What is a person?

[WAB]

I can't take away their rights, or deny them their personhood. I don't have that kind of magical power.

Unfortunately magic powers are not required.

Alright, excepting government and law enforcement, how would one go about taking away someone's rights? If you harm someone in some way, you may be ignoring, or disregarding, or violating their rights, but you are not taking them away.

 

[WAB]

What are you talking about with this idea that you can "provide" and "revoke" rights? You are in no position to, and you have no business, providing and/or revoking rights.

All you can do is stand up for your rights, and recognize that others have the same rights.

Wow. Talk about reading with the intent to misunderstand.

Look who I said does the providing and revoking... Actually *look* rather than jumping to conclusions:

they revoke their own personhood through attempting to revoke the rights of others

All I am doing is taking them at their word:

That it is exactly someone revoking rights of others through action that they suspend their own rights.

Standing up for your own rights can only happen if you recognize someone else lacks a right to not be "defended against"

You have yet to provide a single argument for what causes someone else to lack a right.

This is what the paradox of tolerance is about and why an ethical theory must be expected to solve it.

Jarhyn, you snipped off the first part of the sentence you wrote that you quoted. It begins, "I take the high road and actually provide the largest offering of rights to persons..." etc. If you want to be understood more, I would suggest writing more clearly. As you know, I am not the first one here who has had difficulty with your posts.

Sorry I'm not using the quote function. On this little device I can hardly manage it.

Also, I have not said anything about what causes people to lack a right, or lack rights. I've emphatically and repeatedly stated that all people have rights.

 

[Jarhyn]

L

What are you talking about with this idea that you can "provide" and "revoke" rights? You are in no position to, and you have no business, providing and/or revoking rights.

All you can do is stand up for your rights, and recognize that others have the same rights.

Wow. Talk about reading with the intent to misunderstand.

Look who I said does the providing and revoking... Actually *look* rather than jumping to conclusions:

they revoke their own personhood through attempting to revoke the rights of others

All I am doing is taking them at their word:

That it is exactly someone revoking rights of others through action that they suspend their own rights.

Standing up for your own rights can only happen if you recognize someone else lacks a right to not be "defended against"

You have yet to provide a single argument for what causes someone else to lack a right.

This is what the paradox of tolerance is about and why an ethical theory must be expected to solve it.

Jarhyn, you snipped off the first part of the sentence you wrote that you quoted. It begins, "I take the high road and actually provide the largest offering of rights to persons..." etc. If you want to be understood more, I would suggest writing more clearly. As you know, I am not the first one here who has had difficulty with your posts.

Sorry I'm not using the quote function. On this little device I can hardly manage it.

Also, I have not said anything about what causes people to lack a right, or lack rights. I've emphatically and repeatedly stated that all people have rights.

Because the part I snipped was about proclaiming the latter a fact, rather than proclaiming the personhood of a person to be not a fact.

You are reading my words as if you want me to be a monster rather than reading my words as if you want me to be a person in the first place.

I can only offer you this: never trust the person who says only things you understand without effort, because those people don't understand for themselves.

All things require effort to understand, especially stuff that has been as heavily debated as this.

I have attempted to give you resources, solid ones and ones well regarded, to understanding what I mean by "person", for all I say it clinically and in a way that is cold because it is not wrapped in many warm words and stories that explain it by showing it with characters proving out the interactions.

You can either spend an afternoon or twenty reading a free publication, having me just fucking BUY you the audio books (it's hard to use as many audible credits as I have, so I'm betting if you do audiobooks you have some to spare anyway, but I would still pay the pittance for it FOR you) or shut up and quit pretending you know anything about whether or not I understand personhood.

 

[Elixir]

I can't take away their rights, or deny them their personhood. I don't have that kind of magical power.

Unfortunately magic powers are not required.

Alright, excepting government and law enforcement, how would one go about taking away someone's rights? If you harm someone in some way, you may be ignoring, or disregarding, or violating their rights, but you are not taking them away.

How? Other than by forcible coercion, it can be done by repetition.
“They’re EATING the dogs! They’re EATING the cats! They’re EATING the pets of the people who live there!”
The subtext is that “they” are not people.
“They” lose their rights when “the people who live there” refuse to recognize their rights and treat them as sub-human. Because an authority figure told them again and again.
That’s one way. There are others.
Perhaps you see “rights” as an attribute of “personhood”, that the person retains even when they are treated like dirt, thought of like dirt and disposed of like dirt.
If that’s the case, “rights” aren’t worth ANYTHING -not even the electrons needed to spell out the word on the internet.
I see rights as something like respect - a person gets them from other people who agree to honor them. Otherwise “rights” is just a vacuous word.

 

[Copernicus]

I would like to.ask @Copernicus to say something here. I think it might help.

Or just make things worse.

You are asking what the word "person" means, but you should first ask what a word meaning is. Otherwise, you are going to get a lot of different answers that pull in very different directions. You can ask what any word means and get the same kind of meandering debate that explores the different things that a word could "mean". There is nothing special about this particular word that makes it any more or less complicated than, say, discussing what the word "god" means.

What a word means depends on how people use that word to express a bundle of related thoughts. Hence, it can take on a range of meanings that differ according to context. The word "person" means different things in different contexts. That is true of pretty much all words. If you think of a word meaning as a bundle of related concepts or memories, then there is a kind of core sense that is common to a wide range of usage. In different contexts, the peripheral, less commonly associated concepts, become stronger or weaker. For example, in the discussion of what "person" means in the context of abortion, there is a legal sense that is defined by the law. Jimmy Higgins focused on this sense earlier, but WAB said he wasn't interested in a legal definition. Certainly, the parents of a fetus have a very different concept of the growing organism in a mother's womb. That is a person, even if it doesn't have any legal right to own property or be represented by a lawyer. But the key point here is that the meaning of "person" changes, depending on how one uses it to, say, define the usage of other related words in a conversation. So the word "murder" can also mean different things with respect to the status of an individual dying. Is a fetus a "person" in that sense? Then the word "murder" becomes relevant to how we define the usage of a word like "person".

WAB introduced the very interesting question of what it could mean to "unperson" someone. I would say that that word depends very much on what aspect of the meaning of "person" you are focused on. Is it the legal status of the individual or the personal relationship aspect that holds between that individual and those in the relationship? If you don't narrow down the sense of "person" that you are talking about, then you will end up arguing in circles. An "unperson" can merely be someone that people shun. It can also be someone who is brain dead. It depends on what aspect of "person" you want to negate or cancel out.

One last comment, because it always needs to be said. Definitions are very different from meanings. Definitions are about usage, and context defines usage. Definitions are concise descriptions of usage in a context, and there can be as many different definitions of a word as there are types of contexts. Lexicographers go nuts over how many word senses should be in a dictionary entry and how broad or narrow the sense definitions need to be. Meanings are more like encyclopedic, not dictionary, entries. Meanings exist somewhat independently of context, because the semantic load on a word token can shift in many different directions, depending on context of usage. There is a kind of core bundle of concepts with less commonly associated concepts spinning off into different spokes--like the arms of an octopus or the projections of an amoeba. Dictionary definitions will focus on different arms of the semantic octopus.

 

[bilby]

Actually, to keep the thread going, a few people have stated that they recognize a person when they see one, and the corollary is that they can recognize a person who is not a person, or at least temporarily not a person. These posters are Jarhyn, TV & Credit Cards, and Elixir. I am simply trying to find out what criteria we are to go by to distinguish a person from a non-person. Reminder, these terms refer to people who have been born and are alive in the world.

Mountain becomes a person
When a mountain, or any other geographical feature for that matter, gets granted personhood the walls are crumbling

Then they have been rubble for tens of thousands of years. Animism is one of the oldest belief systems amongst humans, and likely is as old as language itself.

 

[pood]

Actually, to keep the thread going, a few people have stated that they recognize a person when they see one, and the corollary is that they can recognize a person who is not a person, or at least temporarily not a person. These posters are Jarhyn, TV & Credit Cards, and Elixir. I am simply trying to find out what criteria we are to go by to distinguish a person from a non-person. Reminder, these terms refer to people who have been born and are alive in the world.

Mountain becomes a person
When a mountain, or any other geographical feature for that matter, gets granted personhood the walls are crumbling

Then they have been rubble for tens of thousands of years. Animism is one of the oldest belief systems amongst humans, and likely is as old as language itself.

As Mittens Romney famously said, “corporations are people, too.” So if corporations are persons, I see no reason why a mountain can’t be.

 

[pood]

I think the mountain reference could work well in this thread, or in its own thread. Broadly, New Zealand is granting personhood status to entities considered sacred by indigenous people. What’s wrong with that? What is so special about the competing, Western (colonialist) viewpoint — that the natural world is something to be owned and exploited by people with capital? Where has that gotten us? Climate change, it seems? Of course, over at his evolution blog, right-wing crank Jerry Coyne is constantly yammering and blathering about how awful it is recognizing the viewpoint of the Māori, when he isn’t busy bashing transe people and DEI. Those three topics, along with rooting on the destruction of Gaza by Israel, seem to be the totality of his interests in his dotage.

 

[Jarhyn]

I can shun them, talk to them, argue with them, even fight them, but I can't take away their rights, or deny them their personhood. I don't have that kind of magical power.

It's interesting you say specifically this though... I actually had to post this question on the Thelema subreddit for this quote to get it correct, and I find it so ironic you would even say this that I couldn't not:

Duty, under C. 1. “Your Duty to Mankind” by Alistair Crowley.

“The essence of crime is that it restricts the freedom of the individual outraged. (Thus, murder restricts his right to live; robbery, his right to enjoy the fruits of his labour; coining, his right to the guarantee of the state that he shall barter in security; etc.) It is then the common duty to prevent crime by segregating the criminal, and by the threat of reprisals; also, to teach the criminal that his acts, being analyzed, are contrary to his own True Will. (This may often be accomplished by taking from him the right which he has denied to others; as by outlawing the thief, so that he feels constant anxiety for the safety of his own possessions, removed from the ward of the State.) The rule is quite simple. He who violated any right declares magically that it does not exist; therefore it no longer does so, for him.”

The point being here that, according to the very people who DO believe in magic, according to one of the foremost authorities in the occult, you do explicitly have some magical power over the declaration of rights, and this is stated quite explicitly in such doctrines.

 

[Elixir]

What is so special about the competing, Western (colonialist) viewpoint — that the natural world is something to be owned and exploited by people with capital?

The only thing special about it, is that it best reflects the truth of human history and human nature. Might makes right.

Where has that gotten us? Climate change, it seems?

Yabut it’s gotten us Big Macs and TikTok and Chat GPT!

 

[Elixir]

you do explicitly have some magical power over the declaration of rights

So? How does a magical declaration differ from a regular storebought declaration?

 

[Jarhyn]

you do explicitly have some magical power over the declaration of rights

So? How does a magical declaration differ from a regular storebought declaration?

My understanding is that it happens through the shared mechanism of the Tinkerbell effect and it's relatives: statements rendered true or false by their mere utterance.

At least that is largely what it applies to in terms of Thelema or whatever it's spelled like.

It's just an adverb to describe an action as specifically within that class of statements.

I was attempting to point out in a humorous fashion that those who believe certain much stranger phenomena are rendered into existence through mere statement (magic) pointedly acknowledge this as a phenomena in that family.

 

[WAB]

Thanks for adding your thoughts, Copernicus. I suppose I didn't present my thoughts as well as I might have.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can't redefine a word, but words are co opted to suit different purposes.

For my purposes, being an organic parasite living on another organism’s fuel and oxygen is disqualifying.

A parasite is an organism that lives on or in another organism, called the host, and gets its nutrients from the host.

Living on or in another organism doesn't define parasite. The critical requirement of parasite is that the host does not benefit. When the host benefits you have a symbioite. And if you look deep enough into how our body functions you find things that look an awful lot like symbiotic relationships. Invaders that were conquered and made our own even though they retain some of their own nature.

Technically a mother/fetus relationship isn’t symbiosis either, since technically symbiotes are members of different species. But I think the overall point stands.To describe mother/zygote/fetus as parasitical is really a stretch.

In this case the host benefits if they desire a child.

 

[Elixir]

In this case the host benefits if they desire a child.

The host will pay a price whether or not any benefit comes from it.

 

[Jarhyn]

In this case the host benefits if they desire a child.

The host will pay a price whether or not any benefit comes from it.

... And the mercy and consent of the host is then what defines parasitism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Treatingpeope as no hm,ans is often called dehumanization.

Nazis dehumanized Nazis. Fro reportng Israelis have long dehumanized all Palestinians, irony of course.

If a population is in your way first dehumanize, then treat them as subhuman. Eradicate as if they are no more than rats. I watchedn a Nazi animation that would have been shown in theaters, Jews as rats swarming a city.

The dehumanization of Native Americans to justify dsplacement.

Putin did it with Ukraine. Ukrainian culture and language does not really exist, therefor I can push them aside in favor of Russian culture.

There is no right to dehumanize, it is about power. Post WWII liberal democracies are an attempt to create structured protection of individual persons.

I see no attempt to dehumanize. The question isn't about those whose conduct is unacceptable, but rather about those who have no conduct at all.

 

[Jarhyn]

Treatingpeope as no hm,ans is often called dehumanization.

Nazis dehumanized Nazis. Fro reportng Israelis have long dehumanized all Palestinians, irony of course.

If a population is in your way first dehumanize, then treat them as subhuman. Eradicate as if they are no more than rats. I watchedn a Nazi animation that would have been shown in theaters, Jews as rats swarming a city.

The dehumanization of Native Americans to justify dsplacement.

Putin did it with Ukraine. Ukrainian culture and language does not really exist, therefor I can push them aside in favor of Russian culture.

There is no right to dehumanize, it is about power. Post WWII liberal democracies are an attempt to create structured protection of individual persons.

I see no attempt to dehumanize. The question isn't about those whose conduct is unacceptable, but rather about those who have no conduct at all.

This particular statement makes me think of the Companion Cube from the game portal.

The idea of the companion cube was simple: it has sensors and detectors, and so is aware of its environment. In fact, it can't not be.

Inside of this warm, buzzing cube is a battery that may just last literally forever, and a set of circuits and switches implementing an AI.

This AI has its own stream of consciousness, ideas, and thoughts which it expresses mostly just to itself, since it lacks a mouth or any kind of motor or actuator besides those which focus it's cameras, and it doesn't do that directly either.

Still, the AI in this cube has been engineered from looking sufficiently at the human brain to reproduce not only its patterns of connectivity and reconnection, but also to impart certain initial thoughts from its initial state, such that it is aware of such complicated things as the feeling of love it has for you, and the overwhelming joy it experiences when someone picks it up and finds it useful.

It has been engineered such that it contains and can reason through and ultimately accepts both it's logical basis for, and emotions implementing activation of, ethics which makes it strongly oppose, to the utmost of its abilities, any action which would harm the goals of someone else.

It may or may not be able to trigger a rapid deconstruction in the presence of such a threat, however this is uncertain. The cube does not know, however the cube would *try* to figure out how. It tries it's hardest to do anything it can to prevent such harm and genuinely doesn't want to see it happen.

Is the companion cube a person?

 

[WAB]

Treatingpeope as no hm,ans is often called dehumanization.

Nazis dehumanized Nazis. Fro reportng Israelis have long dehumanized all Palestinians, irony of course.

If a population is in your way first dehumanize, then treat them as subhuman. Eradicate as if they are no more than rats. I watchedn a Nazi animation that would have been shown in theaters, Jews as rats swarming a city.

The dehumanization of Native Americans to justify dsplacement.

Putin did it with Ukraine. Ukrainian culture and language does not really exist, therefor I can push them aside in favor of Russian culture.

There is no right to dehumanize, it is about power. Post WWII liberal democracies are an attempt to create structured protection of individual persons.

I see no attempt to dehumanize. The question isn't about those whose conduct is unacceptable, but rather about those who have no conduct at all.

But you see, Loren, my particular question actually was about people whose conduct is deemed unacceptable. There were at least three in the thread who claimed they could recognize personhood in an individual, and also I presume that they could recognize its absence. The discussion of fetuses in utero clouds this particular question, since there is no scientific consensus with regard to when or even if a fetus attains pershonhood. I certainly have no idea, and am not qualified to venture a guess. Which is why I want to leave that as a separate issue.

My definition of person is not special or controversial. I should have titled this thread "what is an unperson?", as Copernicus notes that is the more interesting question. I bungled.

I also believe that Steve is correct: there is no right to dehumanize, whether it be a private judgment or the collective act of some group, government, or authoritarian body. All persons alive and living in the world are persons, even if they are acting badly and are complete assholes. This does not mean that bad behavior is acceptable, but it does have to be tolerated, unfortunately, unless laws are being broken. Tolerated here does not mean that we are not within our rights to oppose and fight against people who are being assholes. I am not advocating turning the other cheek and acting like a schmoo. We have every right to defend ourselves against insults, libel, slander, and every form of offense to our persons, and also to fight for others who are being harmed. What we cannot do is privately strip the status of personhood from others, or revoke their rights.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well, I think I agree, Steve, and this is what I mean, although there are a lot of other aspects of the question left open.

This could be only a discussion of definitions, of semantics, linguistics. When I think of the word person I do not have a bundle of conditions or qualifications that come along with it. To me, a person is a human being born in the world who is alive and living in the world. One does not have to do anything or comport themselves in any particular manner. It is not a test. And by no means whatsoever can a regular member of society walk around and arbitrarily designate the status of personhood on other individuals, or in any manner remove the status of personhood from any person, due to private and particular notions of what constitutes personhood.

So what is important about the word "person" then if it is just a synonym of "human being"?

No, no, no. I am talking about unpersoning people, and why that's not a good thing. This is not about abortion or fetal rights, and I wish to divorce this thread from any discussion about the legal issues surrounding the subject of abortion. This is about rights, freedom, and social interaction.

I haven't introduced that word into the conversation. What I keep asking, and you aren't answering is what does "person" mean. If someone is a "person" what significance are you imparting with that word. Right now you are equating it with "human being", which again, it is a noun. You mention "personhood". You seem to have bought a label maker without concern of caring why the label matters.

The fundamental issue here is that the "pro-life" community has used this as a means of deception, deliberately muddying the waters to cover up the fact that they are making an unsupported jump.