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What Makes a Person?

According to Wikipedia, "A person is a being, such as a human, that has

certain capacities or attributes constituting personhood". This asserts that

"person" could include other than humans, and that some humans might not be

persons. Humans that are "persons" have certain capacities or attributes

constituting personhood. . In the case of physical organs such as brains there are

good empirical reasons to think they exist, but nonphysical souls do not appear

to factor into our best descriptions and explanations of our behavior, and this

gives us some reason to think they do not exist. What we perceive are limited to

sensory organs but we have a dominion over animals and we use our brain to

think in order to differentiate ourselves from animals. We also have the sense of

purpose in life. It is a factor of determining a person. They say that if you dont

have purpose in life then you are not a person. According to William Jaworski,

Persistence is a philosophical term for existence over time. To say that

something persists is to say that it existsone and the same individualat

more. It means what makes us a person is our identity that differs from animals.

Persons have psychological persistence conditions and their identity over time

depends on psychological continuity. Our identity as human beings is veryunique compared to animals.

As for the word "person" it means human but individually. There isn't any

other living being which can be called a person. And no, a robot or even an alien

can't be called a person. Person is a human being. Persons are human beings

alone and nothing else. One of the central problems of metaphysics is what it is

to be a person. The answer ought to account for central phenomena of

personhood; rationality, command of language, self-consciousness, control or

agency, and moral worth or title to respect, are amongst the salient

characteristics that have been thought to distinguish persons from other forms of

life. The immaterial I that possesses conscious experience, controls passion,

desire, and action, and maintains a perfect identity from birth (or before) to death

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(or after). Modern philosophy of mind has frequently been concerned with

dismantling the cluster of views that make it plausible to think in terms of such a

thing. What am I? What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I

and other human people? What is our basic metaphysical nature? For instance,

what are we made of? Are we made up entirely of matter, as stones are, or partly

or wholly of something else? If we are made of matter, what matter is it? Just the

matter that makes up our bodies, or might we be larger or smaller than our

bodies? Are we substances or is each of us a state or an aspect of something

else, or perhaps some sort of process or event?

We therefore conclude that a person is a human being. A being, in

regards to living things, is an independently, self-sufficiently existing living

organism, as opposed to an organism's parts, which do not exist independently

or apart from it. There are many types of living beings; just observe the wide

variety of living organism in our world. But to be a person is to be a human being.

Neither beast nor plant nor bacteria are persons.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person

http://media.johnwiley.com.au/product_ancillary/82/14443336/DOWNLOA

D/Chapter12_Persons_Jaworski.pdf