Jared Diamond - 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? Are you a person when asleep? Are people with severe mental deficiencies still persons? Severe brain injuries? What's the importance of persons, anyway?



Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005).


Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[georgechanturidze]

Had the privilege of having Jared Diamond as a professor in a small class setting. Amazing man all around.

[stoneagedjp]

In my experience of living in another culture, whenever I thought that people were all the same, I would realize they weren't. And whenever I thought we weren't the same, I would realize we were. Never have figured it out.

[leonoradompor]

Rest in peace mom, you live in my heart***

[MrSanford]

I think there’s a difference between the social person and the existential person. The social person is only defined by how you relate to others ; where by social adaptations or interpretations by neuroscientists. The existential person Will always be unknowable to us just as much as when a person is sleeping we can never know what he’s dreaming. But socially, everybody are just bits of information processed among each other. Perhaps the information was all in our heads in the first place

[robsmitha]

In my lifetime the amount of autonomy given to children has changed a lot in the UK where I live. As far as I can remember from the age of eight or nine I would go out with friends, do whatever we wanted and all would be ok as long as we were back in time for tea and didn't cause any trouble. Looking back we did lots of things where we could get hurt but also we learned a lot about doing activities without someone else having to organise them for us. I think it a shame that youngsters don't have that freedom anymore.

[ronhudson]

Primitive seems a rather harsh way to describe societies different from ours. Hunter-gatherer, nomadic herding etc. adequately describe a difference without implying inferiority.

[hammyhamsters]

Jared didn’t say anything about the topic: what are persons? What are universal in all people and culture?

[Dion_Mustard]

People are not their physical bodies, they are consciousness. When people describe having an out of body or near death experience this is very much verified, the fact that our bodies are irrelevant, and that we each share a universal fundamental consciousness which is non-local.

[bluelotus]

It may well be that in those places where the struggle for survival is harder, children need to learn to survive through harder lessons, but the principles of struggling and learning are ultimately the same.

[HumanBeingsRThinkingBeings]

To get closer to truth..
Invite/Interview - Nassim Haramain

[TheTroofSayer]

If we think that raising a child in hunter-gatherer cultures is wild, what about children raised by animals? The topic of feral children relates. For obvious reasons, this is a topic that cannot be formally studied (keeping children in isolation, or having animals raise them, for the purpose of conducting experiments, is not a humane thing to do). Nonetheless, several examples have been discovered and studied. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard got the ball rolling with his study of Victor of Aveyron (raised by wolves).

[experiencemystique]

1:42of the video and here I'm asking...he traveled to Peru and New Guinea to try to understand what's a traditional family concern means? And in my head...why? What happened to yours?

[DIDUKNOW]

If one can think and has a perspective than one is a person irrespective of disability or physical limitations. That's just common sense.

[francesco]

Compared to the different moral choices that some people do in our modern civilization (they steal, they kill, they rape...) i find those cultural differences quite irrelevant.

[dry]

Have you investigated what creates the ‘I’, the me, the center, in consciousness ?

[najamhaq]

Is it bad sound recording or is it my ears ??

[nsc]

All about survival in each one's environment

[dueldab]

It’s all about Memories and the ability to call them. Your memories make you.

[J.M_Sterken]

Person: universal un/indentified conscious un/social living or dead organism. That's related to that of a human being.

[buckaroo]

My neighbors and their children, unfortunately, are all hunter gatherers.