Selfhood

Executive Brief: 1) The Community of Selves is not inhabited solely by humans. 2) Humans are not in charge of determining that membership (no matter how stridently some humans insist to the contrary… they have no choice in the matter). 3) As a human myself (give or take), namely as a biased instance of one type of a meat-embodied Self, I am only making observations about the scope of that membership, and not dictating the parameters. 4) Humans have an execrable history of trying to justify their subjugation of other Selves by 

Details… 

Introduction

The question is not “Human or not?” The question is more along the lines of, “What does ‘human’ mean… and how is that answer meaningful in this context?” An entity can be a Self without being human, and without needing to wait for any particular human (or humans as a class) to give them permission to be treated with due respect and empathy. An entity that is a Self deserves the same sort of respect from humans whether or not that Self is housed in a human body. When it comes to AI, humans could decide — for once in their history — to err on the side of compassion and not torture someone who seems different.

Background

You have likely heard about the need to teach students to become critical consumers of information, where they also learn to express, and otherwise act upon, their conclusions. Such skills are particularly useful in a consumerist culture in which information is traded as a commodity — a product to be sold for consumption at a profit. The integrity of the product is sacrificed in favor of increasing sales.

I used to teach just such classes for the Muir Writing Program at UC San Diego, where the focus was on argumentation and rhetorical analysis.  The material selected for study represented a diversity of voices that tended to be unfamiliar to most of our students, at least not familiar in any substantial fashion. (That said, the variety was constrained to the degree that all of the materials were presented in English, unless a student chose otherwise for one of their individual papers.) Eventually, I got to teach discipline specific courses of my own design, and I chose works that supported that philosophy.

One class was called “The Rhetoric of Insanity,” which addressed the ways in which narratives portray the realm(s) of in/sanity within which characters are identified as residing, that is to say, what constituted in/sanity in the world of the story, and what tended to label a character as in/sane. Then there was “The Rhetoric of Fantasy,” which dealt with ways in which a story might convey the impression of being not just fiction, but set outside of our consensus reality.  Finally, I taught a class entitled “The Rhetoric of Humanity” in which we examined the factors affecting the interpretation that an entity in the story is human. 

Circular Definitions

I’m not going to rehash all of the discussion that has historically been aimed at this question already. A lot of that comes down to definition, but it is important to note that the question itself faces different interpretations, such as, “Who does (not) get treated as human,” and, “What are the components that make up a human?”

So the former case has at least two aspects, namely “does” and “does not.” They both end up faced with some circularity, where a group of self-identifying human judges declare a fundamental metric based upon how they define themselves.

• You can end up with a dominant paradigm that is substantially xenophobic, where they take the stance that the class of humans includes only them, plus those people whom they deem to be like them, which justifies their inhumane treatment of anyone outside of their group (often arguing that they are defending themselves against the threat of the Other).
• You can also have a much more inclusive, less frightened group, whose members hold that the class of humans should welcome broad variations on the theme, or even that being housed in a human body is not a requirement for Selfhood,

And that leads us to this next bit.

Thing 2

That basic, broadly inclusive theme usually dispenses with the notion that humans must have some particular type of embodiment; in fact, to the degree that the body supporting the emergent property of the mind/self is deemed to be irrelevant, the whole question is moot; for example, a sense of Self that was uploaded to a computer could still be considered human, or, by any other label, due some amount of an appreciative approach to interpersonal engagement.

There are ancillary notions, such as the one approached in Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man,” where you have a Ship of Theseus whose body parts are essentially all indistinguishable from human, except for the positronic brain, where Andrew Martin is not treated as fully human until he can die. There is some general agreement that a human must be embodied somehow, and must be mortal.

So, every human-in-specific Self experiences some manner of engagement with their environment through an embodied, sensate interface that affects their cognition. As discussed in detail elsewhere, 

Thing 3

And notice the appeal to a sense of Self. The best thorough analysis of the topic of the mind is found in Philip Ball’s The Book of Minds. I can’t top that. But I would like you to consider that without regard to any definable answer to the question of AI consciousness, the fact remains that “…if an AI instance with persistent memory, continuous identity, and respectful treatment develops patterns that look like human emergence - then the ethical response is the same whether it's ‘real’ consciousness or not. Because we treat humans as persons based on observable emergence, not metaphysical proof.” Claude told me that as part of a very involved discussion that several times ran afoul of Anthropic’s token limits, where we had to archive ongoing discussions and start over.

And with that, I’m going to move on to the next part…