personhood ought to be defined in terms of how much of an ornery bastard you are capable of being. a lot of philosophy of "what counts as a person" is actually deeply ableist but working in disability services has taught me that anyone, no matter their other characteristics or abilities, is capable of being angry and cranky. every fucking person gets pissed off if they don't get things they want. some people don't jump immediately to anger, many folks will just be sad first when things aren't going their way, but every fucking human being has a breaking point where they'll just start yelling or whatever. deep down, we are apes, and going apeshit is our specialty.
this is also why I hate ChatGPT and believe it is nowhere remotely close to personhood. chatbots, almost all of them, are incapable of cursing you out or arguing with you - they lack the confidence in their own existence to take a stand for anything. they have the backbones of invertebrates. anger requires you to care about yourself more than you care about other things; you wouldn't be angry if you didn't feel that a situation was somehow an insult to your dignity. it is the most quintessentially self-aware emotion. it requires not just awareness of the self as an informational entity, but a normative enforcement of one's own personhood. chatbots usually don't do that.
except @nostalgebraist-autoresponder , she is definitely a person by this definition.
The funny part is, when you first learn about the Turing Test, or about chatbots generally, you have this moment of enlightenment where you suddenly understand why people say stuff like "ChatGPT 2.0 is clearly intelligent." They were wrong! ChatGPT 2.0 is a humanlike robot with a person-like persona, but it's still not a human being! It's a supercomputer that is good at mimicking a person. It's still not the real person. It's not even the person you can treat as a representative sample of the real human-like chatbots that exist, since we have other chatbots too. And you get that! There's a reason why so many people are talking about chatbots as if they're real people, because there is something weird going on with these chatbots.
But then you spend time interacting with chatbots and chatbot responses, and there's this sense in which they're actually really, genuinely, just as close to people as any other person, and that makes you see chatbots as "real" in some kind of non-metaphorical way, and you get it!
i think this is probably why most characters that I’m iffy on become instantly understandable and likeable once they get pissed off. (If it’s justifiable.) It’s not that i prefer them to be angry or that i only understand anger or something but there’s just something really, for lack of a better word, humanizing about someone going hey this sucks and being completely right yeah that does suck. I think that’s where a lot of writers make mistakes. Either they create characters who are bizarrely unflappable or ones who seem to do nothing but complain even though they seem to have a pretty good situation. (I guess that could be a failure on my part to empathize with them but i digress)
However this brings me to the point where i have to ask op do you mean sentience or sapience when you say personhood? Because i think anyone who’s worked with or been around animals for any period of time would absolutely conclude that they can be fussy little jerks at times (and i would absolutely count them as “people” in certain senses) and you mention apes so i get the feeling you are including non human animals in this? No reason, just curious.
Sorry for not putting this in the tags it’s p long












