Personhood Rights

by Ben Hyink

Today the term “person” ascribes certain legal and ethical conditions for an entity. We are confronted by two bioethical choices on personhood: 1) whether or not to extend the status of personhood to non-humans that for all we know have minds at least as capable as those of dependent persons and 2) whether or not to extend personhood status to entities that for all we know are mindless but happen to contain human DNA. I argue “yes” to the first choice and “no” to the second.

Protecting non-human minds as "persons"

The brain structures and behavior of some non-human animals are similar to our own. Some animals are also capable of limited language comprehension, tool use, and other sophisticated behaviors. Certain behaviors have been interpreted as demonstrating abstract self-awareness (such as mirror interaction) and theories about the minds of others (including social strategies).

Two non-human species with the highest development of these traits are chimpanzees and dolphins, though other great apes and cetaceans also approximate their abilities. Their language capacity, when rigorously trained, appears to be equivalent to that of a two-year-old human. Yet, in some regions chimpanzees are still hunted for food (which speaks to unmet human needs), and dolphins have been subject to harmful military research since the 1960s (as have humans). For these animals, might we consider a dependent personhood status, which would offer greater legal protection and exempt them from painful forms of experimentation?

You may have caught the films on “artificial intelligence” called, A.I., (2001) and I, Robot, (2004), which both explored some of the social complexities that conscious androids would create. Perhaps the earliest theory regarding the designation of machines as persons is known as the “Turing test,” created by Alan Turing in 1950. The essential consideration in the test was whether human subjects could be fooled when conversing with the machine in a blind test where the subject could be interacting with either a machine or a human. In an era of “noncognitivist” philosophy and behavioralist psychology, this was an acceptable theory.

However, simple grammar generation programs first developed in the ’60s have already fooled humans in exchanges. Modern online “chatbots” can generate conversation that is convincing for a short while and can even appear clever thanks to sophisticated designs for “grammar parsing” and lexical access, as well as long exposure to human users. But such systems have no design mechanism that would account for conscious awareness of their activities.

What is a mind? An initial requirement would be a capacity for conscious experience. I believe we can more fruitfully differentiate between consciousness based on an analysis of the capacities and mechanisms observed in humans. Enter Immanuel Kant’s representational functionalism. Due to space limits, I can only share an approximate account of some of the things that Kant discovered we need for any moment of conscious experience (at least the normative human form of consciousness).

First, we need basic abilities to access the world spatially and temporally, because one cannot “learn” about time from a temporal series of representations if one has no ability to distinguish a temporal sequence in the first place (likewise for space). An A.I. with identifiable consciousness would need a functional processing system analogous to sensory nerves and forms of declarative memory (which probably could be achieved through functional programs running on a machine that enabled the same kind of processing as observed in humans).

Second, we need some form of judgment in order to interpret anything experienced. Our conscious experience is what Kant called an “apperceptive” judgment of our empirical perception. Apperceptive awareness both interprets a mass of sensation into coherent object representations and unifies those representations in one collective representation. The representations also have to be conceptually meaningful in at least some way to be consciously recognized as representing something. Likewise, a conscious A.I. would need to be able to construct representations from its sensory information, integrate them into a form in which it could receive many particular representations in a unified way (a simultaneous experience of particulars), and conceptually recognize the signals as representing things to it.

We are still learning how humans are able to do these things (not the least of which is the using memory). All theories today involve electrical oscillations in the thalamocortical networks of the brain (including the cerebral cortex and the thalamus). In his “global workspace” model, Bernard J. Baars theorizes that highly active representations in perceptual areas project or are selectively integrated into thalamus circuits, then projected throughout the cortex and central nervous system via oscillations. It may be that some form of network organization is necessary for consciousness.

Still, additional questions arise as to the interests, rights, and even personhood of an A.I. based on the kind of conscious mind it happened to have. Assuming we consider it to have conscious processing approximately like our own, what difference would it make if it had radically different interests from us? What if its affective parameters (presumably necessary at some level for effective environmental navigation) were set to make it enjoy tasks we consider dull, demeaning, or dangerous? Would it make a difference if it were conscious and intelligent beyond the personhood threshold for chimps and dolphins? These questions have hardly been explored.

Designating mindless human bodies as "non-persons"

What is it that makes some people want to rush to declare personhood for all fertilized eggs? As Jack Kessler, the Northwestern Chair of Neurology, has pointed out, those who advance such claims cannot even tell you how many “people” they reference, as splits in early stages of cell division can result in identical twins. The cluster can even split and then recombine. Nerve cells begin to form after two weeks – after any embryo would be harvested for stem cell therapies – but that is far from what is needed to support consciousness. In practice, no one acts consistently on this dubious notion of embryonic personhood. As Ron Regan Jr. pointed out, if President Bush truly thought embryos were persons, he should have sent rescue missions to in vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics to rescue the slowly disintegrating (“dying”) embryos in storage and implant them all in the uteruses of willing surrogates. If an IVF clinic were burning down with an eight-year-old girl and thousands of embryos inside, would anyone ignore the girl to save as many embryos (“people”) as possible? Yet, the need many people have for stem cell therapies is no less desperate, and it is being denied.

Functional connections between the thalamus and cortex do not develop until 5.5 to 6.5 months of pregnancy. At least until that time, no conscious mind exists. If one wants to bring up immaterial souls, then we can at least say that no physiological facilitation for consciousness can be observed, through which a soul could – somehow – access the world. It is hard to say what forms of awareness could be integrated at so early a stage, though we know sensory and motor awareness is still very primitive in infants. Most abortions occur before this time. Late term abortions, virtually always justified by serious risks to the mother, could still be argued for on grounds of bodily autonomy; however, although I respect Peter Singer’s efforts to develop a consistent utilitarian ethical system, I don’t see declaring the life of an adult cat worth more than a human infant (since its mind is more capable) as a necessary position to take. Arguments for “potentiality” can have some weight, but not until their physical object of concern has at least facilitated some subjective experience (hence becomes an embodied subject).

If stem cell use and abortions deal with “pre-persons,” certain forms of brain damage that prevent all possibility of regaining consciousness can turn bodies into “post-persons.” Apparently, Terri Schiavo was such a case. The popular coverage of her condition was fraught with lies and distortions. She collapsed in a weakened state from bulimia nervosa because her heart stopped, and received injuries to the side on which she fell. Video footage of her following a balloon was the result of manipulative editing – a balloon was tossed past her head dozens of times until a shot in which her eyes seemed to follow it was captured. Her cortex was necrotized and liquefied; she couldn’t integrate representations into conscious awareness and her memory was destroyed. She couldn’t think or feel anything – her mind was lost fifteen years ago.

Considering speculative souls once again, if Mrs. Schiavo’s mind did exist without thalamocortical facilitation, it would hardly need (nor could it use) the rest of her body. In any event, removing life support functions to allow her body to die could not “kill her” in the same way a person capable of conscious awareness could be killed. More importantly, her wishes to not be kept in a permanently vegetative state were known to her husband – who was after no fortune, only $50,000 was left from a one million dollar malpractice settlement for Terri’s long term care – and her doctor. For the $950,000 that kept her body in an irrecoverable vegetative state for over a decade, I wonder how many lives of sick or starving people could have been saved.

There are other important ideas for us to consider, including such exotic topics as “cryonic preservation” and “uploading.” Hopefully this has been enough to spark your interest in personhood theory. This article precedes a paper that will hopefully be published online this summer called “Cognitive Network as Embodied Self: A Common Frame for Ethical Dialogue”.