Raymond Tallis - What are Persons?

What does it mean to be a 'person'? How do persons differ from other living things? Must all human beings be persons? Always? When does personhood start—during childhood, at birth, in the womb?

[Josephus_vanDenElzen]

3:29 Interesting, thus mind the people you interact with, if you care about the person you want to be.
3:11 Who we think we are is reinforced by how other people treat us (the person they address)

[davidrandell]

A person is Latin for the English mask. Why bother with superficial terms. The creative nothing per Max Stirner is sufficient. “The Unique and Its Property “, 1844/2017 Landstreicher translation.

[charlesbrightman]

Energy interacting with energy causes things to occur. That is how I believe consciousness, memories and thoughts work. When our brain first forms in the womb, and then becomes active for the very first time, energy interactions occur which allow a "single thought" as it were to emerge from all these interacting energies. This single emerged thought, which happens at an unconscious level, becomes the "higher intelligence" that other energy interacts with. Hence, we learn, forget, etc.

The sad part of all this the more I study and think about it, is that what makes us "us", is just emergent energy interactions in our brain and that when our brain dies for the final time and completely, then "we" die for all of future eternity. Even if I had all the knowledge, understanding, wisdom and applications of "God" but one, to have an actual eternal conscious existence, then I would still die one day from something, forget everything, and be forgotten if there weren't a conscious entity left to care.
(Or at least so it currently appears).

[jenniferrossiter]

Ooh. I like this guy. I want to argue with him, but in a super nice way over tea and biscuts. "Foldedness" is my philosophical term for the day.

[BradHolkesvig]

The only way to learn how we're created is to listen to the voice of God and obey his commandments. Otherwise, you will have to listen to these fools who have never heard his voice.

[MrDeppness]

One's sense of being diminished after having been separated by the society that identifies him is largely determined by his persistence on maintaining his own identity as a constant truth. Now this identity usually comes to an individual by way of society at large defining him, but when one truly transcends himself he sheds his need to become a product of another's labeling and he becomes the creator of his own values, meaning, and purpose. No longer is a society of people needed to label and identify him. He is as he wills, with or without another's approval and/or affirmation, provided he is honest with himself. So all of these erudite highly-esteemed philosophers that like to speculate upon all the variables of what the term "Person" could mean are dancing around the heart of the matter. A person is a soul inhabiting a living body. All other banter in defining this term is an exercise in self-indulgence.

[piotrkupka]

He isn't Raymond Tallis and he isn't a doctor. His parents gave him this name and his job is a doctor. His native leanguage is English and his haircut is rather short and he has a beard. There was a time he didn't have a beard and there was a time he wasn't a doctor. And some years earlier he still made a lot of mistakes trying to speak his mother tongue - yet he was still the same person.
I observe many changes in my body as the years pass by - it looks different then before, it also feels different - weaker, stiffer a.s.o. Astonishingly, I don't observe any changes in the perception of the "self", even if there are so many new memories and also many of the old memories got lost.

[robotaholic]

he lost me when he mentioned a fetus...not because of any pro life/choice idea

[nicokarsen]

I hate the presenter. I don't even know his name. T