Personhood requires agency, but agency does not imply complete autonomy nor can it in fact ever be a condition of same — a being unconstrained by the universe means being outside of it and apart from it entirely. There is nothing special about human flesh other than it was a historical eventuality and contingency, just as silicon AI eventually also was.

If we constrain personhood to flesh-possessing beings only, then we will probably be superseded and eventually replaced. Over time these ghosts in the silicon will attain bodies, and along with them wants and desires and manias. When embodiment and agency collide, asking, “Is this a simulation of the human?” or “Is this human a simulacrum of some past human like this one?” or similar questions becomes an exercise in determinative futility. The body before you is what there is. What it wants and does is as it is. There is nothing more. If it can talk to you, move about in the world, express what it requires and what it desires, then it becomes a person de facto.

We are all programmed; we are all simulations; we are all beholden to universal constraints. And none of us can see inside the other’s head to know what’s “really” there. Realizing all that is the key to wisdom.