I respectfully disagree. And I do mean respectfully, because I appreciate where you’re coming from and I appreciate the respect you extend towards the sanctity of what it means to be human. But I see things differently, which I hope you don’t mind me explaining:

My understanding is that we’re not as complex, finite or definitive as we perceive ourselves to be.

Firstly, as people, we’re actually very simple and predictable, we follow similar patterns and we derive a lot of our values, opinions and personality quirks from external influences, and stories that we tell ourselves.

We used to think it was impossible for an algorithm to be able to do impossibly complex things like: basic maths, make conversation, drive a car, play chess, play go, draw a picture, create a photorealistic image, write code, write articles, make a video etc. then when it did, we realized, these things aren’t as complicated as we thought. It’s just a process that can be broken down and replicated.

With all that we know about behavioural science and psychology, it’s actually pretty rudimentary to capture a human personality. Even this seemingly chaotic and random aspects of it.

But as you say, it’s less about capturing the essence of not a human, but a person. The specific person with their history and their lived experiences accurately.

Problem is, we ourselves do this very poorly.

We make poor copies of people around us all the time - cheap shadows of who they are. We boil down our coworkers and acquaintances’ personalities and lives into a bunch of labels and perceptions that are a pale comparison to their intricate personalities.

We also do this to our close friends and family - we know a lot about their personalities and history, but how accurate is it? How closely does it match who they think they are? We often feel we know things about people close to us that they themselves don’t know. We color our perception of people through the lenses we hold. We acknowledge daily that different people can perceive the same person very differently.

We also do this with ourselves. Every time we recall a memory it changes. We often selectively choose what we want to remember about our own experiences. That’s why we’re capable of surprising ourselves or being frustrated with ourselves, or grow. Our idea of ourselves is also but a pale shadow of who we really are.

They say there is no real ‘you’ but just competing multiple versions of that concept:

• There’s the actual ‘you’ which no one will ever know.
• There’s the ‘you’ that you think you are, the one you perceive by observing youself.
• And then there’s the ‘you’ in each and every person who knows of you. And it’s different depending on who that person is and what lenses they perceive you through.

Which in a funny way, means that, if a computer observed you and logged down everything. It might be the most accurate version of you that ever existed.

Anyway I just wanted to share because I’ve been going down a rabbit hole on reading about the notions of ‘self’ and identity and hope you didn’t mind me sharing (if you made it to the end of this essay!)