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Enneagram Type 5 Board Archive PersonhoodPosted by isaacthe54 on September 10, 2000 at 05:24:19: I've been tossing this idea aroudn for a while, and i was wondering if anyone else had any ideas regarding it. what makes a thing a person? how can we tell if its a person? what does it have to be able to do? this is a very quick presentation of a rather in-depth area, so i understand that i'm really battering some of these topics. if anyone has any further thoughts, let's hear 'em. it seems an obvious idea that information processing has a lot to do with it. but, since we have information processing agents now that are not nearly people, (we don't accord computers moral rights, except insofar as they belong to a person) we have to assume that it's a lot more than information processing. perhaps, it seems to me, the key is the *sort* of information processing. a person has to be able to process information from a self-centered point of view. (take a second to define "think" for the purposes of this moment. "to processing of information in order to forecast future events." we think in order to decide which actions would be appropriate in the future.) it has to be able to think about itself. and, thusly, the degree to which an agent can think about itself is the degree to which it is a person. now, "think about itself" is a very deep adn interesting idea. in a way, by that definition, a dog is more of a person than a blade of grass. why? a dog doesn't really "think about itself" does it? that's the error there. a dog processes tons of information: the smells of each other animal in the room, identifying them all individually, awareness of social stressors and moods, awareness of a "place" in the heirarchy of the pack, and so on. and, the dog uses this information in order to plan actinos that will further the animal's *SELF*interest, teh desire to experience the biochemical reaction(s) called "pleasure." a similar phenomenon happens within humans, with a slightly different design. we want to feel more pleasure and less pain. ("pleasure", i should note here, includes a lot more than just sensual satisfaction; rather, pleasure is the biochemical pheomena associated with all sorts of desireable experience. it could well be "pleasurable" to die, for example defending one's family or country, since the limits of desire are largely flexible.) in order to achieve this perfect state of lots of pleasure and no pain, we use what information we have in memory, the information we're currently collecting, and process it into a forcast of the future given our possible choices, and decide what to do that would help us the most. so, like the dog, the human uses this information in order to plan actinos that will further the animal's *SELF*interest, teh desire to experience the biochemical reaction(s) called "pleasure." it seems, then, personhood basically means that a "thinking" agent uses the power of thought to further its self-interest; that is, it "wants" a particular sort of situation. while this may be a stipulation, it's clearly not all there is to it. mary-anne warren also includes reasoning in her list of personhood-defining characteristics, and i'd have to agree with her. that is, "the ability to solve new and relatively complex problems." and that, humans have in greater degree than any other species or machine on this planet. the capacity to communicate is one that mary-anne warren includes that i do not. i can concieve of a person who has lost all ability to communicate, perhaps through localized brain damage of some sort that destroyed the capacity for language (as sometimes occurs in the case of a stroke) but who still possesses the full capacities of a person. (still processes information in the "personish" way.)
personhood is not a silly thing. it's very important, because it is what we aught to base our ethical systems on. good night. isaacthe54
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