Homo ipse
We seem to be only partially predetermined by our genes. The genetic hand we have been dealt contains information about the traits common to all human beings and some physical and mental attributes specific to us as individuals. Although it seems that we arrive with certain personality traits already intact, our basic character dispositions, and endowment of raw talent, emerge from the contingent unrolling of our particular genetic potential. These potentialities are modified by social and other environmental interactions that begin in utero.
Is language a pre-requisite for personhood? Is a dog a person? What about a human new-born? …a mentally-retarded teenager? …an older person with advanced dementia? …a dolphin? …an African grey parrot? …a crocodile? …a slug? …an entire ant colony acting as a coordinated “super-organism”? …a sentient alien from a distant planet? …a computer that can regularly beat a human chess grand master? …an embodied robot that easily passes the Turing test?
Is personhood an “all or nothing” threshold or can it be partial?
What is moral agency? If personhood loosely equates with moral agency should we think differently about animal rights? In the future will we be faced with ethical dilemmas with regard to machines? Will it make a difference whether or not such machines are embodied?
Can a patient with Korsavov syndrome, or other form of severe memory loss, maintain a sense of identity? Is a functional memory for the construal of experience a necessary prerequisite for personhood?
Not all experiential events are of equal weight. What would be the consequences of total recall? We know that memory is necessarily selective. How do we distinguish between what is important and what is trivial?
How do we construct a perusable narrative around our selections? Is the process of plotting a specific, coherent autobiography for ourselves any different from constructing synthetic knowledge in general? Can we say that our narrative identity evolves over time? If so how reasonable is it to think in terms of a natural selection of competing alternative narratives? Does sanity itself depend on an ability to distil a coherent autobiography?
How are our perceptions, what we can know about the world, and our self-knowledge limited by our chronological age? What is the relationship between understanding and time? Do we live in the subjunctive rather than the present?
Is selfhood an illusion? Is the soul an entirely redundant concept?
To what extent are we co-authored? How are our personal dispositions and emotional traits modified by our formative years in a specific culture? Is it possible to adopt a radical solipsistic stance? If solipsism is a form of insanity, how might it be cured?
Homo ipse refers to questions arising from the notion of selfhood.
Our immediate perceptions, somatic awareness and surface emotions are self-evident and are ours alone. We know that we dwell in a body that is subject to the march of time. We grow, from infancy to maturity; decline, from the peak of maturity to decrepitude; and finally expire, fully aware all the while of own mortality.
