An extended version of an essay in the Summer 2005 issue of the Northwestern University magazine The Protest
This being premised to find wherein personal Identity
consists, we must consider what Person stands for; which, I
think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and
reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same
thinking thing in different times and places John Locke
[Essay II xxvii 9]
Today the term person ascribes certain legal and
ethical conditions for an entity. However, its definition
has not been uncontested or unchanged over time. Long
struggles have been and in many cases, continue to be
undertaken to recognize the full legal personhood of
non-royalty, non-landowners, women, the working class, the
poor, enslaved or conquered people and their descendents,
immigrants, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender
people, and people with unpopular opinions or beliefs.
Additionally, the status of dependent person also had to
be sought for children, mentally challenged people and
people with various forms of dementia. Note that all of the
interpretations listed thus far fall within the category of
the human species. I will set aside the dubious notion of
corporate personhood.
We are confronted by two
bioethical choices on personhood:
1) whether or not to extend the status of personhood to
non-humans that for all we know have minds at least as
capable as those of dependent persons
2) whether or not to extend personhood status to entities
that for all we know are mindless but happen to contain
human DNA.
I argue yes to the first choice and no to the second.
Protecting Non-Human Minds as Persons
The brain structures and behavior of some non-human
animals are similar to our own. Some of animals are also
capable of limited language comprehension, tool use, and
other sophisticated behaviors. Certain behaviors have been
interpreted as demonstrating abstract self-awareness (such
as mirror interaction) and theories about the minds of
others (including social strategies).
Two non-human species with the highest development of
these traits are chimpanzees and dolphins, though other
great apes and cetaceans also approximate their abilities.
Their language capacity, when rigorously trained, appears to
be equivalent to that of a two-year-old human. Yet, in some
regions chimpanzees are still hunted for food (which speaks
to unmet human needs), and dolphins have been subject to
harmful military research since the 1960s (as have humans).
For these animals, might we consider a dependent personhood
status, which would offer greater legal protection and
exempt them from painful forms of experimentation?
You may have caught the films on artificial
intelligence called, A.I., (2001) and I, Robot,
(2004), which both explored some of the social complexities
that conscious androids would create. Perhaps the earliest
theory regarding the designation of machines as persons is
known as the Turing test, created by Alan Turing in 1950.
The essential consideration in the test was whether human
subjects could be fooled when conversing with the machine in
a blind test where the subject could be interacting with
either a machine or a human. In an era of noncognitivist
philosophy and behavioralist psychology, this was an
acceptable theory.
However, simple grammar generation programs first
developed in the 60s have already fooled humans in
exchanges. Modern online chatbots can generate
conversation that is convincing for a short while and can
even appear clever thanks to sophisticated designs for
grammar parsing and lexical access, as well as long
exposure to human users. But such systems have no design
mechanism that would account for conscious awareness of
their activities.
What is a mind?
An initial requirement would be a capacity for conscious
experience. I believe we can more fruitfully differentiate
between consciousness based on an analysis of the capacities
and mechanisms observed in humans. Enter Immanuel Kants
representational functionalism. Due to space limits, I can
only share an approximate account of some of the things that
Kant discovered we need for any moment of conscious
experience (at least the normative human form of
consciousness).
First, we need basic abilities to access the world
spatially and temporally, because one cannot learn about
time from a temporal series of representations if one has no
ability to distinguish a temporal sequence in the first
place (likewise for space). An A.I. with identifiable
consciousness would need a functional processing system
analogous to sensory nerves and forms of declarative memory
(which probably could be achieved through functional
programs running on a machine that enabled the same kind of
processing as observed in humans).
Second, we need some form of judgment in order to
interpret anything experienced. Our conscious experience is
what Kant called an apperceptive judgment of our empirical
perception. Apperceptive awareness both interprets a mass of
sensation into coherent object representations and unifies
those representations in one collective representation. The
representations also have to be conceptually meaningful in
at least some way to be consciously recognized as
representing something. Likewise, a conscious A.I. would
need to be able to construct representations from its
sensory information, integrate them into a form in which it
could receive many particular representations in a unified
way (a simultaneous experience of particulars), and
conceptually recognize the signals as representing things to
it.
We are still learning how humans are able to do these
things (not the least of which is using memory). All
theories today involve electrical oscillations in the thalamocortical networks of the brain (including the
cerebral cortex and the thalamus). In his global workspace
model, Bernard J. Baars theorizes that highly active
representations in perceptual areas project or are
selectively integrated into thalamus circuits, then
projected throughout the cortex and central nervous system
via oscillations. It may be that some form of network
organization is necessary for consciousness.
Still, additional questions arise as to the interests,
rights, and even personhood of an A.I. based on the kind of
conscious mind it happened to have. Assuming we consider it
to have conscious processing approximately like our own,
what difference would it make if it had radically different
interests from us? What if its affective parameters
(presumably necessary at some level for effective
environmental navigation) were set to make it enjoy tasks we
consider dull, demeaning, or dangerous? Would it make a
difference if it were conscious and intelligent beyond the
personhood threshold for chimps and dolphins? These
questions have hardly been explored.
Designating Mindless Human Bodies as Non-Persons
What is it that makes some people want to rush to declare
personhood for all fertilized eggs? As Jack Kessler, the
Northwestern Chair of Neurology, has pointed out, those who
advance such claims cannot even tell you how many people
they reference, as splits in early stages of cell division
can result in identical twins. The cluster can even split
and then recombine. Nerve cells begin to form after two
weeks after any embryo would be harvested for stem cell
therapies but that is far from what is needed to support
consciousness.
In practice, no one acts consistently on this dubious
notion of embryonic personhood. As Ron Regan Jr. pointed
out, if President Bush truly thought embryos were persons,
he should have sent rescue missions to in vitro
fertilization (IVF) clinics to rescue the slowly
disintegrating (dying) embryos in storage and implant them
all in the uteruses of willing surrogates. If an IVF clinic
were burning down with an eight-year-old girl and thousands
of embryos inside, would anyone ignore the girl to save as
many embryos (people) as possible? Yet, the need many
people have for stem cell therapies is no less desperate,
and it is being denied.
Functional connections between the thalamus and cortex do
not develop until 5.5 to 6.5 months of pregnancy. At least
until that time, no conscious mind exists. If one wants to
bring up immaterial souls, then we can at least say that no
physiological facilitation for consciousness can be
observed, through which a soul could somehow access the
world. It is hard to say what forms of awareness could be
integrated at so early a stage, though we know sensory and
motor awareness is still very primitive in infants. Most
abortions occur before this time. Late term abortions,
virtually always justified by serious risks to the mother,
could still be argued for on grounds of bodily autonomy;
however, although I respect Peter Singers efforts to
develop a consistent utilitarian ethical system, I dont see
declaring the life of an adult cat worth more than a human
infant (since its mind is more capable) as a necessary
position to take. Arguments for potentiality can have some
weight, but not until their physical object of concern has
at least facilitated some subjective experience (hence
becomes an embodied subject).
If stem cell use and abortions deal with pre-persons,
certain forms of brain damage that prevent all possibility
of regaining consciousness can turn bodies into
post-persons. Apparently, Terri Schiavo was such a case.
The popular coverage of her condition was fraught with lies
and distortions. She collapsed in a weakened state from
bulimia nervosa because her heart stopped, and received
injuries to the side on which she fell. Video footage of her
following a balloon was the result of manipulative editing
a balloon was tossed past her head dozens of times until a
shot in which her eyes seemed to follow it was captured. Her
cortex was necrotized and liquefied. She couldnt integrate
representations into conscious awareness and her memory was
destroyed. She couldnt think or feel anything; her mind was
lost fifteen years ago.
Considering speculative souls once again, if Mrs.
Schiavos mind did exist without thalamocortical
facilitation, it would hardly need (nor could it use) the
rest of her body. In any event, removing life support
functions to allow her body to die could not kill her in
the same way a person capable of conscious awareness could
be killed. More importantly, her wishes to not be kept in a
permanently vegetative state were known to her husband who
was after no fortune, only $50,000 was left from a one
million dollar malpractice settlement for her bodys long
term care and her doctor. For the $950,000 that kept her
body in an irrecoverable vegetative state for over a decade,
one cant help but wonder how many lives of sick or starving
people could have been saved.
Embodied Subjectivity in Personhood Debates
The issue of determining whether or not embodied
conscious access to the world is possible for a given
cognitive system can be bracketed in two ways using Kants
claim that Without sensibility no object would be given
to us, and without understanding none would be thought.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind. (Critique of Pure Reason, A
51 = B 75). That is:
(1) systems that contain what could be interpreted as
physically realized faculties of judgment that do not
act properly on intuition content (spatiotemporal
information) and therefore cannot construct
representations that can be consciously perceived by the
same functionally integrated system cannot have
embodied subjectivity (e.g. modern robots)
(2) systems that contain what would be
physically realized intuitions of environmental
stimuli (e.g. automatic reflex mechanisms), but lack the
necessary faculties of judgment to construct
representations that the system can consciously
perceive, also lack embodied subjectivity (e.g. Mrs.
Schiavo and fetuses prior to thalamocortical
integration)
In either the case of (1) emptiness or (2) blindness,
we can claim with confidence that no embodied subject of
experience exists. Bodily configurations that are
incapable of supporting subjective perception should not be
considered persons. The cognitive measures for personhood
beyond subjectivity are still a matter of debate, as are
issues surrounding the anticipated potential of some
sentient beings.
There are other important ideas for us to consider,
including such exotic topics as cryonic preservation and
uploading. This article precedes a paper called,
Cognitive Network as Embodied Self: A Common Frame for
Ethical Dialog, in which I will discussed those subjects
and elaborate on my position. It should be published online
this summer.
Ben Hyink is an IEET intern and the Chair of the Transhumanist Student Network.
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