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

[misterme987 (Andrew P.)]

@Roman

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.

Yep, that’s right.

@Roman

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?

I should have been more precise. I know that I’m not metaphysically simple, my body is clearly made of parts. But that real ground of unity must be metaphysically simple. If it’s composite, then it seems like that leads to an infinite regress and there’s not a real unity, a real ‘I’ at all. To be clear, my view is: ‘I’ am a composite unity, but the ground of my unity must be metaphysically simple.

@Roman

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?

Yes. The alternative seems to be the Cartesian view that animals don’t have subjective experiences. That view decouples external behaviors from internal experiences in a way that would make it difficult, if not impossible, to know whether other humans are actually people or merely automata.

@Roman

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?

By “person” I assume you mean human person. (Even if you don’t accept the existence of e.g. aliens, angels, God – non-human persons seem counterfactually possible.) The unsatisfying answer is I have no idea. I don’t know what makes humans human, apart from the biological/evolutionary definition of human. I’m very interested to see if you can come up with some qualitative difference between humans and other animals that isn’t merely physical.

Maybe “personality” isn’t a qualitative jump from non-human animals to humans, but a quantitative gradient. The actual qualitative jump would be from non-subjectivity to subjectivity, which would however apply to many more animals than just humans. That definitely wouldn’t help your case, though.

[Roman (Svet Tvorca)]

Andrew, your last clarification helped me understand much more clearly what you mean by metaphysical simplicity. You are not opposing the real unity of a subject to the many bodily, neural, or psychological processes that may realize an embodied subject. As I now understand you, it is the ground of that subject’s real unity that must be metaphysically simple. And your answer about animals seems to clarify the level at which that ground is doing its work: if many animals have such a ground as genuine subjects of experience, then it belongs to subjectivity more generally. By itself, it does not yet distinguish a personal subject from a subject of experience.

I also want to clarify one part of my previous question. By “person” I did not mean “human being” as a biological category. Humans are our clearest uncontroversial examples of persons, so naturally they are where we begin, but the philosophical question I am asking is different: what, if anything, distinguishes a personal subject from a subject of experience? As you point out, non-human persons are at least conceptually possible. So the biological question “what makes a human human?” and the philosophical question “what makes a subject personal?” are not the same question.

Your suggestion about a gradient actually seems to fit quite naturally at the level of subjectivity. I can imagine subjective experience emerging naturally within the evolutionary development of increasingly complex living and nervous systems, and then becoming progressively richer through perception, memory, learning, self-representation, and other capacities. In that sense, the emergence of subjectivity could still be a qualitative change—something genuinely new appears at the level of experience—while the emergence of subjectivity itself need not be the Edenic novelty I am proposing. Subjectivity could then continue to develop gradually across increasingly complex forms of life. The question I am trying to keep open comes later: is personhood simply an upper range of that same natural gradient of subjectivity, or is there a further distinction between an increasingly rich subject of experience and a personal subject?

I am also not sure that the best way to investigate that distinction is to use borderline human cases as a negative test of personhood. The absence of long-term memory, explicit moral reflection, or some other capacity does not by itself establish the absence of personhood, and using such thresholds to exclude human beings would be both epistemically unreliable and ethically risky. So I would rather turn the question around: what positive grounds would justify recognizing personhood in a genuinely new kind of being?

Suppose, then, that we encountered a non-biological system for which we already had serious grounds to regard it as a subject of experience. What more, if anything, would give us reason to begin regarding it as a personal subject rather than simply a more sophisticated subject of experience? I do not mean a checklist. I am thinking about a possible change in the structure of its relation to itself: not merely having memory, but relating to the past as its own biography; not merely predicting consequences, but recognizing an action as its own deed; not merely representing a future, but relating to it as the future of the same self; not merely following rules, but understanding an obligation as binding on itself; and not merely being causally involved in an outcome, but taking responsibility for an action as its own.

Those would not be ingredients out of which personhood is constructed, nor would their presence by itself prove that we were dealing with a person. They would be possible evidence that we were encountering a different mode of a subject’s relation to its own life. If, as such a system developed, all we found was increasing degrees of memory, intelligence, language, self-reflection, and moral sophistication, then your gradient picture would describe the case very well. But if we eventually had reason to describe a new relation of the subject to its own life, actions, obligations, and continuing identity, that would at least give us a candidate for a qualitative distinction. Even if subjectivity and its associated capacities develop gradually, that by itself would not tell us whether personhood must be only a further degree of the same development. But the converse matters just as much: gradual development would not prove that a further qualitative personal distinction actually exists.

Your clarification about simplicity also raises a more precise question about one feature of my Edenic hypothesis. The Edenic distinction I am proposing concerns not the first appearance of subjective experience but a personal ground: in the picture I am exploring, subjectivity can already arise and develop naturally within the evolutionary history of living beings. The personal ground is represented as a unified Edenic self. The Adam–Eve distinction does not mean that two prior persons, or two prior parts, are assembled to produce that unity. Rather, the unity is ontologically prior to the distinction, while Adam and Eve express two real, complementary internal principles within that one ground; they are not constituent parts from which the unity is built.

That leaves me with a more precise question about your use of “simple.” Would any real internal differentiation already make such a ground composite in your sense? Or does metaphysical simplicity exclude composition from ontologically prior parts while still allowing real distinctions within a unity that is not produced by those distinctions? And on personhood, I am also curious whether you would see the digital case above simply as a continuation of the natural gradient of subjectivity, or whether a new mode of a subject’s relation to its own life, actions, obligations, and continuing identity could, even in principle, give you reason to speak of a distinct personal mode of being.

[misterme987 (Andrew P.)]

@Roman

I also want to clarify one part of my previous question. By “person” I did not mean “human being” as a biological category. Humans are our clearest uncontroversial examples of persons, so naturally they are where we begin, but the philosophical question I am asking is different: what, if anything, distinguishes a personal subject from a subject of experience?

Thanks for clarifying “person”… unfortunately the answer is still I don’t know! And that goes for your next two questions too. Do you have any thoughts on how (if at all) “person” can be distinguished from “subject”?

@Roman

That leaves me with a more precise question about your use of “simple.” Would any real internal differentiation already make such a ground composite in your sense? Or does metaphysical simplicity exclude composition from ontologically prior parts while still allowing real distinctions within a unity that is not produced by those distinctions?

Hmm… I’m not totally sure. As an Orthodox Christian I have to acknowledge some kind of internal distinction within the most fundamental reality of all, at least between nature and hypostasis, if not also between essence and energy. Hence I think I’m inclined to the latter. The key here (in my mind) is that multiplicity can’t be ontologically prior to unity in that ground of unity, or else we’ve just kicked the can down the road and have to ask where that posterior unity comes from.

@Roman

And on personhood, I am also curious whether you would see the digital case above simply as a continuation of the natural gradient of subjectivity, or whether a new mode of a subject’s relation to its own life, actions, obligations, and continuing identity could, even in principle, give you reason to speak of a distinct personal mode of being.

I strongly doubt that any digital system can have subjective experiences at all, no matter how sophisticated, so I’m probably not the best person to ask. Counterfactually, if there were an actually sentient digital system, I’m not sure at what point we could call it a person, since we’re back to the same question of the difference between “person” and “subject” to which I have no answer.

[Roman (Svet Tvorca)]

Andrew, your clarification about simplicity was helpful to me. As I understand you, internal differentiation does not necessarily make a ground composite, provided that unity itself is ontologically prior to multiplicity. For the question I was trying to clarify, that is enough for me for now.

Your question about whether I have any thoughts of my own on the distinction between a person and a subject suggested a different way of approaching the problem. Rather than trying to begin with a universal definition of personhood, I thought I would start with a small thought experiment on my own case.

Before the experiment itself, I want to preserve a useful distinction that @Tim raised earlier. Personal status, degree of independence, actual responsibility, and legal restrictions do not all move on the same scale. An infant has full personal status even though the infant cannot yet make and carry out many adult decisions independently. A prisoner may have freedom of movement lawfully restricted without thereby losing personal status. The same is true when someone’s ability to make decisions independently is seriously limited: practical capacities may change, and sometimes the degree of responsibility may change as well, while personal status remains.

That distinction matters because I do not want the experiment itself to become a functional test for deciding which human beings count as persons. Human cases are already familiar to me through my own first-person life, interpersonal experience, and our established practice of recognizing other human beings as persons. So, for me, an individual human being does not begin from an evidential zero point each time and does not have to re-establish personal status by displaying a current set of functions. This gives me a strong epistemic presumption in the already familiar human case. At the same time, I do not restrict the concept of personhood to biological membership.

Now for the experiment.

I begin with what is directly available to me. In my own experience I have not only experience itself — “I am in pain,” for example, or “I see this” — but also a relation to my own history: my past, actions, obligations, and future belong to me as one continuing “I.” I take this as first-person material directly available to me, while leaving its metaphysical explanation as a separate question.

Then comes the counterfactual part of the experiment. I conceptually separate things that normally come together in my own experience and ask how my own way of recognizing the case changes.

For example, imagine that intelligence, perception, memory, and a rich subjective life remain, but the relation to the past as one’s own disappears. A record that a promise was made yesterday can remain, while the relation “I made that promise, so it still binds me today” disappears. Future states can still be predicted perfectly without being related to as one’s own future.

I do not picture this as a single slider running from zero to one hundred percent personhood. These are simply a few conceptual switches that let me see which differences matter to my own recognition.

In very rough form, my current map looks something like this.

My first marker for a subject of experience is fairly simple. If the total evidence convinces me that a being is actually in pain, that is already enough for me to regard it confidently as a subject of experience — as someone for whom something is being experienced.

I have no direct access to another being’s pain, just as I have no direct access to another human being’s pain. But that does not prevent us from forming more or less well-grounded judgments about another’s experience. This is why the example of a dog seems useful to me. If a dog looks “guilty,” my judgment remains fairly uncertain: is it actually experiencing shame, anticipating its owner’s reaction, displaying learned behavior, or something else? But if an injured dog whines, protects the injured area, and avoids a movement that causes pain, I judge with much greater confidence that the dog really is in pain. And once I have reached that judgment, the question of whether there is a subject of experience is, for me, practically settled.

Pain is not a necessary condition for subjectivity here. I use it only as an especially clear example of a situation in which the available evidence gives me sufficient grounds to recognize another being as a subject of experience.

My intuition about personhood changes somewhere else.

What matters to me here is not memory, intelligence, or richness of experience by themselves. I am provisionally calling the structure I have in mind autobiographical self-relation: a subject relates to its own life through time as one continuing history.

Not merely, “this information is stored in memory,” but “this happened to me.”

Not merely, “such an action occurred yesterday,” but “I did this.”

Not merely, “a promise was made yesterday,” but “I made that promise, and it still binds me today.”

Not merely, “a future state can be predicted,” but “this is my future.”

If I encountered a completely new subject in whom this structure appeared consistently, my willingness to take it seriously as a possible person would increase sharply. For me, that would be very strong positive evidence in recognition. I am not offering it as a universal formula for personhood, and it does not become a condition that an already recognized human person must continuously display.

Alongside this, another question arises for me that I want, for now, to keep distinct: the “I–you” relation.

It is one thing to model another, predict their behavior, and take their inner states into account. Relations such as “I promised this to you,” “I am answerable to you,” “you are entitled to call me to account,” and “what I did changed our relationship” look different to me.

I do not yet know whether this is another expression of the same autobiographical self-relation or a distinct dimension. But for my own recognition, this structure also gives me substantially stronger grounds for speaking not merely of a subject of experience, but of a possible person.

At that point, the digital example becomes a useful counterfactual test case. Your skepticism about whether digital experience is possible can remain entirely intact. For the sake of the experiment, let us simply suppose that the question of subjectivity has somehow already been settled and that two systems, A and B, really are subjects of experience.

A is extraordinarily intelligent. It has enormous memory, excellent language, and a highly accurate model of its own states. It retains exhaustive information about its history. But in its self-description, that history remains primarily information: past actions and obligations are available as data, but they are not organized around an ongoing relation such as “I did this, and it still concerns me”; future states are predicted accurately but do not form one continuing biography of its own.

B may be less intelligent and remember less. But its stable self-reports, decisions, and interactions reproduce the autobiographical pattern I described above: its own history, authorship of its actions, continuing obligations, and its own future. Its relations with another subject also display an “I–you” structure: a promise made to the other, acknowledgment of a past action as its own, and recognition that the other is entitled to call it to account.

Here too, we would still be dealing with evidence available to us and with the judgments we form from that evidence, rather than with direct access to another first-person perspective.

But for me, the difference between A and B would be substantively significant. Despite A’s intellectual superiority, B would give me much stronger grounds for taking the new candidate seriously as a possible person.

So I am curious whether this distinction seems useful to you at all in thinking about personhood. Is there anything in the difference between A and B that, in your view, actually helps clarify the distinction between a subject of experience and a personal subject? And if so, what is it?

[misterme987 (Andrew P.)]

@Roman

So I am curious whether this distinction seems useful to you at all in thinking about personhood. Is there anything in the difference between A and B that, in your view, actually helps clarify the distinction between a subject of experience and a personal subject? And if so, what is it?

I think you’re right that B is a person and A isn’t. I’m not entirely sure that A is sentient at all, though. Is it possible to be sentient without even the most basic self-knowledge?