On Tuesday, 9 July 2013 at 10:38:11 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
... nor does it mean that personhood is not a very useful and
meaningful construct.
Even worse, now you use "personhood" as a replacement for
self-awareness! :) It is a very dangerous mistake to use common
words when speaking about consciousness and thinking - too much
self-reflection involved.
You're looking at it in the wrong context. Walter was talking
about personhood as an analogy, not at all conflating it with
self-awareness.
I agree 100% about the language point. By and large our languages
(and language abilities) have evolved to identify and communicate
day-to-day opportunities and risks.
They are very specialised DSLs running on very specialised
hardware, not well suited to performing complex runtime
introspection or large-scale formal logic :p
Interestingly, it doesn't take a huge change in design to unleash
some very different abilities, e.g. autistic savants.
