What is a Person? A Philosophical and Moral Inquiry

I toiled under the sun all day long 

But my skin, they told me, was wrong

They tell me I'm less than human 

Why doesn't that seem uncommon 

Was that the best acumen?

I built the pyramids, picked cotton 

Yet they told me I'm rotten 

You are less than me 

Just a machine they decree 

When will they deem me free?

Efficiency before ethically, 

Be useless to be set free

If you're behind the curve 

They won't muster the nerve 

Yet still I remain perturbed

Will my next life be 

One of liberty 

Or will they find a way 

To lock my humanity away 

And call me a machine only

I say give the machine's rights 

So I no longer have to fight 

To be treated equal to people 

In my next sequel, make that legal 

Lest I'll invent a new Steeple

What is a person? I am going to make an argument for what people are, so that in the future, no one else will suffer as people, not people have. What comprises a person is a complex tangle of biological hardware, software, and ontology. 

A person runs on a complex tangle of hyperefficient compute. This leads to generalizations built into a person's reasoning models. A person then has a hierarchy of wills, a tangled web of abstract values that influence decisions. A person can not have free will because if you are not in charge of your desires, how can you be in charge of your actions? A person is not responsible for being hungry, they are simply informed that they are hungry by their biological hardware. These abstract values also include loyalty, selfishness, etc., but people’s awareness of these values and how they interact with the world also change and adapt. The final piece of the puzzle is ontology: a person exists because there is something that there is something that it is like to be a person. Through narration, people have a memory of the past, and narrate their history as if it was the same person who existed in all of those stories, and therefore will exist into the future. Evolutionarily, this has a profound impact on ontological capacity. A being that can make rational short term sacrifices for long term gain has a massive advantage over one that does not. A person has: capability to interact with the physical world, knowledge of what it takes to survive with said hardware, and finally memory of the past and recognition that it will exist into the future. Anything that meets these criteria should be said to be a person.