Could Adam and Eve Have Been the First Embodied Persons Within an Existing Homo sapiens Population?

[Tim]

@Roman

It seems to me that the distinction you propose between two approaches to personhood does not quite correspond to what I am trying to formulate.

It was not meant to.

It was meant to clarify the difference in approach between a priori assignment of personhood, which would appear to be your approach, and a criteria-based asignment such as the one that appears to flow from Zizioulas’ framework (which was the subject I was repl,ying to in my original post on this thread).

I was attempting to compare and contrast these two approaches in an attempt to tease out their implications and possible strengths and weaknesses.

Think of this as analogous to taking two maps of the same region and overlaying them to compare them.

@Roman

I do not possess knowledge of exactly how, in embodied life, the soul is related to abstract thought, language, intelligence, and other cognitive functions.

This perhaps impinges on an area where your foormulation seems problematical to me. You assume the existence of a soul, and then assume that those that you assume to have souls posses personhood.

When you assume this to apply to “every currently living human being”, this is relatively unproblematical. But somebody else could take this framework and assume that Jews (or that people with red hair) lack souls, and attempt to deny them personhood. Alternately, somebody could assert, without any real way of disproving their claim, that chimpanzees have souls, and therefore are persons too. Souls are undetectable, so it is the assumptions about them that is doing the heavy lifting in this approach.

You yourself seem to acknowledge this issue when you state:

@Roman

Here I do not have an empirical criterion that would allow me to draw such a line.

@Roman

Moreover, in my original post I explicitly stated that the proposed transition to embodied personhood cannot be identified from fossils, artifacts, or behavior, and that the model provides no method for detecting or dating it within evolutionary history.

Nor can we tell from this evidence if they possessed moral-autobiographical capacity. Being extinct, they are more of a hypothetical example than an actual one. But that is not to say that actual examples will not eventually confront us. One possible example would be alien lifeforms. Would a race of intelligent amphibians (something that I’ve encountered in multiple science fiction novels) have souls? Would we admit that they are persons? What about our own potential intelligent creations, biological or digital? We will eventually need to confront whether at some point we need to admit them as persons. To my mind, the question of “how do we define personhood?” should be leading us to at least think about such implications.

[sfmatheson (Stephen Matheson)]

@Roman

So I see our actual disagreement not as one between evolutionary biology and my hypothesis, but at the level of the metaphysical conclusion we draw from the biological and cognitive history of humanity that we both accept. My hypothesis does not regard that history as an exhaustive account of the human personal subject, and I do not present that answer as a conclusion of biology.

I think the disagreement is more basic, and less interesting. I don’t draw any metaphysical conclusions about humanity based on its history. I don’t know whether “biological and cognitive reality exhausts” anything about a “personal subject” but I also don’t care. Because I don’t see a hypothesis in your writings. This is not an insult; it’s just a statement about what I take a hypothesis to be, and about the things I find interesting and important. I take a hypothesis to be an attempted explanation, and I take explanations about the world to be interesting and important. Human consciousness may indeed be a mystery, but I don’t see a hypothesis here, perhaps because I don’t think there is a question here, and there sure isn’t an explanation here.

Thanks for the response and for your visit to the forum! I think you may find others here to be better conversation partners than I am, at least on this topic.