phase. In the far future, what may be thought of as "aware" may be vastly different to our self assessments, largely limited as we are into the perspective of one set of senses in one place and time.
If over-ratedness is measured by evolutionary success. But you're talking here about the human capicity for reflection. I strongly believe that this is what is at the foundation of being an agent at all to have experiences of any kind. Reflection is the "space" between the egoic center of experiential agency and instinct and dogma. This is retrograde evolution.
You do ignore the qualitative distinctions of human existence just to reduce a person to a scientifically viable idea. Kuhn's "normal science" applauds this, I guess, but the anomalies are filled with gravitas.
To some extent this is simply maturing - what you once thought important you see as ephemeral games of life, to be played out over and over by interchangeable actors. Games that were played long before we were born and will continue unabated after we're gone. So your attention shifts to noticing and appreciating the simple things in life ignored while trying to be efficient.
Narratives are dogmatic, just the endless recapitulation of something we heard when acquiring language and culture. Only in inquiry is freedom realized.