I acknowledge, and mainly agree. I have no strong or principled defense of this thing that my brain does, and wouldn’t object to people pumping against it even if they did so much more strongly than you do above.
However, it is what my brain does.
I could dance around it by saying something like “a less vibrant and interesting person,” which might be better? That, too, is a true statement—while it feels a little like PR semantics, it also underscores that personhood is a binary that can’t be taken away? (My brain absolutely does think of personhood as a binary that all people except maybe those in permanent vegetative comas have.)
I do want to point out, though, that something in your brain caused you to round me off to saying not human, which I absolutely did not say at any point in the post. There’s an enormous qualitative difference between less and not. Although maybe that, in and of itself, is an object example of why you are advocating caution (because people hear what they hear, regardless of what you say, and there’s a benefit to keeping a wide moat around something like that).
It’s true: you never say, in so many words, that anyone is not human. On the other hand, you begin with a quotation from Dune in which someone says “Let us say I suggest you may be human”; and you end by proposing to plot people’s attributes on a cube one of whose corners is “not human at all”. I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame on something in [my] brain here; I think you (deliberately or not, consciously or not) wrote what you did in such a way as to suggest the rounding-off in question, even while maintaining some deniability.
I thought I went out of my way not to make claims about what’s going on in your head. I said that you wrote what you did in such a way as to suggest the rounding-off you were happy to ascribe to something in my head. I very deliberately and explicitly didn’t speculate on what the internal causes of that might have been.
(Is it possible that you misread “in such a way as to suggest” as something like “with the purpose of suggesting”?)
I acknowledge, and mainly agree. I have no strong or principled defense of this thing that my brain does, and wouldn’t object to people pumping against it even if they did so much more strongly than you do above.
However, it is what my brain does.
I could dance around it by saying something like “a less vibrant and interesting person,” which might be better? That, too, is a true statement—while it feels a little like PR semantics, it also underscores that personhood is a binary that can’t be taken away? (My brain absolutely does think of personhood as a binary that all people except maybe those in permanent vegetative comas have.)
I do want to point out, though, that something in your brain caused you to round me off to saying not human, which I absolutely did not say at any point in the post. There’s an enormous qualitative difference between less and not. Although maybe that, in and of itself, is an object example of why you are advocating caution (because people hear what they hear, regardless of what you say, and there’s a benefit to keeping a wide moat around something like that).
It’s true: you never say, in so many words, that anyone is not human. On the other hand, you begin with a quotation from Dune in which someone says “Let us say I suggest you may be human”; and you end by proposing to plot people’s attributes on a cube one of whose corners is “not human at all”. I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame on something in [my] brain here; I think you (deliberately or not, consciously or not) wrote what you did in such a way as to suggest the rounding-off in question, even while maintaining some deniability.
*sigh*
I object on principle to what I see as a non-falsifiable claim by an outside person about what’s going on in my own head.
I thought I went out of my way not to make claims about what’s going on in your head. I said that you wrote what you did in such a way as to suggest the rounding-off you were happy to ascribe to something in my head. I very deliberately and explicitly didn’t speculate on what the internal causes of that might have been.
(Is it possible that you misread “in such a way as to suggest” as something like “with the purpose of suggesting”?)
Yeah, that misreading is a possible explanation for my reaction. +1 for doing better hypothesizing than me in this case.