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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

If you could switch personality at will, would that make you a non-person? It seems like an additional capability, not a lack of ability.

As an analogy, retro computers and consoles each have a particular “personality”. But does the fact that you can in principle emulate one on the other (subject to resource constraints) make them non-computers, just because this demonstrates their “personality” isn’t actually that fixed?

(I don’t think that human brains have such an emulation ability, due to their missing distinction, or heavy entanglement, between hardware and software. But that only shows that computers can in principle be more flexible.)

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> If you could switch personality at will, would that make you a non-person?

Yes, just like the ability to switch bodies at will would make me a non-human. Being bound to a human body is part of what makes me a human.

Person != human, probably

Yes, I definitely admit the possibility of non-human persons. I even admit the possibility of a computer who is a person. I just don't think ChatGPT is there yet.

Imagine a grayscale color wheel (gradient) where we have white on one side and black on the other.

I want you to pick one color of grey and tell me why everything lighter than that has personhood, and everything darker does not?

This is the philosophical nature of the argument that we all have occurring now. Two very well informed experts won't even pick the same spot on the gradient. Some people will never pick anything that's not pure white (humanity), others will pick positions very close to pure black. Hell, there may not even be any right answer. But, I do believe there are a vast number of wrong answers that will deeply affect or society for a long period of time due to the things we end up creating with reckless abandon.

I will gladly concede that personhood is a continuum, not a dichotomy. Great apes have a certain level of personhood. So do dogs, elephants, dolphins, whales, and probably pigs and corvids, maybe even chickens and cephalopods. This assessment is based on the fact that all of these things have identifiable personalities that remain more or less the same from day to day, as well as identifiable goals and desires that were not pre-programmed into them in any obvious way.

So following your response here and your original comment directly comparing ChatGPT to a human with schizophrenia: are schizophrenics non-people? According to you, the bot "literally comes across like a schizophrenic off their meds".

I'm confused. Also, the original article talks a lot about how we can be convinced by actors that they are indeed a totally different person. You might say that actors can change their personality at will to suit their role. Are actors non-people?

> are schizophrenics non-people?

Schizophrenics are multiple people inhabiting one body. The pithiest way I know of describing it is a line from a Pink Floyd song: "There's someone in my head but it's not me."

> Are actors non-people?

I don't know many actors so I can't really say. I like to think that underneath the pretense there is a "real person" but I don't actually know. I have heard tell of method actors who get so deeply into their roles that they are actually able to extinguish any real person who might interfere with their work. But this is far, far outside my area of expertise.

FYI, the condition you are referring to is called multiple personality disorder and is distinct from schizophrenia.

No, multiple personality is different. Schizophrenia is distinct from MPD, but both are characterized by having multiple persons resident in one brain, it just manifest differently. In MPD the multiple persons swap in and out, whereas in schizophrenia there is one person who is definitely the real resident while the others are intruders. Schizophrenics really do hear voices, and those voices are "someone else". With MPD you have multiple coherent personalities manifesting themselves at different times. With schizophrenia you have one personality slowly being driven crazy by not being able to make the voices shut up.

(Source: I am not a mental health professional, but I did spend some time interviewing and hanging out with schizophrenics, both under treatment and not, as part of a documentary film I made about homeless people about 15 years ago. https://graceofgodmovie.com/ )

Thanks for sharing your experience.

My understanding is that the hallucinations experienced by schizophrenics do not rise to the level of being a "personality". Yes, for the person experiencing the hallucination, the source appears to be an "other". But the other in this case is usually single-minded and not a fully-formed personality.

OTOH, I certainly do not discount the possibility that for some schizophrenics this is not the case.

Rereading your comment again just now I think we agree more than we disagree and this probably comes down to semantics. : - )

https://www.livescience.com/55379-schizophrenia-multiple-per...

> the other in this case is usually single-minded and not a fully-formed personality

That's a fair point. I think some of my subjects reported being able to have conversations with the other, but this was a long time ago so I could be mis-remembering. But I still have the interview recordings if anyone really wants to dig into this.

Pretty sure I've encountered people who switch personalities on a regular basis--sometimes in the middle of a conversation. :)

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