I 'Do Art', Part 2: On Personhood

A monster. You are what you make, apparently.

          So I mentioned last blog that this drawing I did signified me becoming a "person". It's kind of a weird term, so I thought I'd put together a definition of personhood for the sake of this piece.


            A person:

1. is a behavioral system, a "filter" through which stimuli are processed and from which responses are elicited. This processing is in concordance with a root tendency which can be found in all the processes that the behavioral system performs.
2. has the ability to perform actions that affect its environment. This assumes that any given being is, in fact, separate from its environment, which, in turn, is an "artificial" concept, but real nonetheless. More on this at a later date.
3. Has the ability to care, one way or another, about things it senses and does. "Caring" is obviously a vague term, but I mean it in the sense of being able to sense a relationship between what it's sensing/doing and the tendencies mentioned in No. 1.
4. is self-aware.

            Only upon having all four of these qualities can a being be considered a "person". I think the first three properties pretty much happen as soon as you're born, or maybe even before (I'm not going there), but I think the 4th property of personhood, self-awareness, is unique in that it happens at a later point in life. I believe this happens when a being is presented with a stimulus of its own making, and recognizes it as such. It is then when the being realizes that it is, indeed, there.

            Maybe the first being to become a person was walking down the beach, and happened to look behind them, and saw their own footprints in the sand, and realized that the shape of these things matched the shape of their own foot, and in some crazy instant, some never-before-fired neuron went off, and this being realized that if these footprints were indeed there because of them, then they must be there to have made them. They were there!

            Afterwards, this new being, this "person" suddenly couldn't imagine not being there - it simply didn't compute - and so it made things. It made things simply to know it was there, to make evidence of itself. and every day, as sure as it had to eat, sleep, shit, and have sex, it had to make something.

            A lot of people talk about the purpose of art, how it's used to express, to communicate, to connect with the spiritual, etc.. It's true that art can conveniently fulfill these practical purposes, but I can't say that this is its purpose. It's purpose is to let us know we are here, because if we ceased to make things that let us know that we were here, we would indeed cease to be people. Whether the first "art" was a line in the sand drawn by a finger, or a shout at nothing, it was us saying "I am here".

            A lot of people talk about art as if it's something separate from living - which is ridiculous. To say "I'm an artist" to me is like saying "Hey, what's up? I'm into breathing. I'm a breathist. here's my card. I'm having a breathing show next week. You should come by."

            I guess it's useful for some to say that this is art and that isn't. I'm not saying the distinction is worthless - it makes it possible to have a conversation about it - but people tend to forget that the distinction is an artifice. It's like the scientists that constantly have to redefine what is alive and what isn't: first we need to use oxygen to be alive, and then anaerobic bacteria were discovered, so we had to expand that set. Then it was a full strand of DNA - that's what it was to be alive - but then viruses were discovered without full strands, so, again, the definition had to be expanded to include those. Only a fool looks at the finger, and not where it points, right? I dunno, maybe it's time we realized that everything is alive, from the largest elephants to the dust on their backs, to the atoms that make them up, and back up to the galaxy we live in, and indeed the universe.

            But, that's another blog altogether. ;)