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Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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It's not precisely a threshold because it's not binary. The quality is "personhood". Defining personhood is obviously an incredibly difficult thing to do, so I've been avoiding doing so in this thread. However, any reasonable definition I can come up with does not include very young infants. If you think that newborns are people, I'd be interested in hearing why - but I haven't come up with a sufficiently good wording for what I think personhood is to have a debate about it.
I won't argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist -- some state of a region of the universe -- then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
Agreed, but ten months seems to be erring pretty hard on the side of caution to me - dolphins seem far more like people than ten month old babies, but I don't think killing a dolphin should be treated as the same crime as killing a (eta adult) human.
Well, one relatively simple question that might help clarify some things: do I remain a person when I'm asleep?
Yes - even while sleeping, your brain contains all the structure and information necessary for personhood, as is easily empirically demonstrated by waking you up.
Cool. Would I still be a person while in a coma that I will naturally come out of in five years but not before? (I recognize that no observer could know that this was the case, I'm just asking whether in fact I would be, if it were. Put another way: after I woke up, would we conclude that I'd been a person all along?)
Obviously this is a difficult question. I'd say you're very nearly a person while in a coma, because with very minor modifications to your brain you could have returned to being a person.
OK, cool... that clarifies matters. Thanks.