What defines a person?

Abstract

McNamara’s (2021) book, Religion, Neuroscience, and the Self: A New Personalism, is a unique read in that it blends a variety of important elements that include theology, psychology, and neuroscience, along with a broader perspective on the future of humanity. This latter point is particularly true in the context of the interaction between human beings and machines. Part of the goal of McNamara‘s book is to alert us to the possibility of losing our personhood to various machines or machine interactions. For this problem, he argues that we need to develop a new type of personalism that will protect the dignity and well-being of all people. He states that part of the necessity of such a personalism is that if we are considered to be created in the image of God, the imago Dei, many of the characteristics that have been argued to be unique to humans “cannot withstand the challenge of the rise of intelligent machines.” He goes on to state that machines already exhibit many of the characteristics previously proposed to reflect the imago Dei such as rationality, creativity, emotions, mind-reading abilities, calculating abilities, and even consciousness itself. Of course, it is currently uncertain as to whether machines will be able to achieve consciousness in the same manner as experienced in human beings. But suffice it to say that, given the rapid advances in computer sciences and artificial intelligence, it is important to carefully consider how to define a person. His argument begins with philosophical and theological perspectives of the person. This of course, is essential since we need a starting point to understand what it means to be a person and how we understand our relationship with others, the world at large, and God. He references a number of theologians and philosophers such as Borden Parker Bowne, Edgar Brightman, and Bernard Lonergan, to name a few. He also indicates the need for an eschatological personalism that is based on ultimate things such as purpose or the “final destiny of the individual, humankind, history and the cosmos.” He argues that the ultimate end of any individual cannot be fully known, but develops as part of a process via interacting with God. For McNamara, this interaction is derived in large part from a number of brain functions that he elaborates throughout the book. The notion of a person, McNamara points out, can be based on a variety of approaches in terms of how we define ourselves as individuals, how a sense of agency plays a role in who we are, and how we develop a sense of meaning and purpose. The unity of the person comes from our sense of agency that utilizes memory to create an entire temporal order of the person; quoting Browne, “Each new experience leaves the soul other than it was; but, as it advances from stage to stage it is able to gather up its past and carry it with it, so that at any point, it possesses all that it had been. It is this fact only which constitutes the permanence and identity of the self” (1898). Thus, the agentic mind is able to “assemble” the self which is based on our experiences, emotions, cognitions, and memories. In my own work, we have discussed the basis of beliefs as depending on these very factors. And these beliefs are what help us construct our sense of self (Newberg & Waldman, 2006). These processes can also be attributable to various brain functions, which McNamara also realizes. Thus, while the above mentioned philosophical and theological perspectives are important, McNamara turns toward an understanding of the person from a neuroscientific perspective. This perspective explores how the human brain contributes to our sense of personhood. Neuroscience also helps us to understand the variety of ways in which we understand our own self through the process of agency/free will, emotional reactions, memory, and experience. Thus, brain structures such as the frontal lobes that contribute agency, the limbic system that supports emotions,