[tt] Are Persons Just an Illusion?

[Eugen Leitl]

https://www.reason.com/news/show/119888.html

Are Persons Just an Illusion?

Neuroscience and philosophy clash.

Ronald Bailey | April 27, 2007

Neuroscientists Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein, in the January issue of
the American Journal of Bioethics (subscription link), wonder if empirical
insights from their discipline can naturalize personhood. In other words,
they explore the notion that a person is a "natural kind" and "seeks
objective and clear-cut biological criteria that correspond reasonably well
with most peoples' intuitions about personhood. These criteria could then be
substituted for intuition in those cases where intuitions fail to agree."
This is an important issue, because trying to determine who is and is not a
person figures in our ethical and policy debates over the status of the brain
dead, embryos, and primates.

Farah and Heberlein proceed to discuss the neuroscientific evidence for the
existence of a separate network of brain systems that automatically
identifies persons as opposed to non-persons. Data from brain trauma patients
and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in which sections of the
brain "light up" when experiencing specific stimuli, have identified a
candidate person recognition network in the brain. This personhood network is
triggered by stimuli such as human-like faces, bodies, or contingent
behaviors. (Contingent behavior is activity that looks like it is responsive
to the outside environment and purposeful.)

The authors argue that the person network is innate and point out that
newborns within 30 minutes of birth tend to track face-like patterns with
their eyes more than they do other shapes of comparable symmetry or
complexity. Noting that the human face is a powerful trigger for the
personhood network, Farah and Heberlein, speculate that "this may be what
makes it hard for many of us to dismiss the personhood of a vegetative
patient or a fetus."

Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because
as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was enhanced by
understanding the beliefs, motivations and personalities of others. They also
speculate that the cost of ascribing intentions to non-intentional systems
might have been far less than the cost of failing to recognize intentions in
intentional systems. Thus the brain's personhood network may err on the side
of activating too often. (This may account of religious belief systems that
attributed intentions to the sun, rain, rivers, volcanoes and the like.
Interestingly, the less humanity has attributed intentions to natural
phenomena, the greater control we have obtained over them -- or is it the
other way around?)

Farah and Heberlein then claim that since the personhood network makes
frequent mistakes and often attributes personhood to non-intentional systems
that "suggests the personhood is a kind of illusion." They conclude, "If
personhood is not really in the world, then there is no fact of the matter
concerning the status of a given being as a person or not, and there is no
point to the philosophical or bioethical program of seeking objective
criteria for personhood more generally because there is none."

This claims too much. Fortunately, the Journal publishes a number of
thoughtful responses to Farah and Heberlein. One of the more devastating is
by University of California, San Diego neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland.
"Are there no mountains, no vegetables, no weeds, and no diseases?," she
begins. Her point is that there are no precise criteria, or "natural kinds"
that completely specify what a mountain, a vegetable, a weed or a disease is.
Lambs quarter can either be a salad green or weed depending on how various
gardeners regard it. Is obesity really a disease in quite the same way as
smallpox? Yet despite the lack of precise criteria for all kinds of things
out in the world (matters of fact, if you will), we manage to know what we're
talking about and get along quite well.

As Christian Perring, a philosopher from Dowling College in Oakdale, New
York, points out there is a great deal of agreement on what constitutes
personhood. These include attributes such as rationality, memory, ability to
self-reflect, intelligence, and a concept of self. "We are good at
distinguishing persons from non-persons in most ordinary circumstances,"
writes Dowling. It is the extraordinary circumstances that modern medicine
engenders -- embryos in Petri dishes, severe Alzheimer's patients,
anencephalic newborns, early fetuses, and patients in persistent vegetative
state - that are problematic for many people. For example, it is clearly the
case that prolife activists hope to activate the personhood networks of women
seeking abortions by requiring them to view ultrasound images of their
fetuses before undergoing the procedure.

University of Maryland philosopher Mark Sagoff makes the extremely
interesting point that the notion that personhood is somehow a moral trump
that demands that others recognize a being's rights is an historically new
concept. "The idea that every human being prima facie is entitled to equal
respect and concern under rules fair to all seems to depend not on hard-wired
biological factors but on contingent historical variables," writes Sagoff.
Human history, after all, is replete with tribes who kill outsiders, men who
kill "dishonored" women, believers who kill and torture infidels, and so
forth.

I believe that Dartmouth College philosopher Adina Roskies is right when she
suggests "knowing that one part of our biological system for identifying
persons is automatically entrained and subject to error should make us more
cognizant of its operation and more skeptical of its output as we engage in
the countless moral decisions we make each day." If Farah and Heberlein have
correctly identified an innate personhood network in our brains, they will
have helped free us from its mandates, just as other natural scientists freed
us from our misconceptions about the sources of disease and rain. We are not
just slaves to our brains' personhood networks -- we can use our rationality
to figure out which entities count as persons and which do not. We will most
likely conclude that personhood is a continuum, not an all or nothing
property. Just where to draw moral lines along that continuum will be a long
hard fought debate, but as Sagoff has pointed out moral progress can be made.
In the end, Farah and Heberlein are wrong, persons are as real as mountains,
diseases, weeds, pets and daylight.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology:
The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available
from Prometheus Books.