The reason I care if something is a person or not is that “caring about people” is part of my values.
If one is acting in the world, I would say one’s sense of what a person is has to intimately connected with value of “caring about people”. My caring about people is connecting to my experience of people—there are people I never met I care about in the abstract but that’s from extrapolating my immediate experience of people.
I would expect in a world where they weren’t people is that there would be some feature you could point to in humans which cannot be found in mental models of people
It seems like an easy criteria would be “exist entirely independently from me”. My mental models of just about everything, including people, are sketchy, feel like me “doing something”, etc. I can’t effortlessly have a conversation with any mental model I have of a person, for example. Oddly, enough I can have a conversation with another as one of my mental models or internals characters (I’m a frequency DnD GM and I have NPCs I often like playing). Mental models and characters seem more like add-ons to my ordinary consciousness.
If one is acting in the world, I would say one’s sense of what a person is has to intimately connected with value of “caring about people”. My caring about people is connecting to my experience of people—there are people I never met I care about in the abstract but that’s from extrapolating my immediate experience of people.
It seems like an easy criteria would be “exist entirely independently from me”. My mental models of just about everything, including people, are sketchy, feel like me “doing something”, etc. I can’t effortlessly have a conversation with any mental model I have of a person, for example. Oddly, enough I can have a conversation with another as one of my mental models or internals characters (I’m a frequency DnD GM and I have NPCs I often like playing). Mental models and characters seem more like add-ons to my ordinary consciousness.