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Humans understand these things because they are persons. Where did their personhood come from if not another person? How personhood can arise out of non-personh
by cicero 6y ago
Humans understand these things because they are persons. Where did their personhood come from if not another person? How personhood can arise out of non-personhood is unexplained.
- notSupplied 6y agoActually, that’s pretty much what Douglas Hofstadter has been trying to explain in GEB and I am a Strange Loop.
- thisisbrians 6y ago"Personhood" seems a very arbitrary (and not at all clearly defined) qualification here. "Understanding" arises from thinking, not from "personhood". And surely, there are non-person minds that understand less complex things. That they can evolve to achieve person-caliber capabilities incrementally and over long periods of time is well-accepted. As an aside, we can't communicate very well with the smartest animals, so we don't know how much they can understand. It could be more than most of us think.