I enjoyed this quite a bit. I find myself agreeing that any useful conception of personhood will probably be a complicated, fuzzy thing. I also agree that this fuzziness isn’t a reason to not attempt to clarify the matter.
My main hesitation comes from the claim that the primary salient distinction between an “organism” and a “self” is, basically, language. How do you know that ant colonies aren’t processing abstract reflective concepts via complex chemical signaling?
Also, it seems like any human under six years old would stand a chance of not being classified as human by your proposed scheme. An important part of the Turing test is that the humans who are being tricked into believing that the AI is a person are not so skeptical that they will classify a significant fraction of actual people as being AIs. In other words, I think the Turing test is a terrible personhood test.
Yes, there plenty of people who don’t pass the Turing test — e.g., those who don’t speak the right language. For this reason, the Turing test, with a human or machine judge, is not a good nonperson predicate, contrary to the OP. But it can be taken as a person predicate. That is, if something passes a strict enough Turing test, it’s reasonable to regard that thing as a person.
But then this defeats the whole purpose: if we don’t want the AI to be a person, then it won’t be able to pass the Turing test, and then it is unclear whether it would be able to use the test to tell people from non-people.
I enjoyed this quite a bit. I find myself agreeing that any useful conception of personhood will probably be a complicated, fuzzy thing. I also agree that this fuzziness isn’t a reason to not attempt to clarify the matter.
My main hesitation comes from the claim that the primary salient distinction between an “organism” and a “self” is, basically, language. How do you know that ant colonies aren’t processing abstract reflective concepts via complex chemical signaling?
Also, it seems like any human under six years old would stand a chance of not being classified as human by your proposed scheme. An important part of the Turing test is that the humans who are being tricked into believing that the AI is a person are not so skeptical that they will classify a significant fraction of actual people as being AIs. In other words, I think the Turing test is a terrible personhood test.
Yes, there plenty of people who don’t pass the Turing test — e.g., those who don’t speak the right language. For this reason, the Turing test, with a human or machine judge, is not a good nonperson predicate, contrary to the OP. But it can be taken as a person predicate. That is, if something passes a strict enough Turing test, it’s reasonable to regard that thing as a person.
But then this defeats the whole purpose: if we don’t want the AI to be a person, then it won’t be able to pass the Turing test, and then it is unclear whether it would be able to use the test to tell people from non-people.
Indeed.