| Abstract [eng] |
The Transformation of the Concept of Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis of Robert Spaemann and Ray Kurzweil is a master’s thesis by Teresė Bernatonytė that examines how the development of artificial intelligence reshapes the horizon within which the human person is understood. The thesis is situated within the tension between two approaches: the ontological tradition, in which the person is understood as an irreducible and intrinsically valuable reality, and the functionalist tendency, in which distinctly human capacities are increasingly interpreted as functions that can be modelled, replicated, and technologically enhanced. The central question of the thesis is how artificial intelligence transforms the concept of person and to what extent the functionalist model reinterprets the ontological tradition of personhood. The first part reconstructs the ontological concept of person in the philosophy of Robert Spaemann, focusing on his distinction between “someone” and “something,” as well as his understanding of personhood as a mode of being rather than a functional property. The second part analyses the transhumanist interpretation of the human being, concentrating on Ray Kurzweil’s view of intelligence, consciousness, and identity as informational processes that can be technologically expanded and potentially reproduced in non-biological form. The third part develops the concept of pseudo-personhood as the central interpretive category of the thesis. The argument is that the decisive problem does not arise when artificial intelligence supposedly “becomes a person,” but when humanly significant functions—such as decision-making, interpretation, communication, and emotional regulation—are increasingly transferred to artificial systems. In such a situation, the ontological status of the person remains unchanged, yet the conditions under which personhood is formed and sustained begin to shift. Pseudo-personhood therefore names a situation in which the functional signs of personhood remain active, while responsibility, vulnerability, embodied exposure, and relation to the other are weakened or redistributed. Two main theses are defended. First, the development of artificial intelligence does not directly alter the ontological status of the person, but it does transform the horizon of personhood by increasingly interpreting human distinctiveness through technologically modelled functions. Second, pseudo-personhood shows that the main challenge of AI lies not in machine personhood itself, but in the gradual transformation of the conditions of human decision, responsibility, and relation to others. The thesis concludes that the key philosophical question today is not whether machines can become persons, but under what conditions human beings can still form and sustain personhood in a technologically mediated world. |
