At the risk of nitpicking around labels, while I see what you’re getting at, consciousness and personhood are two different things in a qualitatively meaningful sense.
Consciousness is a vague term, kind of like the “soul”, which there is not uniform agreement around. Philosophically it may be important, but pragmatically it’s not very useful.
Personhood on the other hand is, at least in the realm of the law, a pragmatically important label. It features heavily in issues like corporate liability, abortion laws, and the citizenship prospects bestowed onto individuals. And it rarely touches on issues of consciousness.
If you want your notion of personhood to be objectively founded, and non arbitrary, then consciousness becomes relevant again. The two are not necessarily different.
I think consciousness is what Minsky referred to as a ‘suitcase’ word. We can’t have an objective definition of a term (personhood) that relies on a second term which is not objectively agreed upon (consciousness).
It’s like how you and I and a thousand other people can all agree that a bridge is one mile in length, but we couldn’t all necessarily agree on if it’s ‘long’.
Which is exactly what I am doing in the post? By saying that the question of consciousness is a red herring aka not that relevant to the question of personhood?
At the risk of nitpicking around labels, while I see what you’re getting at, consciousness and personhood are two different things in a qualitatively meaningful sense.
Consciousness is a vague term, kind of like the “soul”, which there is not uniform agreement around. Philosophically it may be important, but pragmatically it’s not very useful.
Personhood on the other hand is, at least in the realm of the law, a pragmatically important label. It features heavily in issues like corporate liability, abortion laws, and the citizenship prospects bestowed onto individuals. And it rarely touches on issues of consciousness.
So just encouraging you to keep those separate.
If you want your notion of personhood to be objectively founded, and non arbitrary, then consciousness becomes relevant again. The two are not necessarily different.
I think consciousness is what Minsky referred to as a ‘suitcase’ word. We can’t have an objective definition of a term (personhood) that relies on a second term which is not objectively agreed upon (consciousness).
It’s like how you and I and a thousand other people can all agree that a bridge is one mile in length, but we couldn’t all necessarily agree on if it’s ‘long’.
Which is exactly what I am doing in the post? By saying that the question of consciousness is a red herring aka not that relevant to the question of personhood?