Personhood in the Digital Age: An Interview with Monica Meijsing

By Alfred Archer & Maureen Sie

Monica Meijsing’s book Waar Was Ik Toen Ik Er Niet Was (Where Was I When I Wasn’t There) was published in 2018. It opens with an anecdote very recognizable for those who know Meijsing’s dry and quick sense of humor. After waking up from surgery a nurse tells her it has been quite a bloody affair, making a new nurse faint on the spot, to which Meijsing instantly replies with a ‘glad I wasn’t there then.’ She continues by unpacking the joke, explaining why the ‘I wasn’t there’ claim at once sounds quite true and strange.¹ In doing so the reader is immediately plunged deep into a philosophical discussion. How should we understand the claim that there was a ‘black hole’ in my consciousness, when I am under narcosis? Is that a claim we can make sense of? After all, I wasn’t conscious during the anesthetic period; but I was conscious of going into narcosis and waking up right after it as well. In order to make sense of talk about a black hole in my consciousness, it needs to make sense to claim that there is an ‘I’ when I am under general anesthetic, when there is no consciousness, when there is no first person perspective.² The claim that I wasn’t there when under narcosis sounds true made from the first person perspective, strange from the so called third person perspective, the perspective that looks at someone from the outside, noting that, clearly, the person does not disappear even when she is under narcosis.³

To answer the question where I was, during narcosis, Meijsing points out, we need to answer the question what am I: a body, a perspective on the world, a consciousness? After we have answered that question we need to reflect on the conditions under which I persist, and how to think of where we are and whether we are, during narcosis. Her answer takes us through a number of philosophical discussions, about how consciousness, personhood and the concept of ‘a self’ relate to each other, how all of those topics relate to our existence as bodily beings exactly, how to think about the persistence conditions of persons, how our nature as persons relates to our nature as embodied and acting agents and how human consciousness comes into being. We warmly recommend the book to everyone who speaks Dutch and hope it will be translated into English soon, for those who do not. Not only does it take you through the philosophical discussions on this topic and illustrate these discussions vividly with many interesting case studies from neurology, neuroscience and psychology, it also articulates Meijsing’s own view. It is this view – the basics of which she will introduce herself – which made us wonder what her thoughts were on some issues the internet, virtual reality, social media and AI raise for our self-perception and our ideas on personhood. Rather than figure this out for ourselves, we decided to ask her. We hope you enjoy.

Introduction
First of all, great that you are prepared to do this – we are really looking forward to this interview with you on the topic of personhood in the digital age. Could you, by way of opening, tell us a bit more about your view on persons and personhood?

You are entirely welcome – the pleasure is mine! I really appreciate discussing these themes with you.

My position is that you have to distinguish two quite different questions: the first question is what kind of beings we, human beings, are. And the second is what a person is. The first question is metaphysical, and asks for a metaphysical answer. What I am trying to do is a kind of descriptive metaphysics. Put in a nutshell: I argue against both body-mind dualism and physicalism⁴ and for a dual aspect or neutral monist⁵ kind of metaphysics of the human being. But – and this is something a bit more controversial – the second question is not metaphysical at all. I argue against the idea that there is some metaphysically real category of persons distinct from the category of human beings or human organisms. Instead I opt for a relational, and completely human-dependent notion of a person. The practice of accepting certain beings into our already existing community of persons is prior to any characterisation of what a person is. That implies that any characterisation of what a person is follows from this practice, and is shifting across time and cultures, just as these practices are shifting.

I myself find this a scary position, because there is nothing that grounds these practices, and that seems to imply a thoroughgoing relativism of what personhood is. Yet I also want to believe that we can do this accepting in ways that are normatively evaluable: that we can be wrong in certain practices and should strive to get it right. That seems to commit me to a kind of moral realism, and I know that that is a position fraught with difficulties. But, as Maureen once told me, I am not obliged to solve all philosophical problems (phew!).

So yes, I do believe that nothing grounds the notion of personhood, and that it is up to us, the community of persons, to do the right thing by contenders for personhood.

Robot persons
If we understand it correctly your view on personhood—on what makes us persons—differs in several respects from other philosophical views. One of the respects in which it differs is that according to you there is not one unique characteristic that distinguishes persons from non-persons, such as, for example “a soul” or “rationality.” As you outline in your book, the distinction between persons and non-persons comes into existence gradually and in practice: by being treated as persons by other persons.⁶ Now you also claim that what it is to be ‘treated as persons’ is something complex and very practical as well: it entails being treated as beings with a first person perspective, as autonomous, and as moral beings, that is, beings that are a proper subject of the moral reactive attitudes such as resentment and blame, gratitude and praise.⁷ Hence, we ‘inherit’ our personhood of those who treated us like persons and who took care of us.

In your book it is clear that you articulate this view to deal with certain philosophical issues. But it seems that it enables us to be more liberal than most are generally inclined to be with respect to the question of what entities in our world could become persons or could become persons to a certain degree at the very least. This would include, for example, robots, especially those robots that look and function like us. Do you agree with this, and if so, what would you say to persons that worry about the clear absence of a soul or freedom of will that such machines would have?

You don’t ask simple questions, do you :)?

First two disclaimers:
– I don’t do predictions.
– If robots are indistinguishable from us they are indistinguishable from us.

Elaborations:
If it is true that personhood is non-metaphysical and relational, and dependent on our practices, it means that inclusion in the community (or commonwealth) of persons will not remain as it is today, just as it is different today from what it was in the past. So my non-metaphysical notion of personhood implies that I cannot say what will happen in the future – quite apart from the fact that predictions about culture and human beings are always tricky and seldom come true.

The other part I find more interesting, or rather, I can say more about it. My PhD thesis was titled Mens of Machine? (Human Being or Machine?) , and I used to argue that programmed computers were quite different from human beings (you may be surprised how controversial that was back then in the AI community!).⁸ People used to say to me: ‘But if we could build a machine that was completely indistinguishable from us, how could you say that it still was different from human beings?’ And of course I could not say that under that premise. The really interesting question is: ‘What do you mean by indistinguishable?’ If you mean ‘the same in absolutely every respect’, then of course, by definition, they are not different in any respect. What you have to answer is: ‘How many respects, and which respects, have to be the same in order to accept a machine in the community of persons?’

Your question is about ‘robots that will look and function like us.’ Let’s first concentrate on the looks – that is of course the first thing we notice about another being. But how important is it for inclusion as person? In general, if you want to be inclusive, and if you want to be against racism and lookism, looks should not matter (sadly, they always do). But seriously, where should we draw the line between ‘one of us’ and ‘alien’? I think that interaction, affective resonance, having and noticing reactive attitudes, all of that is more important than looks.

Let me give you some real life examples: over the past years I have been present at a number of death beds. Most of the dying persons were no longer conscious, and interaction was no longer really possible. Yet it felt like something, and it raised reactive attitudes in me, to hold their hands. What struck me forcibly, was how entirely different they looked almost immediately after dying. Some of these people were blood relatives of me, so they looked, objectively, a lot like me. Yet, after they died, they didn’t feel like me at all. I have more affective resonance with my cats or my horse (and I don’t look much like either of them) than with these dead people. So how important is ‘looking like us’?

Yet maybe robots have to look like us in some very specific respects in order to spark reactive attitudes in us, and in order for us to notice reactive attitudes in them.

Maybe what’s important is that they must seem to be alive. ET doesn’t look much like a human being, but the fact that he breathes, seems to have a heart, and has a face with eyes and different facial expressions, facial expressions that seem to disclose an emotional life, makes us feel for and with him.

Which brings me to ‘functioning like us’. How much like us a robot has to be in order to function like us? And now I am going rather quickly and roughshod over a difficult terrain: can a robot function like us if it isn’t alive? Which means, if it isn’t an autopoietic system?⁹ Aren’t reactive attitudes intimately connected with being a precarious system that constantly has to strive for self-preservation? Could we see reactive attitudes in and feel them for a being that is not in this way autopoietic, and moreover, warm and fragile (we don’t seem to connect very much with cold-blooded creatures; it is actually also an expression for human beings that are somewhat less of a person!). Could a robot, which you can turn off and turn on again at an arbitrary later time, ever be autonomous?

Concluding: yes, if a robot functions like us in all or most of the above mentioned respects, and therefore looks like us at least is some respects, we might one day include it in the community of persons (but who am I to predict).

What you sketch seems most certainly to be what the fiction on robots is struggling with! If you watch the popular HBO series Westworld, for example, it seems to be this striving for self-preservation that is connected to the fragility of the robot-inhabitants; and we also see it very clearly in Asimov’s wonderful Bicentennial Man. In the recently published Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan, one of the major events in the book is that the main character, a robot called Adam, disables the button with which he can be turned off. So it seems that those features you highlight – of fragility, warmth, striving for self-preservation – seem intimately connected to autonomy and to the susceptibility for reactive attitudes. What about the soul and free will? How do these figure in this web?

I don’t know what souls are; I don’t know if I have one. I am a monist, so I don’t believe in souls in a dualist interpretation. I do use the word ‘soul’ in everyday life to refer to what is important to us, to our emotional and affective states, to our innermost and crucial values. But as long as a robot has the same kind of things that matter to it, emotional and affective states, and innermost and crucial values, why should a soul be clearly absent?

I forgot a third disclaimer: I don’t do free will. I mean, I find this problem of free will totally insolvable. I don’t know what it takes to have or not have free will, and I don’t know whether free will is possible at all (but I think it is). So I won’t go into that discussion (though I think that Peter Strawson, in his ‘Freedom and Resentment’, has said very wise and true things about the topic).

Human bodies and mediation
In your book you also talk about the importance of our embodiment, the fact that are the kind of organisms that we are and that we have the bodies that we have. For example you insist that it is the human organism that has what you call a first person point of view, and that we build from the more primitive first perspectives on our surroundings, from an early age onwards. In our contemporary society, the digital age, we see that children interact with technology from an increasingly earlier age. Also this interaction, for many, persists into later in life and it is not uncommon to see people immersed in interaction with their virtual worlds at the expense of their interaction with the non-virtual world.

Does it follow from your theory/do you think that this impacts their development in ways that will make us into a different kind of persons [in any fundamental sense]?

Yes, I do. I am very worried that young people nowadays seem to have less bodily interaction with others, and less eye contact, than they used to do. Just as the excessive use of screens impacts their eyesight – the incidence of nearsightedness has grown explosively – excessive interaction with non-embodied beings may impact their being a person. If reactive attitudes and the first-person point of view are crucially dependent on being embodied and being surrounded by embodied others, then in the absence of other embodied beings, becoming a person may be that much more difficult. Or, alternatively, it might be that the whole concept of a person will change quite radically, and in ways that I find worrying.

But then, as long as older people like myself have said anything about ‘today’s youth’ at all, they have said that it was going to the dogs, so what else is new? And again, who am I to predict?

Avatar identification
Psychologists are increasingly interested in the way in which our interaction with virtual worlds influences our behavior. One interesting finding, called the Proteus Effect, is that the way in which people behave in online environments is shaped by the appearance of their avatar. In one study, for example, players who were given a taller avatar were found to behave more confidently in negotiations than players assigned a shorter avatar. In addition, interacting with different avatars in virtual worlds has also been found to shape how people behave outside of that world. Do you think these findings have anything interesting to tell us about the nature of personhood?

I didn’t know about the Proteus Effect. It sounds quite plausible, but I have become a little wary of social psychology findings – so many of them, among which are some of the most influential and famous, turn out not to be replicable. But that’s maybe not relevant.

What I think is the case, is that people always have fashioned themselves to a certain extent: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Ervin Goffman (1956) was one of the first books to pay extensive attention to this phenomenon, but of course Machiavelli’s Il Principe is a much earlier manual of how to fashion a public self. I also think it is quite obvious that we present different versions of ourselves (or our selves) in different social circumstances. So the fact that the use of avatars interact with these self-fashionings and self-presentations, consciously or unconsciously, doesn’t seem to me very surprising, or indeed a new phenomenon.

So the phenomenon of self-presentation has a lot to do with what we might call personality, or even with the self. It has a lot to do with having different, and sometimes even rather incompatible, sides to ourselves (or our selves; I keep putting this in parentheses, because I think the very notion of a self, as a separate entity, is extremely problematical, but of course we keep talking about it anyway).

It is a different matter how much this phenomenon has to do with the notion of personhood, and I am not sure whether this phenomenon has much to tell us about that. People who interact with virtual worlds and play with avatars usually have been persons for years. I think the process of becoming of a person is something which starts from birth and is, in a way, finished, long before adulthood. Different social groups have been mirroring a slightly different kind of person for the individual since birth as well. This accounts for the many-sidedness and multi-dimensionality of most personalities. I don’t think it changes very much for the process of becoming a person as such.

Social media and human interaction
Another way in which the digital age may influence human behavior is through the sheer number of potential human interactions are opened up to us by social media. Someone posting something controversial on Twitter, for example, may quickly be subjected to hundreds of responses from strangers all over the world. Similarly, previously private moments such as eating one’s dinner can now be instantly shared online. This leads to two questions. First, do you think the number of people we can instantly interact with may influence the way we interact with one other? Second, do you think that opening up more and more of our lives to human interaction may influence how we develop personhood?

Being almost digitally illiterate (I think I was among the first people who used e-mail, back in the early eighties, but I do not use social media except for the occasional WhatsApp message, where I have some twenty contacts) I am not very confident with answering this question. I simply cannot understand why people should actually choose to share so much of their life with countless others – I think my private life is my own, and I try to remain as invisible as possible in this world.

But are people really interacting with so many contacts? As a firm believer in the importance of embodiment – in fact, I would rather say that we are animated or ‘ensouled’ bodies than that we are embodied souls or minds – I think that nothing can substitute for real, bodily, face-to-face interactions. I find it worrying to read that young people do not use phone conversations, but prefer text conversations because phone conversations are too direct. If that is true, it seems to suggest that, because of social media, people are not interacting more, they are interacting less. Phone conversations are hugely impoverished compared with real, face-to-face conversations, but at least some paralinguistic characteristics of what someone is saying get conveyed. In text conversations even these are lost – and emoticons are definitely not an adequate substitute. Shared affectivity is that much harder to achieve.

I believe that the being included in the community of persons starts with shared intentionality and shared affectivity, and for that you need a body that reacts quite directly to other similar bodies, as indeed new-born infants already react to and interact with human beings in a way they do not react to and interact with non-human beings and entities.

But again: by the time people start using social media, they have already begun being part of the community of persons. So maybe their use does not influence how we develop personhood. Of course there is influence in another way: the tendency of parents and care-takers and generally other persons to be more absorbed in their screens than in their actual surroundings, which includes persons-to-be, and the tendency of some parents to mostly take pictures of their children and look at them, instead of at the children themselves, does influence how these persons-to-be develop, I guess.

Thanks so much for those answers, Monica. For us, as well as provoking more interesting questions about the digital age we are living in, they also invite some questions that bring us back to your first sketch of your view on what it means to be ‘us’ (what kind of beings we humans are) and what it means to be a person. Maybe it is nice to close with those questions, although please feel free to refer us to parts of your book!

In your answer above you say that: ‘Being included in the community of persons starts with shared intentionality and shared affectivity…,’ which sounds interesting and plausible. However, given the fundamentally relational nature of personhood on your view, someone might worry that there is a circularity concerning what it means to be a person. You seem to claim that we become persons because other people (persons) treat and interact with us as persons, that they depend upon – an ‘already existing community of persons’, as you said earlier. But does that not mean that there is no way for persons to ever come into being? Suppose that Eve is ‘the first person.’ For Eve to become a person, there must already exist some community of persons that she is embedded in. However, if this community of persons already exists, then Eve is not the initial person. Of course, Eve is just arbitrary – the same argument will apply to any individual that we pick as the ‘first’ person. So, do you think there is a way to get around this problem, e.g. by having persons ‘bootstrap’ their way into being?

Lastly, we wanted to press you some more on the relationship between relativism about personhood and your idea that we should ‘do the right thing by contenders for personhood’. Suppose far into the future and robots have come into existence and have acquired personhood and that, for whatever reason, the person community split into two isolated groups, which could not communicate with each other (see for a fictional example Westworld, the series produced by HBO – but if you do not like hypothetical SF scenarios you can just use another example of communities getting isolated from one another). Furthermore, over time, these communities evolve in a variety of ways, changing and modifying who they ascribe personhood to. Finally, imagine they encounter each other again. Due to their divergent cultural/social evolution, neither is willing to label members of the other group persons. Given your view, would this sort of scenario entail that there were two distinct types of person – i.e., person₁, defined in terms of one community, and person₂, defined in terms of the other? And, more importantly, in refusing to confer personhood to these others, are these communities making a mistake? If so, is it a metaphysical one or an ethical one (or something else altogether)?

Thanks again for these intriguing questions. I’ll deal with them in the same order.

So what about Eve? This is of course the type of chicken and egg question and of course there is a kind of circularity: Eve must have had a mother and so forth and so on. So what I think is that bootstrapping is indeed the only option, and that is precisely how evolution is supposed to work. How can there ever be hammers? In order to make one you need a smith and a fire and an anvil and a hammer. Circularity! But of course, you can make better hammers with inferiors ones, back to where you only have stones and hand axes.

Moreover, the very start of becoming the very first person must occur between the new-born and whoever is taking care of her – as is indeed the case with every person-to-be. This interaction already involves some shared affectivity in all mammals, I guess. But if these caretakers are wolves, probably not much of what we think is a person will ever evolve – see the empirical evidence on Oxana Malaya and Genie that I mention in my book.¹⁰ If these caretakers are one of the non-human primates, we would recognise such an individual much more as ‘one of us’, though language as we know it would still be missing and that is probably a huge obstacle for conferring personhood to her. Of course, our Eve would never come into contact with a group of present-day persons, but only with other primates that have grown up with primate caretakers. And of course, according to evolution: we all started as just another kind of primates. Personhood is, in that respect, not much different from language, I guess. You learn your language from a competent language-user, but there was a time when there just weren’t any language users. I guess that personhood was bootstrapped in roughly the same way that language was: from the first communicative cries to warn your conspecifics, language bootstrapped itself. And from the first reactive attitudes or moral sentiments of gratitude and resentment, the habit of holding some individuals responsible (but not others) bootstrapped itself into something like personhood.

So now for the future. I don’t know if your mention of robots is relevant here; I’ll ignore it. As I understand it, your question is about the two isolated groups that grow apart in their habits and attitudes regarding personhood. These attitudes are, I think necessarily, still grounded in shared affectivity and shared intentionality, and on reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment. So far so good. But still their attitudes might be different in other respects. What we are talking about is some cultural difference in what the groups accept as candidate person. That is nothing fictional of course: the notions of personhood have changed over time, and they can grow apart in societies that are isolated from one another. And according to my own definition, you would indeed have to say that there are two different types of person: person₁ and person₂. But what happens if the two groups come into contact again?

Well, I think that if just one person from group₁ would come into contact with group₂, they should treat her as a prima facie candidate for personhood₂. The Old Testament is full of horrible genocides, and the killing of ‘all who piss against the wall’, i.e. males, but at the same time it repeatedly admonishes the people to treat the sojourner, the stranger in the land, as one of your own. The stranger is on her own, and should be treated as all the members of group₂. Of course, this will lead to misunderstandings and faulty expectations on both sides, but they can be resolved: I guess that the person₁ will quickly change into a person₂ – she would assimilate. It gets more difficult when whole groups of persons₁ come into group₂. Here we have the situation of mass immigration, and that can happen without a tendency to assimilation. The newcomers would say that their criteria for personhood now belong as much to the whole group as those of the original group. Yet persons1 tend not to fully recognise persons₂ and vice versa. Here we have the all too common situation of discrimination. It happens. And it is wrong.

So how can I claim that in the first situation the persons₂ should treat the one person as one of their own? And how can I claim that discrimination is wrong? For I also claim that there is no metaphysical category of persons. So the persons₂ cannot make a metaphysical mistake. But they can make an ethical one. I would like to base this on some moral realism, but I am really not at home in that discussion, and I gather there is a lot to be said against moral realism. Yet what I think would be a good start is some kind of capabilities approach. By treating human beings as non-persons, you exclude them from many social activities and interactions, and you keep them from fully exercising their capabilities and that is morally wrong.

I guess the situation is somewhat like a society where women have to observe purdah, and are not be seen outside their own homes. They are kept apart by walls or curtains within the house, and have to wear extensive covering like the burqa if they are allowed out of the house at all. It is clear that within the women’s quarters, the women are fully persons among themselves – like a group₂. Nevertheless, their capabilities are severely restricted, personally, socially and economically. Restricting capabilities is in itself morally wrong, I would say. Of course, in communities where purdah is practiced, people think it is morally wrong if women were to appear in public and take part of public life. But then what counts as morally right and wrong has to be negotiated all the time. In the same sense, I guess that what counts as a person has to be negotiated all the time. But whereas in the matter of personhood I don’t think there is any further grounding of right and wrong, I have the intuition that in the matter of ethics there is a further grounding, and capabilities may be useful as an indication of that grounding.

That answer invites other questions, but that only seems proper for a interview with a philosopher! So, thank you so much Monica for your elaborate answers!

Footnotes
¹ Meijsing (2018): 11.
² Meijsing (2018): 12.
³ Meijsing (2018): 13.
⁴ The idea that there only exist physical things, i.e., that if a mind exists, it is not made of a difference substance.
⁵ Monism is the term for the theory that everything is made of the same substance, most often believed to be physical matter. A dual aspect or a neutral monist argues that there is only one substance and that there are two ways of viewing or describing this one substance, i.e., in mental or in physical terms.
⁶ Meijsing (2018): 234.
⁷ Meijsing (2018): 236. Reactive attitudes are attitudes with which we respond to other people’s behavior. They were made influential in the discussion about moral responsibility by Peter F. Strawson.
⁸ The, currently disreputed, John Searle had made the same claim in his article ‘Minds, Brains, and Programs’ (1980), but almost all reactions to his article were very negative: according to his critics, among whom Dennett was one of the most vociferous, Searle simply hadn’t understood computers!
⁹ As Meijsing explains in her book: ‘Autopoiesus is the Greek word voor self-making, self-construction. An autopoietic system is [… one] that keeps together its own organism. That is to say, the system is built in a way that it keeps its internal system constant and does so within strict boundaries, in changing environments.’ See: Meijsing (2018): 204.
¹⁰ Meijsing (2018): 232-233.

References
Asimov, I. (1978), The bicentennial man and other stories. New York, NY: Fawcett Crest.
Goffman, E. (1956), The presentation of self in everyday life. Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Social Science Research Centre.
Machiavelli, N. (1532/1976). De Heerser (Il Principe) . Amsterdam, Nederland: Athenaeum Polak & Van Gennep.
McEwan, I. (2019). Machines like me. London: UK, Jonathan Cape.
Meijsing, M. (2018). Waar was ik toen ik er niet was? Een filosofie van persoon en identiteit. Nijmegen, Nederland: Uitgeverij Vantilt.
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3 (3), 417-457.
Strawson, P. F. (1962/1982). Freedom and resentment. In G. Watson (Ed.) Free will (pp. 59-81). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.