Personhood
Person vs. Human:
Persons: Beings who are part of our moral community.
Human: a biological term if you have human DNA.
What must process to be part of our moral community?
John Noonan proposed Genetic Criterion, i.e you’are a person if you have human DNA. Mary Ann Warren offers Cognitive Criteria:
- Consciousness
- Reasoning
- Self-motivated activity
- Capacity to communicate
- Self-awareness
Or Social Criterion: whenever society recognizes you as a person, or someone cares about you.
Peter Singer proposed:
The key to personhood is sentience, the ability to feel pleasure and pain.
It focuses the being’s capacity to suffer.
Gradient theory of personhood: personhood comes in degress, and you can have more or less of it.
Where does you mind reside?
Phineas Gage was injured with rod pieced though his brain, his personality degraded to a belligeranet jerk.
Reductive Physicalism: the view that the world is made only of physical stuff, including us.
Substance Dualism: the world is made of both physical stuff and mental stuff.
Interactionism: each entity of mind and body can have effect on the other.
Frank Jackson presented the story about Mary: the qualitive experience of seeing isn’t the same as knowing facts.
Qualia: instance of subjective, first-person experience.
Epiphenomenalism: physical state can give rise to mental states, but mental states can’t affect physical states.
Colin McGinn believes:
Mysterianism: the question of consciousness is unsolvable by human minds.
John Searle uses the Chinese Room story to argue that AI which passes Turing Test is NOT strong enough.