Q: Can you describe a human hand?
A: Yes, but why should I? Can�t you just look at a human hand, or, if you�re blind, feel one? Is this a bot question?
But I�ll try to answer while including important metaphysical perspectives that seem to elude the modern mind.
The hand has four fingers, a thumb, and a palm, which is connected to the wrist, which connects it to the arm. The exact placements of these parts are unimportant, since you already know them.
The fingers are different sizes and have different placements and differing levels of dexterity, but they each serve their respective function, the hand wouldn�t be complete without any one of them, and they�re all part of your body/your being. So, we don�t say that one finger is �better than� another. This is analogous to human beings and other life forms. None is really �better than� another. Everybody serves their function, and everybody is an instantiation of the same divine spark. Superiority is an illusion, though the illusion that one is superior to others can come in useful for believing one is capable of meeting certain challenges.
Now onto the palm and wrist. We think of the hand as being a separate part of the body unto itself, and the fingers as being separate from the palm, etc. We may know intellectually they�re all parts of the same whole, but on a subliminal level at least, we consider and categorize them as separate. This is due to deep and deadly flaws in human cognition, which are closely related to the cultural left-brain imbalance talked about by Iain McGilchrist and others. The overall effects of this imbalance are unthinkably devastating, but let�s just focus on the hand for now.
Instead of thinking of the hand as having 6 parts (the four fingers, the thumb and the palm), think of it as 6+, where the �+� represents the wrist that connects it to the greater whole. Likewise, everything in nature is connected and is better thought of holistically than purely using the �divide and conquer� method of understanding. Similarly, Alfred Korzybski, author of General Semantics, which is a new and better way of thinking about facts, suggested ending all sentences with a comma instead of a period, in order to indicate that the idea expressed is not the end of possible thought on the matter.
One example of how we could see things more holistically is to notice how the hand is actually a fractal of the larger body. The four fingers correspond to the two legs and two arms, and the thumb corresponds to the head. E.g., it�s no coincidence that the opposable thumb is what allowed humans to start using tools and to eventually build civilization, just like the head is the part of us that thinks and hence allows us to manipulate objects in a sophisticated way and to do anything else that�s more complex than, say, absorb nutrients, grow and photosynthesize.
Not only does this fractal relationship point to the holistic nature of all things natural, but it�s an aspect of cosmic truth encoded in the human form. As an angel once whispered, beauty is embodied wisdom. We find the human form (and other forms in nature) beautiful not for the evolutionary-psychological reasons we�d rationalistically assume, but because these forms are sublime reflections of the beauty, truth and wisdom of the cosmos. (Sexual selection probably played a big part the human form developing this way, but the point is that the selection criteria is sublime; it�s not as though we simply evolved to find beautiful that which is incidentally functional for the local purposes of survival and procreation. That ideation is symptomatic of the modern disease in thinking that I mentioned earlier.)
Aesthetic sense involves everything the mind and soul know, including that which we don�t know that we know; hence aesthetics is extremely difficult to explain, for the most part. Similarly, memes such as words become popular for reasons that are largely inscrutable; for example, it�s actually no coincidence that �evil� is �live� spelled backward, but we don�t know this on a conscious level. Our language is�rife�with cosmic truths, because it�s developed organically through popular aesthetic sense rather than deliberately and consciously.
But I digress.
Another way in which the hand is actually holistic is the same way in which all organisms are holistic. Each microscopic part of it fulfills a dozen functions simultaneously that make sense only the context of a thousand other microscopic parts that each fulfill a dozen functions. This is one way hands differ from machines (machines work much more simplistically and modularly), yet we rationalistically think of biological beings as mere machines. Other ways they differ from machines is they�re self-healing and self-growing. And, regarding biological beings as wholes, they�re self-replicating. Another way biology differs from machines is that biology employs virtually all the principles of physics, chemistry, etc., while machines employ only the aspects of physics we know, and not even that much�they actually employ only the aspects that are easy or necessary to think about in designing them to fulfill their given purpose.
You could argue that they�re technically still machines, just of a more sophisticated variety, but that�s just semantics; calling them �machines� undermines their splendor because it invites comparison to our man-made machines that are typically what we refer to when we us the term. And I suspect that there is one difference between biological forms and machines that disqualifies them as being machines by any definition: that is that biological forms are imbued with life energy, or just life, that�s not wholly separate from their physical/mechanical aspect, and that plays a magical and crucial role in their functioning. We assume they function purely mechanistically, but we don�t actually know enough about how they function to prove this. The assumption is, again, a symptom of the left-brained/obsessively modeling, materialistic, scientistic thinking of our times.
Anyway, that�s all the useful things I can think of re the description of a hand.