Conceptualizing of personhood

I've written that people are patterns, but that kind of thinking is not too useful. The most useful way I have found to conceptualize of people is to think of a person as being defined by a certain set of traits, say intelligence, knowledge, morality or anything else you can think of. Think of each trait as existing on a scale going from - X to +X. These traits together create a set of Axis. 2 traits = a 2 dimensional space. 95 traits = 95 dimensions. A person is a cloud in this space. Why a cloud? Because a point would mean that any change in temperament or character would make them a different person. We see people as being the same as long as their personalities (collection of traits) stays roughly constant. Hence why a cloud is more appropriate than a line.

Eliezer Yudkowsky coined a term for this: "Empirical cluster is personspace", which is a very good concept handle.

What is a person?

A Person is not matter. We are not hardware, even though existence without our hardware may be impossible.

• If I were to create and run an atom for atom accurate model of my brain on a computer, that would still be me despite the hardware/matter being entirely different from my original brain.
• As the individual atoms which make up me are exchanged for other atoms from my surroundings, I do not become less me.

A Person is software. A Person is a pattern. A person is not an empirical cluster in personspace. A person is the system which produces those characteristics. A system which reacts and changes to the environment in certain ways. A system whose internal patterns follow a certain rhythm over time or space. 

If a person is a pattern, what is he different between a person and any other kind of pattern? From stars to stones, all things follow a pattern. What makes something alive? What makes something a person? [Questions are entangled. People must be alive.[Maybe not? Emulated brain which is not running is still a person despite not being alive? No, it is a potential person. More rights than no person, less than an actual person.]]

I don't know what makes the patterns we call people different from other patterns. I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference. This seems to be one of the cases where reason doesn't work. Where a certain belief is hard-coded into our way of thinking and where thinking without it seems impossible. Maybe one day we can find a way to remove these beliefs from ourselves. I'd like to see what the world is like without this neural block clouding my thinking. Then again, that seems impossible given that without such a belief I would no longer be myself.

Consensus is not Truth: How philosophers deal with moral relativism

If we all agree that earth if flat, that does not mean that it is.

The greatest problem in ethics is that moral beliefs cannot be grounded in objective reality. It is not possible to find evidence in the physical world which proves that one set of ethical beliefs is better than another. You can't get an ought from an is.

Most people who realize this, myself included, simply ignore the fact that their beliefs cannot be justified and go on holding the same morals they always did. For a subset of these moral beliefs, we remain willing to use violence to impose them on others. We hate the baby-eaters, even though we know that we have no reason to assume we are more right than they are.

Most competent philosophers, realizing they cannot show that moral beliefs are objectively true, attempt to show that they are true intersubjectivly, meaning that they are true given the axiomatic moral beliefs a person holds. If you hold the set of beliefs X, then you should believe Y.