Matthew's Journal

The things that come up for me are things to do with "numerical identity". If we're into speculative fiction: Thomas Riker. Jeckyll and Hyde. I mean these beings are clearly human (I mean Hyde is a very bad human, but nevertheless faces criminal responsibility), but how many persons? I'm reminded of the title of Parfit's book Reasons and Persons which has a lot of weird thought experiments. Questions of personhood don't necessarily lead to questions about dehumanisation.

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.