I have no idea what I consider a person to be. I think that I wish it was binary because that would be neat and pretty and make moral questions a lot easier to answer. But I think that it probably isn't. Right now I feel as though what separates person from nonperson is totally arbitrary.

It seems as though we evolved methods of feeling sympathy for others, and now we attempt to make a logical model from that to define things as people. It's like "person" is an unsound concept that cannot be organized into an internally consistent system. Heck, I'm actually starting to feel like all of human nature is an internally inconsistent mess doomed to never make sense.

I am VERY confused. I suspect that some people can value some things differently, but it seems as though there should be a universal value system among humans as well. The thing that distinguishes "person" from "object" seems to belong to the latter.

Well I certainly feel very confused. I generally do feel that way when pondering anything related to morality. The whole concept of what is the right thing to do feels like a complete mess and any attempts to figure it out just seem to add to the mess. Yet I still feel very strongly compelled to understand it. It's hard to resist the urge to just give up and wait until we have a detailed neurological model of a human brain and are able to construct a mathematical model from that which would explain exactly what I am asking when I ask what is right and what the answer is.

I would guess that you're not a utilitarian and a lot of LWers are.

If "a lot" means "a minority".

Well, no, that can't be right.

There's a continuum of.. mental complexity, to name something random, between modern dolphins and rocks. Homo sapiens also fits on that curve somewhere.

You might argue that mental complexity is not the right parameter to use, but unless you're going to argue that rocks are deserving of utility you'll have to agree to either an arbitrary cut-off point or some mapping between $parameter and utility-deservingness, practically all possible such parameters having a similar continuous curve.

I would guess that you're not a utilitarian and a lot of LWers are.

I'm almost certain this is false for the definition of "utilitarianism" you give in the next sentence.

There is unfortunately a lot of confusion between two different senses of the word "utilitarianism". The definition you give, and the more general sense of any morality system that uses a utility function.

I generally consider myself to be a utilitarian, but I only apply that utilitarianism to things that have the property of personhood. But I'm beginning to see that things aren't so simple.

I've seen "utilitarianism" used to denote both "my utility is the average/[normalized sum] of the utility of each person, plus my exclusive preferences" and "my utility is a weighted sum/average of the utility of a bunch of entities, plus my exclusive preferences". I'm almost sure that few LWers would claim to be utilitarians in the former sense, especially since most people round here believe minds are made of atoms and thus not very discrete.

I mean, we can add/remove small bits from minds, and unless personhood is continuous (which would imply the second sense of utilitarianism), one tiny change in the mind would have to suddenly shift us from fully caring about a mind to not caring about it at all, which doesn't seem to be what humans do. This is an instance of the Sorites "paradox".

(One might argue that utilities are only defined up to affine transformation, but when I say "utility" I mean the thing that's like utility except it's comparable between agents. Now that I think about it, you might mean that we've defined persons' utility such that every util is equal in the second sense of the previous sentence, but I don't think you meant that.)