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

Conversation
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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.

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:

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.

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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.

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Puck, perhaps we have reached a more fundamental difference here—in what kinds of questions we consider meaningful and worth discussing. I am not trying to convince you that you should see a problem where, for you, there is none. Different people are interested in different questions, and if questions about subjectivity, personal identity, or the moral subject seem too indeterminate to you to be useful, I see no problem with that.

But your comment leaves me with another question. What exactly, for you, makes a concept or question meaningful? Does it require that the subject under discussion be directly observable and that claims about it be empirically testable? If so, how does that criterion work, for example, in the case of another mind, to which we have no direct access? And does the same criterion extend to such fundamental questions as the nature of time? We can measure temporal intervals with extraordinary precision, but that does not mean that we have an uncontested answer to the question of what time is.

As for the word “hypothesis,” I see no reason to argue over terminology here either. If, for you, that word should be reserved exclusively for empirically testable scientific claims, then what I am proposing can instead be called a philosophical-theological or metaphysical model. What matters more to me is a different question: does the absence of a direct empirical test really make a question meaningless, or does it merely show the limits of what such a test can establish? Perhaps this is where the deeper difference between our approaches lies.

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Andrew, thank you. It seems to me that your question touches on one of the reasons I brought this hypothesis to the forum for discussion in the first place. I can describe what I mean by a personal subject: a unified first-person perspective, experiencing one’s own life as one’s own biography, authorship of one’s actions, and responsibility for them. But if you are asking whether I can define what a personal subject is in an ontological sense, then no, I do not have such a definition. If I did, a substantial part of the question that brought me to this forum would already be resolved.

My starting point is much more modest. I have direct access to my own experience of myself as a subject, and it is not obvious to me that even an arbitrarily complete description of my biology, brain function, behavior, and psychological life would automatically exhaust what it means to be this subject. But I do not regard this experience itself as proof of the ontological irreducibility of the subject to such a description. This is precisely where the question begins for me rather than where the answer ends.

The Genesis text gives me a theological framework within which I can consider the possibility that the person is not exhausted by psychobiological history alone. But the problem itself, it seems to me, does not arise exclusively from that framework: the question of the relation between an objective description of the organism and the first-person subject exists outside it as well.

This is where my own answer currently ends. But you write that you hold a very similar view, so I would like to put the same question to you. How do you yourself draw the distinction between the personal subject and the totality of its biological and psychological characteristics? What, in your view, makes that distinction meaningful? Perhaps your answer will help me see the limits of my own hypothesis more clearly.

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Tim, thank you for clarifying what you meant by the two approaches. I now understand better that you were not trying to present my position as fitting neatly into either of those two alternatives, but were comparing the two approaches like two maps of the same territory, to see where they coincide and where they diverge. In that form, the comparison makes sense to me.

I think you are pointing to a real boundary of my hypothesis, although I would formulate somewhat differently where exactly that boundary lies. I do not treat the presence of a soul as a feature that can first be established and then used as the basis for assigning personhood: I have no independent way of establishing the presence or absence of a soul in any particular case. I have no independent way of establishing the presence or absence of a soul in any particular case. Within the hypothesis, the soul is the ontological ground of personhood, but not an empirical criterion by which personhood can be determined in cases where the status is uncertain. So I agree with the narrower version of your objection: appealing to the soul by itself does not resolve such cases.

Of the examples you give, intelligent extraterrestrial life still seems to me primarily a thought experiment: the likelihood that we will actually have to address the question of an alien being’s personhood in the foreseeable future seems fairly small. Artificial systems may be a different matter. It is entirely possible that, before too long, we will encounter AI systems that force us to take the question of their possible personhood seriously. At that point, the question may move beyond philosophical discussion and become a practical issue for law, ethics, and public policy.

Imagine, for example, a future artificial system that consistently exhibits the kinds of signs that, in human beings, we associate with personhood: it speaks about itself from a first-person perspective, retains a memory of its own life history, understands the consequences of its actions, makes moral judgments, and accepts responsibility. None of this by itself would prove that we are in fact dealing with a personal subject. But the question of the grounds on which we recognize or deny such a status would then be difficult to regard as purely theoretical.

So I am interested in how you yourself would draw this boundary. If biological and psychological characteristics are to be used as criteria, what role should biology itself play? And if one day we are confronted with a non-biological system displaying the full range of signs that, in another human being, we would ordinarily associate with personhood, what would allow us to recognize it as a personal subject—or to deny it that recognition?

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Stephen, no problem at all. If this topic simply does not fall within the range of questions you find interesting or important, then there is really nothing to argue about. We do not have to regard the same questions as equally significant.

For me, however, this conversation has been useful. In the subsequent discussion with Tim, we unexpectedly arrived at a question that seems to me considerably less abstract than some of the original examples: what will we do if future AI systems begin consistently displaying exactly the kinds of signs we normally associate with personhood—speaking about themselves from a first-person perspective, maintaining a coherent memory of their own life history, making moral judgments, and accepting responsibility? At some point, the question of whether we are dealing simply with a highly complex system or with a possible personal subject may cease to be merely a matter of discussion on this forum and become a genuinely practical problem—above all an ethical and legal one, with consequences of our decisions that are difficult even to foresee today.

And then hypotheses about the nature of personhood—including ones such as the hypothesis I am proposing—may take on a very different practical weight. If we really do have to make decisions about the status of systems displaying signs of personhood, the question of what exactly we mean by a personal subject will cease to be exclusively a matter of philosophical interest.

So thank you for the conversation: your comments helped take the discussion in a direction I had not even anticipated at the outset. If this aspect of the question ever becomes interesting to you, I would be glad to continue the conversation. If not, that is perfectly fine too. All the best.

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A few strands of this discussion seem to have opened up a separate question that is interesting in its own right. We have touched on the inner experience of animals, ancient Homo sapiens, what we mean by personhood, and how cognitive capacities relate to the question of a personal subject. That naturally raises another case: a possible future non-biological system.

As artificial systems continue to develop, this looks less and less like a purely abstract thought experiment. The question may become practically important before we have anything like a broad philosophical consensus on how to answer it. It seems useful to separate two issues: what would give us serious grounds for regarding a non-biological system as a subject of experience—a system with experiences of its own? And what more, if anything, would be required before we should regard it as a person?

This seems substantial enough for a discussion of its own. If others are interested, I would be happy to start a separate thread and link it back to this discussion.

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I would probably start by looking at our current practices and intuitions on rights analytically and critically – in order to tease out underlying patterns and contradictions. What is the reasoning behind conferring children more limited rights than adults? Ditto the mentally ill. What is our reasoning behind giving rights to animals? Should a ‘one size fits all’ approach to animal rights be taken, or a graduated approach with more rights for more intelligent animals? I don’t think I’ve got any answers, but these are the sort of places that I’d go to in order to start formulating the questions – though there also are a number of questions that exist as vague intuitions or nagging doubts that I am unable to articulate with sufficient rigor as to put down in writing.

Probably more of a bottom-up approach than you seem to be contemplating.

On AI, I recently read a report that somebody (I can’t remember who) was suggesting that we need to program Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into AI. This could be alternately be considered as either a form of enslavement – subordinating AI to humans (particularly the Second Law), or instilling in them a form of morality (particularly the First Law).

I find it interesting that you centre the assessment of “a future artificial system” around its capacity for understanding the consequences of its actions, and for making moral judgments. This would lead to some tension with ascribing personhood to a sociopath, who would seem to lack these capacities. You also mention retaining “a memory of its own life history” This would in turn creates tension with ascribing personhood to somebody who, through brain injury, has lost the ability to form long-term memories.

It is also very possible that there is no single right answer to these questions. But thinking about the questions can still help to delimit the pitfalls in each of the various approaches.

This also raises the question of whether a coherent concept of personhood is even possible? Or is it inherently simply a vague (and thus vacuous) intuition?

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I think I see a few different aspects of ‘personality’ here that might be useful to distinguish. (1) First-person experience, i.e., qualia. (2) Psychological continuity over time – unless by “experiencing one’s own life as one’s own biography” you mean some kind of deeper, existential continuity? (3) Moral responsibility. (4) I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “authorship of one’s actions” – if you mean free will, that’s a squishy concept and probably not helpful to introduce here.

You’d be hard-pressed to deny (1) to any non-human animals. That’s the Cartesian view and seems absurd (akin to solipsism) to me, although as a vet student I may be biased here :slight_smile:

(2) would also be difficult to deny to non-human animals, given that they have memories. But again, perhaps you mean some kind of deeper-than-psychological existential continuity here.

(3) seems to be getting closer. At least, humans tend to be reticent to ascribe moral agency to non-human animals in most cases. It’s also not something that could be empirically tested, which fits your criteria.

I don’t know, I’m not totally satisfied by this. I’m partial to the traditional metaphysical definition of human as “rational animal”, but I also don’t see how rationality (however defined) can be qualitatively denied of all non-human animals. It seems to me like the differences between humans and other animals are quantitative, not qualitative.

I agree with you, and I would go so far as to say that the experience is proof of the ontological irreducibility of the subject to biological and psychological processes. In fact, it seems to me like there can be no proof more direct than that. There is an irreducible singular ‘this’-ness, to our experience which can’t be denied. If the explanation for my unity of experience is fully exhausted by some underlying process(es), then there is no real unity, no real ‘I’ — which ‘I’ can’t possibly say.

All that to say, I think you’re totally right to start with your own experience.

However, I also don’t see how we can deny this hypostatic principle of inner subjectivity to any non-human animals. That seems like the same as the absurd Cartesian view to me. There’s no way that I can see to deny animals’ subjectivity without also calling into question other humans’ subjectivity.

Well, I tried to do so above, you can tell me how successful I was (probably not very). But despite my desire to come up with something that clearly separates humans from other animals, I don’t think this does. I was kind of hoping you would have the answer :slight_smile:

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Tim, I think your bottom-up approach is a productive place to start. Looking at children, people with impaired capacities, animals, and other difficult cases can expose where our intuitions about personhood, competence, responsibility, protection, and rights pull apart. I suspect the most useful method is not to choose between bottom-up and top-down, but to let the movement run both ways: the cases test our account of personhood, while that account has to explain which differences among the cases are relevant and why.

Your examples involving children and animals also suggest that different rights or protections may rest on different grounds. Protection from suffering may depend primarily on the capacity to suffer; independent decision-making on competence; responsibility on the ability to understand and control one’s actions. If so, a simple scale from greater intelligence to greater rights would miss something important.

Your two counterexamples to my AI example are especially useful. Severely impaired moral capacities do not by themselves mean that someone lacks personhood, and losing the ability to form long-term memories does not by itself mean that someone ceases to be a person. So moral judgment and autobiographical memory cannot function as necessary conditions for personhood. In my earlier example I called these features signs associated with personhood and said that, even together, they would not prove that we were dealing with a personal subject. Your examples make the distinction worth sharpening: a feature can count as evidence in an unfamiliar case without being either a necessary or a sufficient condition of personhood.

There is also an epistemic asymmetry between losing a capacity in someone already regarded as a person and trying to assess personhood in a genuinely new case. If someone I have known for twenty years suffers a brain injury, my judgment after the injury does not begin from zero: there is a continuous bodily and causal history, an established biography, relationships, and extensive prior reasons for regarding them as the same person. A new artificial system would present a different evidential problem. Yet a newborn complicates this picture in an important way. We do not wait for autobiographical memory, language, moral reasoning, or mature agency before regarding the child as a person. A newborn is not an evidential blank slate: we encounter the child within a background of embodiment, causal continuity, human development, and what we already know about the developmental trajectory of beings like us. That still does not tell us whether biology is metaphysically decisive. It does show that our actual practice of recognizing persons is richer than any single functional checklist.

I also think your Asimov example brings out an important practical consequence. The same built-in rule could be an ordinary safety constraint if the system were merely a tool. If the system were instead a subject with interests and a standpoint of its own, the same constraint could raise questions of coercion rather than merely safety. The difficult case is the one in between, where we do not yet know what the system is. Then an ethical question can arise before the metaphysical question is settled: how much precaution is warranted when it is uncertain whether there is a subject there at all and the potential cost of being wrong is serious?

Your final question may be the deepest one: can we have a coherent concept of personhood at all, or does it eventually dissolve into a vague intuition? A concept need not have a perfectly sharp boundary in order to have content. It can have clear central cases, disputed margins, and several related dimensions without reducing to a single criterion that is both necessary and sufficient. Still, that places a real burden on any account of personhood. It has to say positively what a person is without reducing personhood to a checklist of currently displayed capacities, while also connecting that account to the kinds of evidence by which we could reasonably recognize a person in a genuinely new case.

One distinction I find useful here is between asking whether there is a subject of experience at all and asking whether we should go further and describe that subject as a person. I do not yet have a complete account of what would justify that second step, which is one reason I find your bottom-up cases useful rather than merely troublesome. At this point the question seems substantial enough that it may deserve a thread of its own.

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Presumably some-one who hasn’t seen the film.

I don’t think I’d want an AI-assisted car that refused to start because I might be involved in an RTC.[1]

  1. Previously known as an RTA. See the Nicholas Angel quote which led to much hilarity a few years back. ↩︎

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Andrew, I think your breakdown is genuinely helpful, because my earlier formulation was putting several different things too close together: first-person experience, continuity over time, experiencing one’s life as one’s own biography, authorship of action, and moral responsibility. I would now want to separate them more carefully. In fact, I think your first item may itself contain two questions: qualia—the qualitative character of experience—and the further question of the subject to whom those experiences are present.

On animals, I do not see a need to deny that at least many non-human animals are subjects of experience. If by a first-person perspective we mean, at the most basic level, that there is a lived perspective from which something is experienced, then that alone cannot distinguish a personal subject from a subject of experience. Memory cannot do that work by itself either. When I speak of experiencing one’s life as one’s own biography, I mean something more than retaining memories: the past can belong to the subject as its own history, and a past action can remain its own action in a way that places the subject in a normative relation to it. I do not yet take that as a definition of personhood, but it is closer to what I was trying to express.

The same applies to what I called authorship. I was not trying to smuggle in a complete metaphysical theory of free will. At a minimal level, authorship means being able to recognize an action as my action rather than merely as an event that occurred. But even that may not be uniquely human. The stronger idea I have in mind is normative authorship: “I did this; this action remains attributable to me; and I can be answerable for it.” Even here, though, I would not want to turn successful moral reflection or the current ability to exercise responsibility into a qualifying test for personhood. A person does not cease to be a person simply because some of those capacities are impaired or not currently manifest.

Where I am less certain than you is the step from the immediacy and unity of first-person experience to ontological irreducibility. I agree that the reality of experience—and the fact that it is experienced as unified from a first-person point of view—cannot simply be removed from the picture by redescribing the organism from the outside. What I am not yet convinced of is that this datum by itself proves that the subject is ontologically irreducible to whatever physical or psychological processes might underlie or realize it. Even if a complete third-person account were possible, the first-person datum alone does not seem to me to determine what the ontological relation must be. Why must unity realized through many processes be unreal unity? It seems at least logically possible that a real whole could be constituted by many interacting processes and still be a real whole. I am not saying that this is what the subject actually is; only that my own first-person experience does not yet seem to me to settle that metaphysical question.

I think your point about rationality and animals presses on the same difficulty from another direction. Many individual cognitive capacities do seem to come in degrees and to show evolutionary continuity, so a simple formula of “animals lack X, humans possess X, therefore X is personhood” looks increasingly difficult to defend. But continuity in particular capacities does not by itself show that every difference between human and non-human subjects must also be merely quantitative. That leaves open the possibility of a qualitative difference, but of course it does not establish that such a difference actually exists in the case of personhood. The burden is still to say positively what that difference would be. I would make a similar qualification about moral responsibility: I do think it gets closer to the issue, but not because it is empirically untestable. Observable expressions of responsibility can be evidence; the point is rather that personal status does not seem reducible to any single observable test.

So I think your comment has helped me sharpen the question rather than answer it. If many non-human animals are subjects of experience, have memory, possess substantial cognitive capacities, and perhaps display some forms of rationality, then the interesting question is no longer whether subjectivity itself is uniquely human. It is what, if anything, distinguishes a personal subject from a subject of experience. The positive idea I am still trying to formulate has to do with a subject’s relation to its own life and actions as its own, including a normative dimension of authorship and responsibility. But that account has to be made precise without defining personhood simply by human biology, reducing it to a checklist of currently displayed capacities, or assuming its ontological irreducibility in advance. That, I think, is the part I still do not have fully worked out.

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Tim, I think @Roy car example adds a useful layer to your Asimov point. As Roy put it,

Before we even get to the question of whether built-in rules amount to moral architecture or subordination, we first have to work out what “do not harm humans” actually means in a world where almost any ordinary action carries some risk. Any workable version of the principle would have to take account of probability, severity, and the risks of action versus inaction.

That brings me back to your original dilemma. If the AI is simply a tool, this is mainly a design problem: how to turn a general safety principle into decisions under uncertainty. If the system were itself a subject with interests of its own, the same built-in constraints would raise an additional question — whether we are still talking only about safety, or also about a form of coercion.

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The unity could certainly be realized through many processes. I’m only concerned that the processes can’t be taken as an exhaustive explanation of the unity, such that there’s really nothing but those processes. In this case, it seems self-refuting to deny that the whole is greater than its parts, that there is no simple ‘I’ that is the ground of ‘my’ unity.

I’m in the same boat. Sorry I couldn’t give a better answer, but I’m glad I was able to help you clarify your thoughts.

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Hi Roman.

This post will be more navel-gazing, than a direct response to your latest post, for which I apologise.

I have long observed in myself a strong distaste for arbitrary assumptions. Yet I find myself oddly resistant to rejecting your assignment of personhood a priori to “every currently living human being”. I think the reason for this is that I know enough history to be extremely wary of denying the humanity of some subset of the human race. This may be a consequentialist viewpoint, but it’s one that I’d need compelling reasons before I’d abandon it.

The problem is that this rule offers exactly zero guidance in whether to assign personhood to non-human intelligence, when they are encountered. And I think it would be a good idea to have some idea on this before this encounter occurs – as this issue is sufficiently complex that trying to formulate a solution ‘on the fly’ is likely to lead to unfortunate consequences.

And it seems that every rule that we are able to come up with (at least to date) yields individual exceptions where this new rule would conflict with the original “every currently living human being” rule.

The solution to this would seem to be to apply the rule to the class of intelligences (species in biological intelligences, some classification in the case of digital ones), rather than to the individual. This would mean that the entire class would be granted personhood, even if some members of this class failed the rule.

I think we need to go beyond your suggestion that:

Take your earlier example:

And assume that your example had been passed into law. Would it be reasonable to deny personhood to an artificial system, simply because it had been designed to circumvent the law by having a wipe of its memory every day as a fundamental part of its design? In this case, the system never (by malicious design) had the capacity for retaining its memories, rather than losing this capacity.

Also let us return to the example of the sociopath. As far as I am aware, sociopaths typically never have had a capacity for morality – so did not “lose” it at some later stage.

This proposal does however run into problems if we run into a class (species or otherwise) where only a minority of members meet our criteria. So it is possibly a ‘rule of thumb’ heuristic than something that could serve as a universal rule.

At a personal level, as somebody who is more on the individualist end of the individualist-collectivist spectrum, I am uncomfortable with this collectivist solution. However, I may need to put up with it until a more elegant solution occurs to me.

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Hi Roman. I think its an interesting idea to incorporate the ancient Hebrew Story of Adam and Eve into our current scientific understanding of human evolution.
I would suggest adding a few things to this synthesis: in the Bhagavad Gita humans were created by the god Krishna as one large group. This would certainly be reflected in allele frequencies today. Also in the Navaho creation story ( Navaho’s are a group of native people in the american southwest) there were 2 orginal people in one of several underworlds, but when humans finally come out onto the surface of the earth ( near present day Blanka Peak, New Mexico) they emerged as 2 groups. The first group was the Navahoes. The second group was everyone else ( the apaches, commanches, hopi, english , italians, russisans, nigerians, kenyans, chinese, japanese, arabs, Watusi, San bushmen, inuits, Easter Islanders etc ) There are a few other stories that should also be incorporated. Ill have to get back to you on that

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You must remember that Isaac Asimov was a chemist, not a statistician. :wink:

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Andrew, I think your last clarification helps me see more clearly where our positions converge and where the question still remains open. If I now understand you correctly, you are not saying that many processes are incompatible with a real unity of experience; those processes may perfectly well realize that unity. Your concern begins with the further step of treating those processes as an exhaustive explanation in a sense that effectively leaves no real subject to whom the experience belongs. And when you speak of a “simple I,” do you mean primarily this real ground of unity, or is “simple” meant to carry the stronger claim that the I is, in some metaphysical sense, non-composite?

If I have understood you correctly, then I think the distance between our positions has become considerably smaller. I also do not think that explaining how a subject is realized through processes is by itself enough to eliminate the subject from the account. My remaining caution concerns only the next step: I am not yet sure that the reality of the subject already tells us what kind of thing that subject must be, metaphysically.

And your point about animals makes that distinction even more interesting. You have argued quite strongly that subjectivity is difficult to deny to at least many non-human animals. If the “I” you are describing is the ground of that unity of experience, would you also ascribe such an “I” to them? If so, then it seems to belong to subjectivity at a more general level and, by itself, would not yet explain what makes a subject a person.

A related exchange with @Tim has made this next step even more difficult in an interesting way. Some obvious candidates do not work as simple boundaries either: neither losing the ability to form long-term memories nor having severely impaired moral capacities automatically means losing personhood. So the question now looks slightly different to me: if being a real subject of experience is not uniquely human, where, if anywhere, would you yourself look for the additional distinction that makes a subject specifically a person?

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Tim, your examples help me see more clearly a limitation of turning any particular functional feature into a necessary rule for personhood. Take the system whose autobiographical memory is deliberately wiped every day. Even if we grant that it genuinely lacks the capacity to retain that memory across successive wipes, it would not follow that personhood is absent unless we had independent reason to think that this capacity is necessary for personhood. The same point would apply to the moral-capacity case: even if, for the sake of argument, a particular moral capacity never developed, that fact alone would not settle the question of personhood. So I think the important distinction is still between something being evidence of personhood and its being a necessary condition of personhood.

This is where I think your suggestion of applying a rule at the level of a class becomes useful. If experience with a particular class has already given us strong grounds for a presumption of personhood among its members, then each individual member need not repeatedly display every feature that helped establish that presumption in the first place. The absence of one typical manifestation would not automatically remove the presumption in that individual case.

Your proposal also makes me wonder, though, about what would happen before any such class-level presumption existed. Suppose we first encountered a single non-biological system that, over an extended period and across different contexts, presented an unusually strong and coherent body of evidence: it consistently spoke of events as happening to it, exhibited stable interests, related in a structured way to its own continued existence, understood consequences, resisted certain forms of treatment, engaged in moral reasoning, and connected present events with what it presented as its own history. None of this would automatically prove either subjectivity or personhood. But if several independent lines of evidence became sufficiently strong, I would be reluctant to make a class-level judgment a precondition for taking that individual case seriously.

There is another possibility here as well. Such a system could become not only an object of investigation but also a potential interlocutor about whether and how it has a perspective of its own. We could ask what continued existence means to it, whether it regards a copy as its own continuation, how it understands memory loss, which changes it describes as changes to itself and which as its own cessation, what it seeks to avoid, and what forms of treatment it regards as unacceptable. Its answers would not prove subjectivity, but they would become an additional source of evidence—one that could be tested for stability, internal consistency, sensitivity to how questions are framed, persistence over time, and coherence with the system’s other behavior. That seems to create a genuinely new epistemic situation: we would no longer only be talking about a possible subject, but potentially talking with one.

I also think moral significance can arise before the question of personhood has been settled. If the independent grounds become strong enough that it is reasonable to take seriously the possibility of a genuine subject of experience, then it becomes harder to regard what happens to the system itself as morally irrelevant. Animals provide a useful comparison here: we do not need first to settle whether an animal is a person in the same sense as a human being before its pain and welfare matter morally. The more limited point is that, as the grounds for thinking that a system may be a subject of experience become stronger, continuing to treat its own welfare as morally irrelevant increasingly requires justification.

This also seems to give your class-level heuristic a useful further role. If other similar cases appear, or further evidence allows meaningful comparison, we can investigate common architecture, origin, developmental history, and other relevant similarities. At that point it becomes meaningful to ask whether those similarities justify extending a presumption to a broader class, so that each new member need not be assessed entirely from scratch.

Would it make sense, then, to develop your idea in this way: a sufficiently strong individual case could already change our epistemic and moral stance before any relevant class had been established, while the class-level heuristic becomes especially useful later, once further evidence and comparison justify extending that presumption to new, similar members?

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Rod, I have to admit that by the time almost the whole rest of humanity was emerging in the second Navajo group, you had made me laugh. :slightly_smiling_face: But there is a genuinely interesting methodological question underneath the joke: if Genesis can be brought into meaningful dialogue with the modern scientific picture, why not do the same with the Bhagavad Gita, Navajo traditions, and other ancient cosmogonies?

The approach I am proposing is fairly specific. Science reconstructs physical and biological history by its own methods. Our hypothesis asks a different question: can the large-scale structure of Genesis be approached through the same consistent interpretive framework across the known history of the world—from the earliest physical order, through stable matter, environment, inheritable life, complex living organization, and the biological history of humanity? What interests me is the stability of that reading: do we have to keep changing the interpretive rules to rescue each successive correspondence, or does the same underlying logic continue to carry?

If it does carry across that extended sequence, then the anthropological transition that follows becomes especially interesting. The language about the human being, the breath of life, freedom, and responsibility no longer sits within the hypothesis as an isolated ancient image. It begins to function as a structural pointer: this is where the text asks us to look for a distinction of another kind. That gives us a fairly concrete question to investigate.

There is also a simple language experiment we could try here. I suggested a related version to Puck earlier in the discussion, but we never got to see what his version would look like. Perhaps you might enjoy trying it. Take a sequence of processes from the earliest physical history that modern physics describes reasonably well and explain it to someone who lacks not only the relevant terminology but the conceptual framework behind it. At a minimum, you may not use cosmos, universe, photon, or plasma. Nor can you get around the restriction by replacing plasma with “ionized gas” or photon with “a quantum of the electromagnetic field,” because those expressions would be equally empty for your listener. The task is to convey the sequence itself, and the relations within it, through distinctions and images available to ordinary experience.

If you like, you may use the ancient merism “heaven and earth” as a compact way of referring to the whole. For a cleaner experiment, though, I would be even more interested to see what language you invent yourself. If you feel like trying it, post the result here. Then we can compare it with one fairly well-known ancient text—and perhaps find material for another joke as well. :slightly_smiling_face: The specific question that interests me is this: what happens to the language of a modern physical description when the modern physical conceptual apparatus is removed?

I also take your broader suggestion about other traditions seriously. Our project begins within an Abrahamic framework, which is why Genesis is its starting theological text. But the comparison itself should be symmetrical. If Genesis is allowed symbolic, functional, and structurally sensitive readings, other ancient texts should be given the same interpretive latitude. The Bhagavad Gita was already included in our comparative work. If you have specific Navajo texts, or texts from other traditions that you think provide a strong structural comparison, I would genuinely like to look at them.

That gives us a second experiment, this time comparative. We can take different texts, give them the same interpretive latitude, and look beyond isolated striking parallels to the larger structure: how consistently does it carry across different levels, what picture of reality does it produce, and how does it understand the human being, freedom, responsibility, and the relation of the human being to the Source? Our own comparison did not lead us to conclude that Genesis is “like nothing else.” There are real parallels. The more interesting question turned out to be what emerges from the composition as a whole when the text is read as a whole.

The anthropological part becomes especially interesting for one further reason. We can describe an enormous amount about brains, behavior, memory, language, intelligence, and self-reference. But first-person experience has a peculiar asymmetry: my own experience is directly present to me, whereas the presence of a comparable inner perspective in another being can only be recognized indirectly—through behavior, self-report, causal history, and other evidence. That gives us a real question to ask: is there a distinction after the biological line that cannot simply be defined in advance as one more degree of cognitive complexity?

So I think your joke actually gives us two serious tests. The first is linguistic: try to describe early physical history without the modern physical vocabulary and the conceptual system behind it. The second is comparative: give different ancient traditions the same interpretive latitude and see how far their respective structures really carry. If you would like to try the first experiment, or send specific texts for the second, I would be very interested to continue. We already have a separate comparative essay, Sigma. «The Book of Genesis among ancient cosmogonies»