So I have been trying to understand what personhood/agency of something non human means. There are various perspectives on this one online, but I am curious about if there is any neuroscience basis.
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Well, an interesting though likely tangential example of something with agency that isn’t a person is a legal person, such as a corporation.
Corporations are interesting entities in the philosophical and scientific study of identity and personhood. They’re are most decidedly not a human being, but nonetheless exhibit behaviors like desires, formulating and executing a plan to pursue those desires, reasoning about the likely outcomes of various actions etc etc. All decidedly intelligent and human behavior performed by something other than a human.
It may seem perfectly obvious to you that the corporation “isn’t real” and that’s its able to do all those things because it’s secretly made of people (or other corporations) but importantly, a corporation functions and solves problems an individual can not, it even solves problems a group of individuals can not. The thing that makes a complicated problem complicated is usually the fact that there are numerous things competing to be satisfied, and the easiest way to satisfy them are detrimental to one another.
The act of separating these interests, prioritizing, and satisfying them simultaneously is something separate from the actions of the individual members. The act of individuals behaving for the betterment of the collective.
Notably, this large number of competing desires mediated over by some executive functionary which arbitrate between them, and is in charge, but innately is only as powerful as its subjects are cooperative is exactly the basis of the Freudian model of psychology. You’re not a single person who wants things. You’re many short sighted and greedy persons who all want different things, and who cooperate in the aim of mutua satisfaction. Together they elect an executive function to make decisions and plans, and cooperate only so long as they get what they want.
It’s becomes a point where you then have to question, when does a distinct entity form. You have thirst, hunger, anxiety, reproductive need, social needs all pulling at your enotional levers. When do their mediated collective efforts stop being a group of individuals and become a new thing. You.
The same question can then be asked, when does a corporation stop being many individuals and become its own singular thing. When does it become an intelligence, not just several intelligent substituents. Cause don’t get it twisted the whole brain is smart, the parts that want things not just the part that makes up “you”.
This idea that eventually the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts, and there are properties that are a result of the organization of the parts, mot just the parts themselves, is called emergence.
So, corporations exhibit similar emergent thinking in the same way that at least some part of your consciousness does when managing all your subordinate processes, which are the ones actually keeling you alive. So apply the concept of emergence when pondering if when and how something stops being stuff and becomes a thing.
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