#personhood — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #personhood, aggregated by home.social.
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I want to see a Chimp deal with the President's cognitive test, which I understand is just a question of remembering some symbols, and walk it.
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A corporation is not a person until Texas executes one!
-- Jim Hightower (Comment on Citizens United Supreme Court Case)⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JimHightower #CivilRights #Humor #Personhood
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A corporation is not a person until Texas executes one!
-- Jim Hightower (Comment on Citizens United Supreme Court Case)⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JimHightower #CivilRights #Humor #Personhood
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A corporation is not a person until Texas executes one!
-- Jim Hightower (Comment on Citizens United Supreme Court Case)⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JimHightower #CivilRights #Humor #Personhood
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A corporation is not a person until Texas executes one!
-- Jim Hightower (Comment on Citizens United Supreme Court Case)⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JimHightower #CivilRights #Humor #Personhood
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A corporation is not a person until Texas executes one!
-- Jim Hightower (Comment on Citizens United Supreme Court Case)⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #JimHightower #CivilRights #Humor #Personhood
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“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn”*…
In what does our personhood consist? From what/where does it come? João de Pina Cabral unpacks the seminal thinking of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that suggest that a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others…
It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’…
[de Pina Cabral traces the development of Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, starting with Plato’s concept of methexis; elaborates on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas; and traces te advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that support them…]
… the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, [persons] find themselves as members of families, associations, [socialities], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from their world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves…
How does one become a person? “We” before “I”: “To be is to participate,” from @aeon.co.
A (if not the) next question: how does personhood emerge when the formative interactions are increasingly mediated/attentuated by technology?
* Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3
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As we get together, we might send behaviorist birthday greetings to a man whose work focused on how one might train the “persons” who emerge: Kenneth Spence; he was born on this date in 1907. A psychologist, he worked to construct a comprehensive theory of behavior to encompass conditioning and other simple forms of learning and behavior modification.
Spence attempted to establish a precise, mathematical formulation to describe the acquisition of learned behavior, trying to measure simple learned behaviors (e.g., salivating in anticipation of eating). Much of his research focused on classically conditioned, easily measured, eye-blinking behavior in relation to anxiety and other factors.
One of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
#anthropology #behavior #Behaviorism #culture #FranzBoas #history #identity #KennethSpence #learning #LucienLévyBruhl #person #personhood #Psychology #Science -
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn”*…
In what does our personhood consist? From what/where does it come? João de Pina Cabral unpacks the seminal thinking of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that suggest that a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others…
It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’…
[de Pina Cabral traces the development of Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, starting with Plato’s concept of methexis; elaborates on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas; and traces te advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that support them…]
… the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, [persons] find themselves as members of families, associations, [socialities], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from their world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves…
How does one become a person? “We” before “I”: “To be is to participate,” from @aeon.co.
A (if not the) next question: how does personhood emerge when the formative interactions are increasingly mediated/attentuated by technology?
* Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3
###
As we get together, we might send behaviorist birthday greetings to a man whose work focused on how one might train the “persons” who emerge: Kenneth Spence; he was born on this date in 1907. A psychologist, he worked to construct a comprehensive theory of behavior to encompass conditioning and other simple forms of learning and behavior modification.
Spence attempted to establish a precise, mathematical formulation to describe the acquisition of learned behavior, trying to measure simple learned behaviors (e.g., salivating in anticipation of eating). Much of his research focused on classically conditioned, easily measured, eye-blinking behavior in relation to anxiety and other factors.
One of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
#anthropology #behavior #Behaviorism #culture #FranzBoas #history #identity #KennethSpence #learning #LucienLévyBruhl #person #personhood #Psychology #Science -
One thing that continues to make me sad about my redundancy is that I had just developed a new module on #Personhood. I only taught it for two years.
I did it because I felt personhood - how we define it, as individuals or communally; how we give it to some and not others; how personhood ideas shape the world we build and the world in turn our sense of self - is so core to everything. Still think this.
Maybe i can develop it into an online thing of some kind? Idk.
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: Rights for robots (15 Apr 2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: Rights for robots (15 Apr 2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: Rights for robots (15 Apr 2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: Rights for robots (15 Apr 2026)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/
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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period. [Unofficial] @[email protected] ·Pluralistic: Rights for robots (15 Apr 2026)
https://web.brid.gy/r/https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/15/artificial-lifeforms/
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I think the Apes are more 'People' than Donald Trump is...
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We should give Chimps the technology of 'bags' so they can carry their precious gems in. 👜
Humans will try to exploit this gem collecting behaviour, watch out for us 😔 -
New blog post: "Person-Between"
In Japanese, human being (人間, ningen) literally means person-in-between. Watsuji Tetsuro built an entire ethics from this: beings are constituted by relational space, not individual consciousness.
Three continents, three traditions: ubuntu, buen vivir, ningen: all arriving at the same correction: the individual-first model isn't the default. It's one option. And maybe the wrong one.
https://whilewerebothrunning.com/posts/person-between/
#philosophy #ningen #ubuntu #personhood #relational #WatsujiTetsuro -
Thinking about “civicmindedness”:
thinking and acting beyond your private life and work. Protesting, volunteering, participating in local politics, etc.How some people have it and others don’t. How our whole Western individualist value system (more so now than even 30 years ago) works to erode it, but how important it actually is, in a deep, psychological way even. We are all part of communities and need to feel it.
(feeling local election U-turn! #GreenParty)
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A quotation from Wendell Berry
The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2000), “The Total Economy,” Citizenship Papers (2003)More about this quote: wist.info/berry-wendell/82138/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #wendellberry #bigbusiness #corporation #heritage #humanity #life #personhood #perspective #rights
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A quotation from Wendell Berry
The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (2000), “The Total Economy,” Citizenship Papers (2003)More about this quote: wist.info/berry-wendell/82138/
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #wendellberry #bigbusiness #corporation #heritage #humanity #life #personhood #perspective #rights
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Do you know a good #essay or #text discussing this discrepancy:
People refering to #animals or #plants with gender (she/he/they instead of 'it') or discussing #personhood of #nature (environmental personhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_personhood ) are often accused of #anthropomorphism, while it seems completely normal for many to refer to #AI like a person. And #intelligence is quickly adopted for AI but not enough researched/seen in animals.
I'm searching for human-made material only! 1/2
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I just came across one of my old essays [I called them "Thots"] on #Personhood, written on February 3, 1982.
"I look at myself and what do I see? I see a person. Not a girl, not a woman, not a homo sapien, not a citizen, not a statistic. Just a person.
I am wearing dark blue knit stockings, slightly faded jeans, a plaid shirt, and an old denim vest; and somehow, these things are part of me. I am not just wearing them -- they are an extension of my persona. Persona. Personality. Not girl-ality, woman-ality, homo sapien-ality, but PERSON-ality. Ah, at least someone out there agrees that I am a person and things that pertain to me are person-related. I like that.
When I 'am' a person, there is no pressure for me to think or behave a certain way. I can just be me -- relaxed, comfortable, happy. I also feel that my style of dress sometimes reflects this person-ness. At least it does as I am writing this [still true].
Also, being a person, I can also be whatever else I feel like being. I can be a feminine person, a masculine person, an eccentric person, a nice person, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Which would you rather be? A fixed label or a flexible person?"
cc: @autistics
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I just came across one of my old essays [I called them "Thots"] on #Personhood, written on February 3, 1982.
"I look at myself and what do I see? I see a person. Not a girl, not a woman, not a homo sapien, not a citizen, not a statistic. Just a person.
I am wearing dark blue knit stockings, slightly faded jeans, a plaid shirt, and an old denim vest; and somehow, these things are part of me. I am not just wearing them -- they are an extension of my persona. Persona. Personality. Not girl-ality, woman-ality, homo sapien-ality, but PERSON-ality. Ah, at least someone out there agrees that I am a person and things that pertain to me are person-related. I like that.
When I 'am' a person, there is no pressure for me to think or behave a certain way. I can just be me -- relaxed, comfortable, happy. I also feel that my style of dress sometimes reflects this person-ness. At least it does as I am writing this [still true].
Also, being a person, I can also be whatever else I feel like being. I can be a feminine person, a masculine person, an eccentric person, a nice person, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Which would you rather be? A fixed label or a flexible person?"
cc: @autistics
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I just came across one of my old essays [I called them "Thots"] on #Personhood, written on February 3, 1982.
"I look at myself and what do I see? I see a person. Not a girl, not a woman, not a homo sapien, not a citizen, not a statistic. Just a person.
I am wearing dark blue knit stockings, slightly faded jeans, a plaid shirt, and an old denim vest; and somehow, these things are part of me. I am not just wearing them -- they are an extension of my persona. Persona. Personality. Not girl-ality, woman-ality, homo sapien-ality, but PERSON-ality. Ah, at least someone out there agrees that I am a person and things that pertain to me are person-related. I like that.
When I 'am' a person, there is no pressure for me to think or behave a certain way. I can just be me -- relaxed, comfortable, happy. I also feel that my style of dress sometimes reflects this person-ness. At least it does as I am writing this [still true].
Also, being a person, I can also be whatever else I feel like being. I can be a feminine person, a masculine person, an eccentric person, a nice person, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Which would you rather be? A fixed label or a flexible person?"
cc: @autistics
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I just came across one of my old essays [I called them "Thots"] on #Personhood, written on February 3, 1982.
"I look at myself and what do I see? I see a person. Not a girl, not a woman, not a homo sapien, not a citizen, not a statistic. Just a person.
I am wearing dark blue knit stockings, slightly faded jeans, a plaid shirt, and an old denim vest; and somehow, these things are part of me. I am not just wearing them -- they are an extension of my persona. Persona. Personality. Not girl-ality, woman-ality, homo sapien-ality, but PERSON-ality. Ah, at least someone out there agrees that I am a person and things that pertain to me are person-related. I like that.
When I 'am' a person, there is no pressure for me to think or behave a certain way. I can just be me -- relaxed, comfortable, happy. I also feel that my style of dress sometimes reflects this person-ness. At least it does as I am writing this [still true].
Also, being a person, I can also be whatever else I feel like being. I can be a feminine person, a masculine person, an eccentric person, a nice person, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Which would you rather be? A fixed label or a flexible person?"
cc: @autistics
-
I just came across one of my old essays [I called them "Thots"] on #Personhood, written on February 3, 1982.
"I look at myself and what do I see? I see a person. Not a girl, not a woman, not a homo sapien, not a citizen, not a statistic. Just a person.
I am wearing dark blue knit stockings, slightly faded jeans, a plaid shirt, and an old denim vest; and somehow, these things are part of me. I am not just wearing them -- they are an extension of my persona. Persona. Personality. Not girl-ality, woman-ality, homo sapien-ality, but PERSON-ality. Ah, at least someone out there agrees that I am a person and things that pertain to me are person-related. I like that.
When I 'am' a person, there is no pressure for me to think or behave a certain way. I can just be me -- relaxed, comfortable, happy. I also feel that my style of dress sometimes reflects this person-ness. At least it does as I am writing this [still true].
Also, being a person, I can also be whatever else I feel like being. I can be a feminine person, a masculine person, an eccentric person, a nice person, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Which would you rather be? A fixed label or a flexible person?"
cc: @autistics
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As I've said for years, AI personhood isn’t a distant thought experiment; it’s an approaching policy crisis. 🤖 The Guardian’s Jacy Reese Anthis argues that digital minds will soon force us to rethink “who” counts as a person under law. 20% of Americans already believe some AIs are sentient; 38% say those systems should have rights. We’ve barely handled the social fallout of the internet, yet we’re racing toward coexistence with entities that can learn, plan, and act independently. The question isn’t just how we will treat them, it’s how they will treat us. 😳 If we wait until AI self-improvement loops kick in, we’ll be spectators, not stewards. The sociology and philosophy of AI, not just the engineering, will decide whether we coexist or get sidelined. ɸ
🧠 20% already see AI as sentient
⚖️ Legal & moral personhood debates rising
🚨 Policy & sociology trail behind tech
💡 Prepare now — before acceleration hitshttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/30/artificial-intelligence-personhood
#AI #Ethics #Governance #FutureOfAI #TheMatrix #Data #Lore #TNG #Personhood #Philosophy
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Today's poem:
Two-Blooded
- by Rolando Kattanhttps://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/795467118785232896/two-blooded?source=share
#poetry #nature #giftedness #RolandoKattan #personhood #complexity #pluriformity
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Person, #Religion, and the Problem of #Legal Essences in Legal #Personhood in #PrivateLaw
(Christopher Essert, Eva Micheler, and Paul Miller, eds., #CambridgeUniversityPress, forthcoming)
29 Pages Posted: 26 Aug 2025 Last revised: 26 Aug 2025https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5402988
While #American law continues to use the terms "person" and "religion," their meanings in different legal contexts suffer from a growing incoherence whose source is similar: a lack of essential attributes.
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Don't get elephants drunk. It does happen and people die (both human and elephant) 🐘 🍺 🪦
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Truly we share an Earth with other, non-human People....
https://defector.com/innovation-strikes-in-the-field-of-chimpanzee-rectum-adornment
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“This isn’t a bottom-up change,” said Mary Ziegler, a #law professor & historian of the #antiabortion movement. “It aligns w/the #SouthernBaptist Convention trying to figure out how #ultraconservative it’s going to be on #personhood,” she said of the #Christian movement that sees #embryos & #FertilizedEggs as human beings w/ #legal rights. [but not #women]
#ReproductiveRights #IVF #fertility #BodilyAutonomy #MaleSupremacy #evangelism #WomensHealth #health #medicine #privacy #law #SCOTUS #Dobbs
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“This isn’t a bottom-up change,” said Mary Ziegler, a #law professor & historian of the #antiabortion movement. “It aligns w/the #SouthernBaptist Convention trying to figure out how #ultraconservative it’s going to be on #personhood,” she said of the #Christian movement that sees #embryos & #FertilizedEggs as human beings w/ #legal rights. [but not #women]
#ReproductiveRights #IVF #fertility #BodilyAutonomy #MaleSupremacy #evangelism #WomensHealth #health #medicine #privacy #law #SCOTUS #Dobbs
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“This isn’t a bottom-up change,” said Mary Ziegler, a #law professor & historian of the #antiabortion movement. “It aligns w/the #SouthernBaptist Convention trying to figure out how #ultraconservative it’s going to be on #personhood,” she said of the #Christian movement that sees #embryos & #FertilizedEggs as human beings w/ #legal rights. [but not #women]
#ReproductiveRights #IVF #fertility #BodilyAutonomy #MaleSupremacy #evangelism #WomensHealth #health #medicine #privacy #law #SCOTUS #Dobbs
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“This isn’t a bottom-up change,” said Mary Ziegler, a #law professor & historian of the #antiabortion movement. “It aligns w/the #SouthernBaptist Convention trying to figure out how #ultraconservative it’s going to be on #personhood,” she said of the #Christian movement that sees #embryos & #FertilizedEggs as human beings w/ #legal rights. [but not #women]
#ReproductiveRights #IVF #fertility #BodilyAutonomy #MaleSupremacy #evangelism #WomensHealth #health #medicine #privacy #law #SCOTUS #Dobbs
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“This isn’t a bottom-up change,” said Mary Ziegler, a #law professor & historian of the #antiabortion movement. “It aligns w/the #SouthernBaptist Convention trying to figure out how #ultraconservative it’s going to be on #personhood,” she said of the #Christian movement that sees #embryos & #FertilizedEggs as human beings w/ #legal rights. [but not #women]
#ReproductiveRights #IVF #fertility #BodilyAutonomy #MaleSupremacy #evangelism #WomensHealth #health #medicine #privacy #law #SCOTUS #Dobbs
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#DonPage - Defining #Personhood: Beyond #Body and #Mind
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWzZH9o1Ghk
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #Memory #Time #Causation #Contiguity #Person #Persons #Experience #Awareness #QM #QuantumMechanics #QuantumTheory #QuantumPhysics #Physics #Science #PhilosophyOfScience #ManyWorlds #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#WarrenBrown - What Are #Persons?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2yxdq5pO7k
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #Personhood #Neurophysiology #Neuroscience #Autism #Self #TheSelf #Relationships #Personality #God #Religion #Attachment #AttachmentTheory #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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#JosephLeDoux - What is the Nature of the #Self?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ0DB0Qn7WQ
#Philosophy #PhilosophyOfMind #Mind #PhilosophyOfConsciousness #Consciousness #Neuron #Neurons #Synapse #Synapses #Psychology #Freud #Person #Personality #Personhood #Identity #PersonalIdentity #CloserToTruth #RobertKuhn
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Feeling very positive and heartened to see the great #animalrights, #animalliberation and #vegan communities on here!
I'm told there are now also a few #veganism and #animalrights instances popping up? Please send any new ones you learn of!
Thank you so much to everyone working on their own little piece of this #antispeciesism puzzle. We're going for full #nonhumanrights #personhood and #equality
#Animaljustice is an issue that goes hand in hand with #climatejustice. Not just for humans, but for nonhumans too. Animals have even more individualized #climates than humans, and our #anthropocene activities have an even greater impact on them.
Please boost/ give us a follow!
We're here to build a community on a higher, more inclusive level - but stronger and more integrated, intentional in purpose, too. -
Great Apes should have rights, they're people like us.
Capitalism will kill all other forms of intelligence on this planet, and not even out of fear or anything, just for profit. -
By describing a fetus as a person from conception, Trump has legitimized #fetal #personhood.
Pro-abortion activists have long warned that fetal personhood,
an ideology that calls for providing equal human rights to a fetus
(even if it’s a cluster of cells),
will effectively strip pregnant people of their own rights.The legal language employed by fetal personhood also effectively categorizes any person receiving an abortion at any stage as a #murderer.
But the concept of fetal personhood is not only weaponized to limit abortion access
—it’s also been leveraged at the state level to restrict in vitro fertilization ( #IVF ) access for intended parents in places such as Alabama,
and even used to limit access to forms of #birth #control.
In May, the Texas GOP attempted to transform fetal personhood into law, claiming that “abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide,”
and called on lawmakers to extend “equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization"https://newrepublic.com/post/190506/donald-trump-fetal-personhood-executive-order
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How '#fetal #personhood' in #Alabama's #IVF #ruling evolved from #ChristianNationalist #fringe to #mainstream.
"The movement that's referred to as '#personhood,' to indicate that #life begins at #conception, was always going here"
#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Alabama #Conservatives #Extremism #Fascism #Religion #RepublicanParty #Hate #Bigotry #Violence #Genocide #Discrimination #Misogyny #Homophobia #Transphobia #ThePartyOfHate #EmptyThePews
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/14/1238102768/fetal-personhood-alabama-ivf
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“The three embryos that we have, that are frozen right now, that we can’t use as of right now, are very important to us and our best hope,” Tucker Legerski said. “I don’t know if we would be able to afford another egg retrieval and transfer or creating more embryos, because of the emotional and financial costs.”
The Legerskis are far from the only prospective parents wondering what the future of IVF holds, both inside Alabama and beyond its borders. IVF patients and advocates in Alabama are rushing to figure out what the ruling and subsequent cessation of care means for their deeply time-sensitive plans.
Outside Alabama, people are petrified that similar restrictions could soon surface in their state now that Alabama has blazed a trail.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/24/us-infertility-patients-ivf-alabama-ruling
#Florida #Alabama #fetal #personhood #IVF #extrauterine #children
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#Florida lawmakers have postponed a bill that would give fetuses civil rights after a similar ruling in #Alabama has halted in vitro fertilization treatment at several clinics in the state.
The “#fetal #personhood” bill had been gaining support amid Florida’s mostly Republican lawmakers.
The legislation attempts to define a fetus as an “unborn child”, allowing parents to collect financial damages in the case of wrongful death, the Tampa Bay Times reported.But the bill has largely stalled after Democrats argued that the legislation could affect in vitro fertilization ( #IVF ) treatments, as seen in Alabama after the state’s supreme court ruled earlier this month that embryos created through IVF are considered “#extrauterine #children”.
Since the ruling, several Alabama IVF clinics have paused services.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/27/fetal-personhood-ivf-florida?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
