What does it mean to be a person?

            What does it mean to be a person? Is it how one looks? Is it based on how one thinks? Is there some sort of soul or spirit within us that makes us a person? Or is it the emotions that guide us? Or the intellect that humans are so proud of? We can knock off looks because having severe deformities or injuries does not take away someone’s personhood, and we have to allow for the fact that humans might not be the only beings able to claim personhood (aliens might exist). It would also be incorrect to base it solely off intellect since idiots exist, and we now have artificial intelligence. What about the way people think, powered by the brain? Still the brain is just a cluster of nerves that fire off signals, and can be mimicked by machines and is often the basis used for the design. That rules out the brain. What about emotions though? Could we really base something as important as personhood on an indiscernible quality? Something that cannot be measured from the outside? How can one know whether or not an emotion is real? Certainly not by facial expressions, especially since they can be faked and mimicked by a good actor or someone programmed to do so, but just because something cannot be easily measured and outwardly falsified does not mean that it can be discarded as a means of discernment between what is really a person and not a person. What it really boils down to is that truth cannot be discarded because someone can fake it. True emotions are what separate people from machines. In the Black Mirror episode, the robot Ashebot could only mimic human emotions. He did not suddenly learn emotion based on how he was supposed to feel in a situation. He only followed orders. There were no true emotions. A person does not learn emotions; they merely learn why something is sad. Take for example a child at a funeral, the child, a boy for convenience, does not understand why everyone is sad not because he has yet to learn real emotion, but because he does not yet understand what it means to be dead. After death is explained, the child is not sad because he has been taught how to feel sad, but because he understands that he will never see his grandmother again. The emotions are already there, unlike for Ashebot where he needed someone to explain how to express fear. There was no true fear, but he was programmed to behave like the original Ashe and to fill any gaps in his knowledge. Therefore in the case of machines versus people, emotions can be used to determine whether or not the machine is a person because even sociopaths have been known to know the more intense emotions, such as anger. There still remains the case that emotion cannot separate humans from animals. There is also an argument for the case that people contain eternal souls which rules out machines and animals, but that argument whether true or false will not hold up to atheist who plays a part in legislating what makes a person a person, so it will be ignored for now. There are no qualities here that can rule out both animals and machines from being a person, but a very simple answer could be that people are often irrational. Whether this irrationality is our enjoyment of the arts or our willingness to spend all our rent on a chance to meet our favorite celebrities. There is no basis in survival for this, no instinctual desire for this, yet people will make decisions without thinking or processing the information. We’ll change our plans just to stop and sit down because it feels nice, we’ll go without food for days to honor our gods even though this goes against our own survival instincts, and you can’t program the willingness to forego everything just to sit in the sun and use the excuse that it felt nice outside, so I forgot to go get food. There may be an algorithm for designing clothes, but there’s no algorithm for desiring comfort or wanting to feel pain if you’re into that kind of stuff.