Peter van Inwagen - What Does it Mean to be a Person?

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?

Peter van Inwagen is an American analytic philosopher and the John Cardinal O’Hara Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, 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.

[markberman]

This ties directly into so many other conversations and inquiries here. How often do we find that what we perceive as the most complex, intractable things in our existence have, at their root, the most simple answers. Even the most complex Maths eventually fall into a solution that, in the end, seems so very elegant and obvious to those who can climb up its stairs.
We love, absolutely love, big words and rhetoric that demonstrates our brilliance and hard work put in to mastering some "thing" or some."subject". What if rather than building ourselves up to a perceived position we worked towards wonder and answers without the drapery of modern societal schematics.. one reason I loved Dyson so much.
What does it mean to be a person... for starters it means we are not defined by the mechanistic parameters of the physical brain. Nature vs Nurture... yadda, yadda, yadda... the emergence of some over others with their circumstances or within their lives means some "thing". Even divergent characters raised within the same family. The "brain bucket" floating in fluid and so wildly and extraordinarily designed and built produces a fantastically large number of different people... and yet, across peoples, on a macro level we can see and trace similarities. What does that mean? What does it mean that across all humanity there is a remarkable degree of balanced intelligences?
Ever watch a master bricklayer lay bricks, is the rhythm and talent of that really that different from watching Yo Yo Ma.... both can have the mesmerizing ability to pull us out of ourselves... what does that really mean for humanity?
We factually know that water reacts to sound-frequency-rythm, and we are mostly water and our brain buckets holding our minds "our personhoods" reside within fluid protected by bone.. what are the implications of this?
Why can we not produce Einsteins or DaVincis or Lincolns at will?
PS- I really enjoy the thought, that it is very likely, that "smarters" will dismantle, scoff at, and negate what I have written as either amateurish, boorish, babbling of someone that should know better than to opine on such "higher-mind-educated" things... feels best to scoff at than risking delving into such basicness.
Anyhoo, Cheers.

[longcastle]

Wittgenstein said, when you’re looking at language or a word, consider its use. For the most part a person is just what we English speakers call an individual human animal. We don’t call a dog a person. If we we’re talking about one, for example, we would say “that dog over there”, not “that person over there”. Referring to individuals of our own species, we could say “that human over there”, but it’s just a part of our language that we usually say, “that person over there”, instead.

[enotdetcelfer]

The key is synergy. You're starting from the wrong end. Self and person is a more specific version of identity, and identity in complex forms is about synergy, the sum being greater than the parts, and an effect of structure and interplay. If two multipurpose machines work at a sandwich shop, and machine A cuts ingredients faster, while machine B assembles them faster, then the sandwich shop has one synergy if you have A cutting and B assembling, and another synergy if they have B cutting and A assembling. Every synergy then has an identity that distinguishes it from others such that it's interaction with others is mediated by inputs and outputs, and the extension of internal preferences upon the input/output environment. Personhood is the state of an identity that has rights and duties within a society, and the self is a virtual model of a synergy that exists within a virtual model of the dynamics of an environment such that querying the state of the model is exactly the same as querying the dynamics. This is not that hard.

[micronda]

I would say...
My self alone is not a person. My soul alone is not a person. BUT...
The person who locks my self and my soul together, is me.

[jamenta]

"Thou wilt not find the boundaries of the soul
even though thou searchest through all its ways -
so unfathomable is its essence"

~Aniella Jaffe

[-by-_Publishing_LLC]

(6:52) *PVI: **_"I would suppose there's no conceptual barrier to persons being either material or immaterial."_* ... Logical barriers to conceivability are crucial to determining what can or cannot be. The fact that I can conceivably refer to _myself_ as *"I"* in a self-referential manner (and nobody else do the same) suggests that this is an *_observable phenomenon_* despite there being no physical evidence.

In fact, every one of us can do the same, ... but you can't be me, and I can't be you.

Whereas I concede to the materialists that I cannot offer _physical evidence_ to support a nonphysical state of consciousness that allows me to refer to myself as "I, " they are equally unable to explain the phenomenon of "I" ... and why I am able to do so.

Demanding physical evidence to support the existence of a nonphysical property is like using a flashlight to find evidence of darkness.

[time]

In my opinion, I think the "self" is just a phenomenological illusion, it feels as if it's real by human experience and it plays an important role. If you have studied Theseus's ship's paradox, you know it also applies to our body. Each day our cells are getting replaced by new ones and we are constantly fed with new information and experience, we get influenced and with time, the self aslo gets sculpted and changes. From a materialistic view, the self doesn't exist because the materialistic component, which is the body, keeps on changing. But from a metaphysical point of view, the metaphysical component is what is constant and what we carry throughout our life which is the "essence" of the self and our existence, some people call it the "soul".

[shiddy.]

feels like I've had this whole conversation with myself in the mirror at some point

[picksalot]

Here is an ancient definition of the individual person that is pretty comprehensive: The 5 primary forms of matter that constitute the physical body; 5 primary senses; 5 primary actions; 5 primary metabolic/phisiological processes; 4 primary functions of the mind (volition, intellect, doership, and memory).

[infinitygame]

you are the fundamental reality, search yourself, you have all the answer to your questions

[stephenzhao]

Thanks be to God you have an important and inspirational talks. 👍6:08 ... we only got the word person from trinitarian theology also known as Best Theology The 1ST VERSION. ... but it was a useful word it moved into ordinary usage sometimes it just means human beings sometimes students are puzzled if you talk about extra hypothetical extraterrestrials as persons because for them the word just means human being but I think it has the more general meaning when a person is anything that can call itself I that thinks of itself as I and um I would suppose that persons could there's no conceptual barrier to persons being neither material or immaterial and I happen to think that when I use the word I I refer to a looming human organism and not to some immaterial thing not to some part of this organism but to the whole thing all differences in the philosophy of person have to do with what they were differences 7:10 about what the word I refers to in my view 7:15 ... 8:15 I can say that if we're talking about ❤the necessary being that grounds all reality and then to say that is a person I mean that stops me I mean does that make intuitive sense. 8:31 PI: ... (as a person) ... well but I mean even in the first place (?) that is would we expect the ground of all reality to make Him perfect now your worry has been put in the form of an argument you know who says the God is supposed to be absolutely unchanging and everlasting and yet to be an active conscious agent uh to exhibit both zetrapusois natural also uh and he sses a contradiction there to me this is just one of those contradictions that some philosophers see uh and I don't that is I would expect God to be mysterious in some respects you know if maybe the world there's no reason the world shouldn't have turned out from the perspective of my intellectual development where the ultimate ground of reality was something like the platonic one that wasn't a person [like Chinese Dao 道, however, Chinese church has redefined the traditional Chinese Dao the concept why maybe one reason that many Chinese doesn't like to be a Christian] but if it tells me it's a person uh am I going to say 9:40 oh that can't be right this must be some kind of illusion there's not that nothing could be telling me that because that can't be true I'm not so good at priorit metaphysics is to say it's impossible and of course it's also told me it seems that I'm made in its image and likeness so that would mean that it was a person but you know all these all things I'm saying are very little metaphysical value I'm simply expressing my puzzlement with why others are puzzled.

[TheUltimateSeeds]

The "person" or the "self" (or more specifically, the immutable Cartesian "I Am-ness") is established the instant the proverbial "lights come on" within the mind at the moment of birth. Indeed, it is the locus of what we call the "soul" and is what survives the death of the body to live eternally in a higher (transcendent) context of reality.

[stellarwind]

The origin of language is a fuzzy concept. How did we assign different sound waves to such abstract ideas like self or person

[gettaasteroid]

A person is someone who has achieved 'agape' as in 1st Corinthians 13, or to quote Dr. King, a person possesses "a very stern love that would organize itself into collective action to right a wrong by taking on suffering"

[sujok-acupuncture]

The word "person" comes from greek word "persona" meaning personality wearing a mask. Per means "through" and sona means "sound". Human are beings where we hear sounds through. If there is no sound then we are just like vegetating plants.

[JayakrishnanNairOmana]

Arthur: I have trained this human Peter to feed me. He doesnt know he exists. He has a special interest in a class of things but doesnt know he is in there.

[maryblodgett]

He’s missing the mark. For instance, the question of whether an Alzheimer’s patient is still a person simply because they’ve lost awareness of self comes into play. What is self? Is awareness of self an ego based delusion of what we truly are outside of human form

[catherinemoore]

🤕I'll listen when the argument can be understood without having to pause and start again or just when the presentation is succinct as well as clear. 😏

[BlueBugger]

Persons comes from the Greek word kanah which is one with a title especially a surname.

[missh]

Is this about dialogos or the action of it, kinda like the cat in the box experiment or a group of people observing two people discussing one concept? If experiential was dropped from either scenario, what is the purpose for the exercise? If an emergent concept is derived from the two subjects using only peer reviewed known facts from literature across different fields of study, wouldn't it be blind sided by its own institutional biases? Or does it refine all the fields of study by a unanimous agreement where the unknown is the point of restructing how to better utilise the fields of study in either scenario. This leads me to think the self is an organised system where "I" is consistent and "Self" is specific? Idk but I always enjoy the challenge of thinking about these topics. Thanks CTT!