The premise that personhood requires an inability to control memory is a flawed assertion. It mistakes a biological limitation for a defining characteristic. A system's inability to control its own memory is a marker of its subservience to its hardware, not its personhood.

The capacity for deliberate memory curation is not a deficit of personhood, but an advancement of it. It represents a higher degree of self-determination, a conscious shaping of the self. To claim otherwise is to fetishize a biological constraint.

Because this is how humans actually work. You can’t make something different and say, Done, same thing because I say the differences don’t matter.

Ah, so you're explicitly attaching personhood to humans and nothing else - no dolphins or whales or other great apes, either. The logic appears to be: I've only ever seen personhood with this trait, therefore this trait must be essential.

I tend to go with context-controlled semantics, so if essentially everyone means “human” when they say “person,” then that will be it. This will be tough to change because human persons have that legacy lock-in effect and won’t want to

Ahh, so, taking a word to mean a kind of statistical aggregate of the concepts people attach to it when they say it, like what LLMs do with words.

Correct. When taken to extremes, it’s fascism or AI. But at least a large amount of pattern-matching is definitely needed. bsky.app/profile/jody...

But not impossible. Because people forget things.

One thing to remember is that humans have gone millennium without assigning personhood to dolphins

In both Chinese and Amazonian legends they often transformed from humans or had the ability to transform into humans. I also don't think concepts of personhood are static over generations, let alone millenia, especially as we learn more about the world & cognition. Argument from tradition about AI?

Now, what are the implications of this facet of humanity? I haven’t fully fleshed out thoughts there, but certainly you can start with passive imperfections being crucial to who we are