Do you think there are really other basic human needs beside food and shelter? Yes/No and why.

Humans need other humans. Babies raised in controlled conditions in which they receive only food, water and shelter, and no human contact, die very quickly. Their immune system is greatly weakened without contact and they die. (Yes, people actually did studies like this with human babies, for more about this, see Howard Bloom's excellent book The Lucifer Principle)

So, humans need food/water, shelter, and other humans. Everything else is icing on the cake.

regular sleep cycles?

Heat and clothing would be the other two.

Yes, human contact is of vital importance. But it´s also important that this contact is not just in the form of physical presence (of the babies parents for instance). Humans need eachothers aproval. People need to be apreciated by others. You can actually see it on a brainscan when a person hasn´t been loved by his/her parents as a child.

The vast majority of adults is alo not capable of dealing with (social)isolation. That´s why solitudal isolation is also considered a form a torture by most human rights organisation. People realy get severe psychiatric disorders, become psychotic or suicidal.

A very tragic story is that of soviet dissidents who managed to escape from their prison in siberia.
Siberia is so incredibly big, that you can literally walk around there for years, without ever seeing anybody.
Many of these dissidents who managed to withstand the most brutal forms of torture and the hard live in the siberian prisoncamps, eventually succombed to the madness of isolation, if they managed to escape.

There is the story of one man who didn´t went mad. I don´t remember his name. He knew that there was the chance of going mad as a result of isolation, so he did all kind of `social exercises` like talking to trees or animals.

Human relations are of crucial importance for our survival.

That´s also why things like I-phone´s are so important to many people: people need to have the feeling that they belong to a group and that they´re apreciated and respected. They don´t realy need those I-phones or the rolexes, etc.
But when they live in an environment where having such things are a factor for apreciation, trying to obtain such goods will become almost a vital psychological urge, an obsession that is hard to fight.

So it´s clear that the line between basic needs and non-basic needs is not as sharp as a simple biologist would maybe say.

But it also shows another basic need: all humans have a basic need for justice and fairnes. They need a social structure around them with rules that are ethically sound.

The early sociologist durkheim has made a study on suicides and concluded that living in a social structure that is either too tight or too loose, increases the amount of suicides (just google 'durkheim' 'suicides' and you will see it somewhere.

With the science of durkheim, you would expect that suicides would increase currently in countries lie greece. and indeed, they do. From very low suicide rates, greece is now a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the western world.

Without sunlight we'd get very ill indeed.

Exercise maybe...

Altered states, perhaps - in whatever form (eg. spice, psilocybin, coffee, tobacco, meditation, religion, endorphins). It is very rare to find someone who does NONE of these.

Also, debatably, some form of creative expression...music, art, writing, whatever; enjoying/consuming or creating. You may survive without these, but it would be very grim. Mentally, you may die.

All this depends on your definition of 'human'. If we are just physical bodies, we need fairly little.

However taking conciousness into account I think we need more, to feed our psyches and ahem...'spirits', as well as our bodies.

air, sleep and disposal of wastes added to the fore mentioned water, sunlight, exercise, and human contact.

So simplifying on basic needs:

- Energy (this includes food, water and sunlight).

- Shelter (A place where they can rest and have sex).

- Contact (preferably with the approval of others).

- Clothing (Even nudists need their clothes).


are we missing something? I think this may be it.

We're talking about Maslow's Hierarchy here:



DMT could be construed as part of the self actualization process. The text seems to be blending into the background.

From the bottom, it goes Physiological Needs>>Safety>>Love/Belonging>>Esteem>>Self-Actualization

If we are getting really basic, contact isn't entirely necessary. There have been may prisoners in solitary confinement for years and survived. Even decades. Were probably never quite the same again unless they had supreme strength of mind, but still...

Also, clothes are culture and climate/shelter dependent. You wouldn't need clothes if your society agreed on it, and you never encountered anyone else.

Much human contact is based on expressive, social, bonding practices eg. the tribal dance and its subsequent manifestations, art, common goals such as the building of pyramids etc.

Thus some form of creativity must be essential, even in terms of solidifying 'contact'. Yes we are animals, but we also need some things other than purely instinctual urges (eg. sex) to unite us. Otherwise we may all soon have AIDS, and could hardly be called human.

Even dolphins make water-rings as art, and many birds perform mating dances. So it is not only humans that appear to need to create and enetertain themselves and each other without apparent necessity. The importance of such practices are really unknown, but they may be basic needs.They may have even been essential for our evolution. Who is to know?

Also, I would be interested to see whether someone would survive without some form of stimulus, like in a windowless cell(though would never actually advocate such a dreadful test). Their mental health may make achieving the other basic needs untenable. They may lose the will to live, making the other factors moot.

So yea, the will to live is another basic need (aided by art/music/dance/laughter/religion/tradition/spirituality/a purpose/rollercoasters/whatever).

All for the sake of lively debate of course

In the wild, if you´ve become crazy....you die. Someone on his own would eventually die in nature.

For humans as a species, contact is even more basic: without sex, the species ceases to be.

Of course that is true. Our survival as a species, scientists theorise, may well have been down to our social interactions. We are a social species, hence our success.

My point was that sociability has many factors, aside from sex.

If sociability is crucial (which it is), then so are the things we are social about. The things that make bonds strong are also crucial.

Therefore potentially what could be described as 'non-basic' needs, may actually be basic ones. We may not have survived this far without them. At least, we may not have been as successful as humans have turned out to be.

Arguably it is the things that bond us aside from animalistic sex, that make us human. Things such as dance, art, music, ritual... culture bonds societies together. It is through acting in societies that we have survived, whether they be big or small.

Therefore these things may be seen to count as basic human needs.

My vote goes to soap, makes hygiene so much more hygienic