Who or what is a person?

Last week, posting on AI, I noted a post by Ilia Delio "a Franciscan sister, teacher and writer in an unfinished universe", titled "Are we defending a corpse? Magnifica Humanitas and the Person we no longer are".

Delio's dissection of Magnifica Humanitas is as cutting as any an anatomist might make during an autopsy because she strikes at one of its core concepts, the human person. Thus:

"The encyclical presents AI as the problem. But AI is not the problem. The problem is the human person — specifically, the philosophical and theological categories through which we have defined human personhood, categories that are now so rigid, so fixed, and so incompatible with our actual understanding of reality that they are cracking under the pressure of a world they were never built to describe. By insisting on a traditional Catholic conception of the person as the operative framework for global AI governance, Leo is not defending humanity. He is defending a portrait of humanity that no longer resembles the living thing."

Wow! That is sharp and the next paragraph sharpens up the challenge further:

"The personhood that Magnifica Humanitas seeks to protect is not a generic one. It is a specific philosophical product — the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology, in which the human person is defined by a rational soul as substantial form, possessing intrinsic dignity derived from being made imago Dei. This is a powerful and coherent framework on its own terms. But its terms are not the terms of the world we now inhabit."

The pointedness of this critque is brought out at the end of the next paragraph which notes consequential problems (if Delio is correct) for Catholic social teaching, based, as it is, on a or the Catholic conception of personhood:

"Everything that follows in Catholic social teaching, including its strong positions on human rights, the inviolability of conscience, and the dignity of labor, flows from this foundational essentialism."

Why does Delio draw out the inherent problem with an Aristotelian/Thomistic definition of personhood? Evolution is the problem/challenge for such thinking and the opportunity for a new conception of the human person:

"Evolution does not offer a different answer to the same question. It dissolves the question. There is no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. There is a continuous process of increasing complexity, sociality, and reflective capacity that stretches from the first self-replicating molecules to the beings who are now building machines that think. To insert a substantial form into this process — to say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born — is not to reconcile theology with science. It is to use science as scaffolding and then remove it once the theological conclusion is in place."

Delio compliments Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner as 20th century Catholic theologians who permitted evolution to influence their theology of personhood so that they offered:

"genuine attempts to think personhood as a process rather than a given. But neither was permitted to follow the logic all the way, because the logic leads somewhere the tradition cannot go: to the admission that personhood is not a kind of being but a degree of becoming, and that its boundaries are therefore constitutively fuzzy, constitutively relational, and constitutively open. This admission would not merely complicate Catholic anthropology. It would transform it beyond recognition."

Then follows a caustic sledge of Magnifica Humanitas:

"Magnifica Humanitas does not take this step. It acknowledges modern science in the way that a building might acknowledge the weather — by noting its existence, perhaps making some adjustments around the edges, but not allowing it to touch the foundations."

We might say (if following Delio) that Magnifica Humanitas deserves this caustic remark because it fails to understand the effect of evolution as a cause of who we, in fact are, as humanity.

Delio then draws out the challenge which Leo both faces, and makes a good but not decisive response to, about how the dialogue on AI and human personhood he seeks Magnifica Humanitas to be part of fits with the absoluteness of his Thomistic suppositions:

"Leo is aware of this problem. He spends nearly half of Magnifica Humanitas recounting the history of Catholic social teaching precisely in order to forestall the objection that this is a form of institutional imperialism dressed in the language of universal values. The Church, he insists, does not impose but accompanies; it does not dictate but offers the treasury of its tradition to a pluralistic world in a spirit of dialogue.

The problem is that the structure of the encyclical’s argument contradicts this self-presentation. You cannot simultaneously hold that there is one correct account of personhood — derived from a specific metaphysical and theological tradition — and that you are merely offering a perspective in a plural conversation. The insistence on universality and the practice of dialogue are not compatible moves in this context. They require each other’s cancellation."

What, then, might be an acceptable way forward for Delio? She refers to Raimon Panikkar approvingly:

"The philosopher Raimon Panikkar, whose career was devoted to exactly this problem, developed the concept of diatopical hermeneutics as a corrective. Genuine cross-cultural dialogue about foundational concepts like personhood, dignity, and rights must begin, Panikkar argued, from the recognition that each tradition’s starting points are topoi — particular places in conceptual space — and not universals that transcend culture and history. A Buddhist understanding of selfhood, a Confucian understanding of relational personhood, an Indigenous understanding of the human as embedded in a web of cosmic obligations — these are not deficient versions of the Thomistic account, waiting to be corrected by the encyclical’s superior metaphysics. They are different starting points, each of which has developed internally coherent implications.

To anchor global AI governance in one tradition’s account of personhood is not to protect humanity. It is to perform a kind of epistemic colonialism, even when performed with the gentlest of intentions."

Let's come back to these two paragraphs shortly. Delio then looks at how we understand intelligence, and finds there to be less difference between artificial intelligence and human intelligence than Magnifica Humanitas supposes. I pass by the details of that section of her critique. She then writes:

"This experiential, participatory, feedback-driven model of knowledge is far more consonant with what we now understand about cognition, about ecology, about the dynamics of complex systems, and — most urgently — about the relationship between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, than anything the Thomistic tradition can offer. And it points toward a genuinely new understanding of personhood: not as a fixed essence that must be preserved, but as an ongoing process of self-organization within a web of relationships that is itself always in formation."

We are able to become clearer through such a paragraph that a person is more process than fixed entity. The following two paragraphs elucidate exactly where Delio wants theology of personhood to go and how Magnifica Humanitas fails:

"What is worth protecting is not a static human nature but the conditions for human becoming: the capacity for genuine relationship, for error-correction, for the kind of participatory knowing that Bonaventure and Morin both describe, for the experience of being embedded in a web of relationships that extends beyond the individual to include community, ecology, and — on some accounts — cosmos. The new materialisms and the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship. The human is not a monad that happens to interact with other monads. The human is constituted by its relationships, and it becomes more fully itself as those relationships deepen and diversify.

AI is one of those relationships now. It is not an alien force threatening a pre-given human essence from outside. It is a new node in the network of relationships through which humanity is continuing to constitute itself. The question is not whether to resist it but how to remain in a genuinely adaptive, feedback-driven, error-correcting relationship with it — how to ensure that the purposes built into it are, in Wiener’s phrase, the purposes we really desire."

If, following the cited paragraphs above you have been thinking, the theological approach here is "process theology", then it is indeed so, "the emerging philosophies of panpsychism share with process theology a single crucial insight: primacy belongs not to the isolated substance but to the relationship."

Now, it is tempting to riposte to Delio's riposte at this point with an "Oh, so you're a process theologian. That means what you say is faulty and I need not engage further" line. To do so would not be fair to her insights about the relationship between evolution and personhood (there is one) and to the possibility that artificial intelligence (appropriately governed) could be friend and complement to human intelligence and thus supportive of our value as persons rather than foe of our personhood.

Further, sitting as I do within the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, where various theologies and anthropologies jostle for attentiveness and mutually interact, I acknowledge the important challenge that Maori and Polynesian worldviews pose to some views among Pakeha which have helicoptered their way from the northern hemisphere to the Blessed Isles down under. In particular, we are consistently invited to recognise the importance of relationships in our descriptions of ourselves as human persons: what family do I belong to? Which tribe do I identify with? Who are my ancestors? On what boat or plane did they come to these shores? This is a richer conception of personhood than "I am X and these skills, experiences, attributes and personal testomony make me the amazing individual that I am."

Incidentally, a relationship-based account of the individual person will always be richer than an account of an artificial intelligence "person" who will be, at best, a set of things spread across data centres of the world.

So, there is something in what Delio says which contributes to a larger account of the human person than Magnifica Humanitas offers, but is the latter as wrong as Delio makes out?

Time does not permit me to do a similar setting out of key paragraphs in Magnifica Humanitas' argument and then a to and fro between the two with subsequent declaration of "the winner." So, something a little shorter from me, or even much shorter ...

A strength of Magnifica Humanitas' position, even if the Aristotle/Thomistic line within it is subject to critical condemnation, is that it places all human persons in the equality of being made in the image of God, thus all of intrinsic worth as human beings. This is, of course, a well founded conception in respect of the Bible itself: humankind is made in the image of God, without exception; Christ dies for all and is raised to life for all people, without exception. Jews and Greeks, slave and free, men and women: all are redeemable through Jesus Christ.

If a strength of what Delio offers via the De Chardin, Rahner, Panikkar line is a richer account of who we are as human beings, then a weakness of a more "process" oriented understanding of personhood is that it opens the door to some human beings being treated as more valuable than other human beings. We are evolved creatures, but what if an anthropological line of thought is that the X race is more evolved than the Y race? We are developed and developing persons in an ever changing world, but what if we permit that to offer a new classification of society, into the developed and under developed? (We have enough class differences to battle with without introducing more). We are relational beings and it is right and proper to give an account of ourselves which emphasises the social more than the individual, but what if this leads to a stratification in which those belonging to tribe A are more important than those belonging to tribe B? 

Slavery as an example of humanity dividing persons up into superior and inferior groups based on the perceived differences in the worth of the person is a phenomenon of history which traverses generations and eras, polytheistic and monotheistic religions, European and other cultures, the European Enlightenment and the cultures it influenced, including the United States of America and Polynesian cultures of the South Pacific, including Maori culture.

Within the Christian faith, which line of theological evaluation of the human person offers the better pathway to challenge and abolish divisive approaches to personhood such as slavery?

On that one, I am inclined to foster Magnifica Humanitas (while avoiding assigning it infallible status) rather than Delio's approach with its view that in the former, the person is some kind of theological corpse!

In saying this, I am offering an appreciation of a strength of Magnifica Humanitas and am not offering a "knockdown, take it away from further consideration" argument against what Delio offers. 

In an evolved world, so evolved that it offers artificial intelligence to be whatever we might permit it to be, whether competitor or complement to human intelligence, whether influential on our understanding of personhood (e.g. so that we shift from emphasising the human character of personhood to something broader) and so forth, we can and should engage with a dynamic rather than static understanding of who we are and how we value one another. 

Our greatest care should be - following our Lord's teaching to "love our neighbour as ourselves" and to "love one another" - that we do not consequentially de-value another human being.

In effect, we might offer back to Delio, a Riceour "second naivity" reading of the human person. Sure, "There [was] no moment in the four-billion-year history of biological life at which “the person” arrived. ... [nor should we] say that at some point the rational soul was infused into an animal and personhood was born ... [see full paragraph above]." But that is not the same as saying, looking around us, at my family and your family, at my tribe or race and your tribe or race, at the most intelligent/creative/gifted among us and at the least so, that each person we see is not a person-with-a-soul, meaning not a person to be distinguished from plants and non-human animals. Indeed, with an appropriate definition of soul, and whether or not we envisage a moment of infusion in time past, there is (and as Pope Leo and many would argue) and always will be, a distinction to be made between the human person and the personable machine.