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The second chapter of our book group book (Rowan Williams' Being Human) is "What is a person?"
He starts by paraphrasing a slightly obscure[0] essay by Vladimir Lossky, who, he says, declares that we lack good vocabulary to distinguish between something that is simply one unique instance of its kind, and the quality (whatever it is) that makes a conscious thing of this kind irreducible to its nature.
The point he's making, I think, is that there is something more to being a person than simply being an example of a kind of thing. He's saying that there is something about us as a whole that isn't captured simply by listing facts that happen to be true about us. He then quotes Lossky at more length:
This is all well and good, and I'm sympathetic to the desire to avoid the "meet this set of criteria to be a person" approach that can come out of debates as to what it means to be a person. And from a Christian point of view, the idea that all people are first of all in relation to God before they are in relation to anyone or anything else; and thus that we must bear that in mind in all our doings with other people is useful (and very traditional).
But it doesn't seem to me to be actually answering the question of "What is a person?" Rather like the idea (I think from Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance) that everyone knows what "quality" is, but most people would struggle to define it; fine for the day-to-day, but not a very satisfactory answer to the question posed. Williams at least half admits this, saying later in the chapter that it's only a theological perspective that makes sense of the idea of personhood "But what I'm really suggesting is that when it comes to personal reality the language of theology is possibly the only way to speak well of our sense of who we are and what our humanity is like — to speak well of ourselves as expecting relationship, as expecting difference, as expecting death [...]" But how to talk about personhood to people who reject any sort of theological worldview?
Williams notes that Science Fiction has from time to time looked at this question of personhood - when encountering an alien or a cyborg, how do you decide to accord the status of person to this other being? He concludes that the answer is that "At the end of the day, we can say this is something we could discover only by taking time and seeing if a relationship could be built." That still seems unsatisfactory to me, not least in the age of generative AI systems[1] that produce plausible-sounding answers to any question and with whom at least some people seem to convince themselves they've had a relationship.
Is there a useful way of answering the question "What is a person?" without relying on a theological worldview or having the sort of argument that concludes that some humans are less people than others?
[0] e.g. the WP article doesn't mention it at all. But then Williams did his thesis on Lossky. The article "The Theological Notion of the Human Person" is online
[1] which are stochastic models of "what would an answer to this question likely sound like", and I am axiomatically going to declare as neither conscious nor persons
He starts by paraphrasing a slightly obscure[0] essay by Vladimir Lossky, who, he says, declares that we lack good vocabulary to distinguish between something that is simply one unique instance of its kind, and the quality (whatever it is) that makes a conscious thing of this kind irreducible to its nature.
The point he's making, I think, is that there is something more to being a person than simply being an example of a kind of thing. He's saying that there is something about us as a whole that isn't captured simply by listing facts that happen to be true about us. He then quotes Lossky at more length:
Under these conditions, it will be impossible for us to form a concept of the human person, and we will have to content ourselves with saying: “person” signifies the irreducibility of man to his nature— “irreducibility” and not “something irreducible” or “something which makes man irreducible to his nature” precisely because it cannot be a question here of “something” distinct from “another nature” but of someone who is distinct from his own nature, of someone who goes beyond his nature while still containing it, who makes it exist as human nature by this overstepping [of it].Williams then goes on to talk about how people are shaped by the web of relationships they are part of and influence "A person, in other words, is the point at which relationships intersect, where a difference may be made and new relations created." He asserts that this (at least to Christians) is a mystery that applies to each and every human individual, and that from this it follows that the same kind of reverence or attention is due to all of them (regardless of any of the features of people that result in their marginalisation).
This is all well and good, and I'm sympathetic to the desire to avoid the "meet this set of criteria to be a person" approach that can come out of debates as to what it means to be a person. And from a Christian point of view, the idea that all people are first of all in relation to God before they are in relation to anyone or anything else; and thus that we must bear that in mind in all our doings with other people is useful (and very traditional).
But it doesn't seem to me to be actually answering the question of "What is a person?" Rather like the idea (I think from Zen & the art of motorcycle maintenance) that everyone knows what "quality" is, but most people would struggle to define it; fine for the day-to-day, but not a very satisfactory answer to the question posed. Williams at least half admits this, saying later in the chapter that it's only a theological perspective that makes sense of the idea of personhood "But what I'm really suggesting is that when it comes to personal reality the language of theology is possibly the only way to speak well of our sense of who we are and what our humanity is like — to speak well of ourselves as expecting relationship, as expecting difference, as expecting death [...]" But how to talk about personhood to people who reject any sort of theological worldview?
Williams notes that Science Fiction has from time to time looked at this question of personhood - when encountering an alien or a cyborg, how do you decide to accord the status of person to this other being? He concludes that the answer is that "At the end of the day, we can say this is something we could discover only by taking time and seeing if a relationship could be built." That still seems unsatisfactory to me, not least in the age of generative AI systems[1] that produce plausible-sounding answers to any question and with whom at least some people seem to convince themselves they've had a relationship.
Is there a useful way of answering the question "What is a person?" without relying on a theological worldview or having the sort of argument that concludes that some humans are less people than others?
[0] e.g. the WP article doesn't mention it at all. But then Williams did his thesis on Lossky. The article "The Theological Notion of the Human Person" is online
[1] which are stochastic models of "what would an answer to this question likely sound like", and I am axiomatically going to declare as neither conscious nor persons
(no subject)
I'm not sure of the limits of "theology" here, but a panpsychism that assumes fragmented consciousness as a driving principle behind phenomena seems to give the right answers. Including for LLMs, since we know which fragmented consciousness has produced those phenomena and how, and also people in conditions or circumstances which preclude them having meaningful relationships.
(no subject)
I agree with most of what you say but I don't exactly have any answers.
By default I would have gestured to some combination of intelligence, consciousness, feeling. With maybe some bodges to include babies etc. But your post raised further thoughts.
I'm not sure what is meant by a theological worldview, do you know what he's getting at? Is it more, being able to define person in terms of relationship with God? Or more the approach to how to think about the question?
I feel like there's a good thought in defining person in terms of potential relationships, that does get somewhat close to what feels right as "person". But I think it has similar challenges as any other definition. I think a theoretical alien who is intelligent but didn't develop community instincts the same way as humans would be a person, but could have much more limited relationships. I feel like animals can be defined by the same sorts of relationship as humans but less so in some ways, which feels right to me if I think of them along the person axis but not as fully there as humans, but I don't know if he would agree.
I also think there are going to be significant edge cases. As with many concepts, there's a lot of aspects of "person" that go together for humans, but for hypothetical aliens we might need overlapping categories, and people often get angry and insist it has to be one way or the other, not sort of.
(no subject)
(no subject)
There's various debates about fetal personhood. Embryonic personhood? Zygotic personhood? Under normal non-SF circumstances there's a window where the number of eventual people isn't fixed; the number can go up with identical twinning, and down with chimerism. People don't normally merge and split like that.
Etymologically, "person" is from a word meaning "mask" as in a theatrical mask; there's an element of convenient fiction to it. Like a form of packaging that divides something nameable with a mass noun - humanity? sentience? consciousness? - into something that takes a count noun. A heuristic with a broad but not endless domain of applicability - there is more beyond, possibly very important things beyond. Another thought; LLMs can be thought of as kind of a collage of human writings, a repackaging of human consciousness. I'd be happy to use the word persona but less person in conjunction with certain LLM-based things.
There are states of consciousness where this feeling of personal identity attentuates or disappears entirely, attainable via various practises - psychedelics, meditation, etc. The Quakers have a concept of a "gathered" meeting which seems to involve something along those lines. In such states I'd argue that humanity is perfectly well attended to but personhood is allowed to slip.
Thinking further east; there's a lot of stuff about atman - "the true, innermost essence or self of a living being, conceived as eternal and unchanging", persistent across reincarnation. The word is from a root meaning "breath" - see also "spirit". The Buddhist notion of anatta which has found its way into various bits of Western discourse is basically a denial of the existence of atman or at any rate the possibility of ever experiencing one. This is a point of disagreement with Hinduism. Within Hinduism there's the Dvaita/Advaita split - Advaita says "atman is brahman" - that all atman are one (or "not two", Sanskrit is Indo-European and if you look closely you can see familiar things there) and are the supreme being; Dvaita disagrees. There's also another couple of nuanced positions. Advatia kinda maybe looks a bit like anatta if your squint but there are very definitely Buddhists who go out of their way to argue that the two positions are very different. Anyway the idea of the Indian greeting "Namaste" is that it reverentially greets the atman.
(no subject)
And I'm pretty fine with personhood being a social norm/judgement, rather than an intrinsic property.