Future Current

George Dvorsky and Ben Hyink at Transvision 2007

Ben Hyink has contributed to transhumanism activism through his work with the Transhumanist Student Network and by serving as an intern for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. He received the JBS Haldane Award in 2007, presented by James Hughes at the Transvision awards ceremony. His essay “Personhood Rights,” presents an argument for extending the status of personhood to non-humans, though not to entities that for all we know are mindless but happen to contain human DNA. The essay was first published in the Summer 2005 issue of the Northwestern University magazine The Protest.

The following essay was originally published in May of 2005 on the IEET website as an extended version of an article printed in the Northwestern University magazine The Protest. It has been reproduced with permission from the author.

James Hughes presenting Ben Hyink with the JBS Haldane Award at Transvision 2007

Personhood Rights

This being premised to find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places.
- John Locke [Essay II xxvii 9]

Today the term person ascribes certain legal and ethical conditions for an entity. However, its definition has not been uncontested or unchanged over time. Long struggles have been and in many cases, continue to be undertaken to recognize the full legal personhood of non-royalty, non-landowners, women, the working class, the poor, enslaved or conquered people and their descendents, immigrants, lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, and people with unpopular opinions or beliefs. Additionally, the status of dependent person also had to be sought for children, mentally challenged people and people with various forms of dementia. Note that all of the interpretations listed thus far fall within the category of the human species. I will set aside the dubious notion of corporate personhood.

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

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 of 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 Kants 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 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 Singers efforts to develop a consistent utilitarian ethical system, I dont 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 couldnt integrate representations into conscious awareness and her memory was destroyed. She couldnt think or feel anything; her mind was lost fifteen years ago.

Considering speculative souls once again, if Mrs. Schiavos 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 her bodys long term care and her doctor. For the $950,000 that kept her body in an irrecoverable vegetative state for over a decade, one cant help but wonder how many lives of sick or starving people could have been saved.

Embodied Subjectivity in Personhood Debates

The issue of determining whether or not embodied conscious access to the world is possible for a given cognitive system can be bracketed in two ways using Kants claim that Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. (Critique of Pure Reason, A 51 = B 75). That is:

(1) systems that contain what could be interpreted as physically realized faculties of judgment that do not act properly on intuition content (spatiotemporal information) and therefore cannot construct representations that can be consciously perceived by the same functionally integrated system cannot have embodied subjectivity (e.g. modern robots)

(2) systems that contain what would be physically realized intuitions of environmental stimuli (e.g. automatic reflex mechanisms), but lack the necessary faculties of judgment to construct representations that the system can consciously perceive, also lack embodied subjectivity (e.g. Mrs. Schiavo and fetuses prior to thalamocortical integration)

In either the case of (1) emptiness or (2) blindness, we can claim with confidence that no embodied subject of experience exists. Bodily configurations that are incapable of supporting subjective perception should not be considered persons. The cognitive measures for personhood beyond subjectivity are still a matter of debate, as are issues surrounding the anticipated potential of some sentient beings.

There are other important ideas for us to consider, including such exotic topics as cryonic preservation and uploading. This article precedes a paper called, Cognitive Network as Embodied Self: A Common Frame for Ethical Dialog, in which I will discussed those subjects and elaborate on my position. It should be published online this summer.

Related articles: Cyborgs Today and In the Future. James Hughes explores some of the historical continuities between the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophes and the present-day steps toward cybernetic augmentation of the human body.

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