What is a person?

News that generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) apps have penetrated the dating market and spawned users to create idealized fantasy bots which serve as romantic partners to humans are nothing new. Replika, the oldest of these apps, has been on the market since November 2017.

The companionship offered by generative AI bots does not appear to have filled the loneliness people in many technologically advanced societies report feeling.?

Evidence is mixed whether having a virtual companion promotes or detracts from one's social life.?

As AI's power and imagery increase rapidly and draw more humans into its orbit, capturing their attention, desires and income, the technological development of AI bots challenges us to reconsider what makes us human, to ask what it is to be a person.?

Having a clear understanding of what it means to be a person gives us a way of looking at AI simulacra of persons critically.?

The first answer to the question, "What is a person?", that most people today might endorse, is that a person is a body encased in skin (and hair), occupying physical space, and, if they reflect further, a period of time, namely their lifetime.?

The physical space, naturally, changes with the movement of the body over time, so we can say a person is a body that moves in time.?

This answer doesn't cover all that most people would wish to say, however. They would add something about a person having an identity, e.g. this individual person is 'Fred', where being Fred has significant attributes that help identify 'Fred'.

So together, the common notion of a person, being a person, is to have a body, to occupy space and time, and to have an identity, "being Fred", for example.?

Is that sufficient?

No, some Christians and others would say. Persons are comprised of more than their having bodies and identities. They have individual souls, in addition to having bodies and National identity cards.?

Having a soul brings up many metaphysical questions, as well as the classical philosophical questions of the Mind-Body problem (dualism and monism), and the location of the Mind in the physical universe.?

We will set these aside for now.?

What I wish to explore is how persons leave a trace after they move through space and time.?

I will call this trace their 'aura'.?

Consider an event that happens in a room, where two people are speaking in a heated way. One says something cruel to the other, hurtful words that shock the other person into a state of despair.?

Then the first person leaves.?

Afterwards, the words spoken seem to hang in the air and the other person is stunned, hearing them reverberate in her mind.

The atmosphere left in the wake of the argument poisons the air.?

The example could just as well be framed in the opposite way and bring a lingering sense of astonishment and joy in the wake of a happy conversation.?

The point is that what the first person leaves behind has a continuous effect on the other person.?

Is the effect, either ill or good, to be described as part of the first person's being? Their aura?

The example provokes us to think of being a person as having the capacity to interact socially with other persons. Our aura is intersubjective, a feature of our personality that is shared.?

To take a simpler example, which lacks intersubjectivity, a person enters a cold room and their body and breath warm the room's temperature after some minutes by 0.3 degrees.?

Is this warm person's effect on the room part of them being a person?

The first example is atmospheric and psychological, the second physical. Do we distinguish these effects from their personhood?

These isolated psychological and physical examples are just instances in what happens over the course of a lifetime. Having a personality describes the effect one person has on others over time. A rude person cannot be conceived as someone who is only rude to himself.?

These observations pertain to someone having a personality. As in, 'She has a sunny personality, she lights up the room', or 'He is a gloomy person, he leaves a cloud behind whenever he appears.' In each case, the social aspect comes to the fore.?

So now the answer to the question, 'What is a person?' includes having a body in space and time, an identity, and an aura, which constitutes a person's personality.??

Is this enough?

Most people when asked to consider their own personhood would add something about their experience and history, what we can sum up as their biography. That brings in time and memory as crucial part of who they are.?

Now the answer to the question becomes: having a body, in space and time, with an identity, an aura, and a memory.?

Some would add the metaphysical entity 'soul' to this list.?

The interesting thing about soul is that it is something without a body, doesn't exist in space and time, and may or may not have a (personal) identity. Being metaphysical, there is no way of knowing (Kant).??

To rely on the existence of the soul to distinguish human persons from AI bots imitating persons (avatars) appears somewhat risky. It jettisons other criteria of personhood which may be needed to hold up a defense against AI's ambitions.?

Having a body encased in skin and hair may seem to be the most obvious way persons and AI bots differ, but that too appears to be a thin criterion to fall back on, as robots learn ever greater ways of replicating human bodies, gain in mobility, and can be programmed to act appropriately in common situations faced by humans.?Robots could be trained to incorporate and grow organic features within their structures.

Some philosophers believe the human brain is solely responsible for creating consciousness, a view called 'natural monism' (Searle). If this is so, then in principle there is no barrier to machines achieving consciousness if they are designed properly to mimic the operations of the brain.?

A variant of these theories accepts that the brain is essentially a computer, which leads to the same conclusion. Some day computers will think as well or beyond what humans now do with their brains.?

The ultimate distinguishing feature of being a person as opposed to an AI bot may lie in intentionality, the quality of our ideas, thoughts, wishes and desires to be about other things in the world. Lacking intentionality, no machine can be said to have consciousness, as persons do.

The answer raises a high bar for machines to clear if they ever were to successfully challenge the uniqueness of being a living person.?

Image credit: Bernard Marr & Company