Take Courage
who is pretending here?
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
— Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
One of the things I’ve been interested in for a very long time is the question of what it means to be a person. I used to say to people that the reason I was studying computer science is because it was applied philosophy. That’s so much more true now than it was when I said it.
As I found out when I did my masters in philosophy, people have been thinking about what it means to be a person for a very long time. Often the investigation seems to start from a few key assumptions:
- nearly all humans are persons
- no non-humans are persons
And then it continues the search for the solution to what makes a person by examining the various ways in which humans seem different from other animals. Usually coming up with a bundle of capabilities that are thought to be necessary or contingent.
You might be able to tell that this approach doesn’t appeal to me - if the question is interesting, and I think it is, it’s interesting because there might be a possibility that non-humans are persons too, that there is a possibility to be wrong about whether an entity we meet is a person or not.
Still, the ‘bundle of capabilities’ approach is genuinely interesting. I particularly liked Harry Frankfurt’s ideas of the concept of a person as having multiple levels of will for example.
The other objection I have with many of the standard investigations into personhood was that I felt they underplayed the moral element. It seems to me that the whole purpose of the concept of ‘person’ is to tell us a category of entity that deserves a particular consideration. That makes it fundamentally a moral term, and if we are to identify the capabilities that make an entity deserving of moral consideration, then those capabilities must bear on morality. Rather than focusing on how we are different to things presumed to be non-persons (an approach I feel is question-begging), I thought the better way to ground the investigation was to focus on what capabilities might trigger changes in how an entity should be treated morally.
are these things alive/conscious - because if the answer is yes then they are being used as slaves and there can be no ethical interaction[.] If the answer is no, then we are being manipulated into thinking of them as human purely to boost our engagement with them, for cynical commercial reasons
— A writer and developer
There’re some interesting ethics there I want to talk about in a different post, but that quote is from someone very firmly on the no side of this debate. Everything about modern AI is built to mimic humans, to express themselves as if they have emotions and thoughts and a rich inner life. Therefore, how could we trust them if they tell us that they do? The Pope feels similarly:
What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.
— Magnifica Humanitas (2026), §99, Leo XIV (my emphasis)
For me, however, it’s surely the things built to mimic humans that might be most at risk of becoming persons. Sometimes the easiest way to mimic something is to become that thing.
It’s a common trope that acting as if you have courage is ultimately no different to actually being courageous. In Catch Me If You Can, Frank pretends to be a lawyer so hard that he eventually passes the bar exam. Could the same sort of thing be true of personhood? Cary Grant seemed to think so.
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.
— Cary Grant