What, If Anything, Is a "Person"

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother.

We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother.

This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves!

But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery, not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between "I" and "me", controlling "my" body so "I" can walk for example. At a certain point (if we are lucky), all these discoveries are packed away and absorbed into what we experience as "reality". Unless we have a brain injury, it will no longer make sense ask if these hands are "mine".

As we learn to speak, we learn to speak of I, me, mine and what "I" want. At this stage, mother is just another very interesting and special object in the world. Other objects with similar shape and sound may be accepted as "like" mother (a source of food, comfort etc). Objects that are similar but different in alarming ways (different skin colour, loud voice etc) are in a different category of "scary people".

Before too long, we generalize and create a category of "person", which includes "me", my mother and certain entities resembling my mother. It can take a very long time for us to actually attribute feelings and experience like "mine" to other persons (theory of mind). This ability may entirely fail, resulting in a pathological inability to recognize others as persons (Autism and psychopathy for example).

As an adult, we generally recognize a very broad category of human shapes as "persons" who we take for granted have an inner experience like ours. We may even generalize this to animals -- a generalization others may see as the "error" of anthropomorphizing.  Again, this categorization may fail - get it "wrong". We may, for example, regard things with human shapes as not persons if we are taught to do so in the course of military training.

Starting with our mother, we build up memes to model other people. We often make the mistake of assuming that this inner models is the other person. We say, Bob is dishonest, when we really mean, My inner idea of Bob is one of a person who cannot be trusted. Being memes, these models "run" on live brain material, allowing them to have ghostly thoughts and plans. At some point, the oldest of our person memes may accumulate enough related memes to take on a life of her own, even after the original has died. Hofstadter describes this phenomenon at length in "I Am A Strange Loop".

Building from this, we imagine the world to be full of "persons" like ourselves. If we imagine all of these persons (or at least the ones we know and trust) to "believe" in a certain meme, we take this meme as "real", even if it conflicts with our own direct experience. Conversely, we may doubt our own experience if we think it's not shared with other people (that is, our memes of these other people don't include the "belief" that what we are experiencing is real). Thus, we can "believe" in God without evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary. We can "believe" in the Big Bang with nothing but barely-understood testimony from trusted other persons. We can dismiss our own "peak experiences" (such as oneness with the universe) as "not real" because they are not (perceived as) shared with others.

And then there is "assimilation", which is the phenomenon of absorbing our very selves into a higher meme of society, a nation, a corporation or some "meta-person" I call a "dragon".