Meeting Archive — 3 sessions

• October 1, 2026
  SIG-PRG 2026-10-01

  Participants: Sarah Friend | utc +2, themandalore, Sam Mandel (GMT -4), Mike Travers, Simon Hudson | utc-5, Eric Alston (UTC - 6), Nick Garcia, ayseayse__, misha 🪨, vincent

  The group discussed Mauss's genealogy of personhood, treating it as a dated but thought-provoking "time travel" piece. Conversation centered on whether personhood is intrinsic or socially/culturally constructed, skepticism toward the essay's progress narrative culminating in Kant and German philosophy, and the recurring theme of masks and role-playing. Several participants connected the text to contemporary questions of AI personhood, privacy, cryptography, and online identity. The session ended with logistics on selecting the next reading.

  • Personhood as socially constructed vs. intrinsic: Sam: The one clear takeaway was that personhood is not intrinsic but socially determined — tied to one's role, ancestors, and other factors. He raised the question of what, if anything, is "left" of a person once you subtract cultural/historical accretions. For ancient cultures (e.g., Romans stripped of citizenship/freedom), there may be little left — a frame hard to inhabit from our modern, Enlightenment-inflected assumption of a core intrinsic self. Eric: Countered with a structural view — humans are "fundamentally individuated" at a basic physical level ("when we have to use the bathroom"), independent of social recognition. The challenge is techniques for socially constructing individuation across billions of people (names, legal identity, Social Security numbers, hierarchy).
  • Person as role / the centrality of masks: Mike: The main idea is person-as-role-playing, descending from masking; the first paragraph of the conclusion summarizes the whole argument (from masquerade to mask to modern personhood). Sarah: Mapped Mauss's progression of terms — personage (rule-based, relational mask), persona, person (the moral/responsible subject), and moi (the interior self Mauss claims is present in every culture and era). She found the person/persona distinction genuinely tangled in the text. Eric: Masks as identity/expression are far more ubiquitous (across continents, cultures, eras) than the limited ethnography suggests — citing Venetian carnival masks and a Kenyan mask he owns. Sarah: Masks are "alive and well" today in avatars, usernames, and pseudonyms, despite the text framing them as historical. She highlighted the striking image of masks-within-masks.
  • Skepticism of the progress narrative: Sarah: Criticized Mauss for writing from a supposedly "impartial" vantage point observing the past, rather than acknowledging his own situated, contingent position. Eric: Found it "a bridge too far" to credit Kant and German philosophy with bringing "closure" to personhood within what is a narrow (if important) philosophical tradition. He suspects philosophy and social change coevolved endogenously, and leans toward social change leading philosophy. He noted the modern recognition of universal human dignity is a recent, imperfectly realized turn. ayseayse__: Identified a possible "systematic error" in Mauss positing himself as a detached observer (a "god's view" / Cartesian detachment) while describing situated subjects.
  • Public self vs. secret self / privacy: Sam: Asked whether "the self" is public-plus-secret self, or whether one is the "real" person. We tend today to treat the secret self as the real self — but that may not always have been the case. misha: Explored ritual as constitutive of the person (performance shapes the person and vice versa). Drawing on a cypherpunk reading workshop, framed the modern self as something "extracted" and tracked on platforms. Privacy ≠ secrecy but is the power to selectively reveal oneself; over-disclosure could "destroy" the person. Offered the analogy: private key = the soul of the digital person, public key = the mask. Also noted the political danger of private thoughts being exposed.
  • Connections to AI and consciousness: Simon: Historically kept consciousness (compositional) and personhood (political — "who gets what") separate, but the text led him to see personhood as an extension of a relational view of consciousness. Our self-understanding is entangled with how others see us and how we think they see us — relevant to social/parasocial relationships with machines, which may require extending some form of personhood to better delineate lines. Also raised the tension of control: we can change masks, but law and the immutable experience of being constrain that control. Sarah: Framed a meta-project for the group: separating out the different aspects of personhood/self (internal self, moral person, rational person, legal person — which may lack subjectivity, e.g., corporations) and finding the boundaries of Mauss's framework. Connected the private/public self to the private/public key analogy.
  • Language / translation: vincent: Confused by terms, downloaded the French original. In French, "moral personhood" overlaps both the moral subject and the legal entity — a distinction that fades in French. As a French-Canadian / Quebecois from a secular society with deep Catholic roots, this felt personal and prompted him to question his own understanding of personhood. Sarah: Noted this genre/era of academic writing is famously badly translated, with meaning lost in English.
• September 13, 2026
  SIG-PRG 2026-09-13

  Participants: Sarah Friend | utc +2, themandalore, misha 🪨, Eric Alston (UTC - 6), LisaRöingBaer-CEST, Sam Mandel (GMT -4)

  This session examined Stone's proposal to grant legal personhood/standing to natural objects such as rivers and forests. Discussion centered on whether Western law is the right vehicle for this, how damages and value get priced, the role of guardianship and "romantic" views of nature, and comparisons to corporate personhood, artworks, and landmarks. The conversation closed with speculative directions — LLMs as guardians, and Coasean bargaining at scale — plus logistics for the next reading and session.

  • Square peg / round hole (Sam Mandel): Western law is built around individual persons and monetary damages; extending personhood from corporations to natural objects felt forced and unconvincing to Sam. He noted that a human legal subject (even one needing a guardian) still has a history and personality, and corporations plausibly develop a collective "personality," but natural features don't fit this in Western culture without a mythological/animist basis.
  • Personhood as recognition, not just standing (Lisa): A consequence of granting personhood would be cultural — natural objects would be recognized as persons, not merely defendable in court. Lisa argued the group risks missing the essay's opening point: rights we now take as common sense (e.g. children's rights) once seemed unthinkable, and today's participants are "illustrating what the entry to the text says."
  • Value, ownership, and economics (themandalore): Framed the question through economics — assigning ownership/property rights (invoking de Soto, collateralization) transforms how people interact with a thing, for good or ill. Suggested personhood here may functionally resemble another mode of ownership/representation, and compared it to cap-and-trade / carbon credits, which ascribe tradable value to something previously unpriced. Argued any such system needs an underlying shared societal goal or morality, which is where environmental disagreement lives.
  • The standing problem (Eric Alston): A river has no "motive power" to make a claim, so the real question becomes who gets regulatory authority to enforce on its behalf. Eric noted many historically protected areas were protected precisely because someone sought to exploit them. His central comparative question: why grant a scientific/guardian group legally actionable standing rather than simply appointing them as a specialized regulatory body empowered to restrict polluting activity?
  • Limits of the civil remedy system (Eric): Courts traditionally impose only monetary damages and are reluctant to compel behavior (injunctions, writs of mandamus); higher-level regulation belongs to legislatures/regulators. Loading environmental protection onto a damages-based civil system asks too much of it, even if the loss (a spiritually/culturally significant river) genuinely exceeds any monetary sum — echoing his tort students' frustration that "$300,000" cannot make someone "whole" after losing an arm.
  • Pricing the ineffable (Sarah Friend): Interested in how culture puts numerical prices on things of ineffable value. Cited Stone's car-damage example: damages default to cost-of-repair, falling back to fair market value when repair is untenable — a logic that becomes strange when applied to pollution in a river.
• September 3, 2026
  SIG-PRG 2026-09-03

  Participants: Sachin, 🙊 Anuraj R, Sarah Friend | utc +2, 🙊 Jenna Dixon, Nick Garcia, LisaRöingBaer-CEST, ayseayse__

  This was largely an organizational kickoff meeting for a new "personhood" research group convened by Sarah, combining participant introductions, collection of research questions, and nomination of readings. The group briefly read and reacted to the Sierra Club v. Morton dissent, touching on legal standing, personhood of natural environments, and the tension between adversarial legal systems and ecological wholeness. The deep-dive discussion of the longer text is scheduled for the next session.

  • Sachin (interests): How fiction writers began basing characters on what they saw on TV; property and personhood (citing Margaret Radin's work); and the "boundary conditions" of identity — how identity often starts as a porous boundary and later gets rendered crystal clear.
  • Group logistics: Sarah has set up a research group page with a list of research questions (currently all authored by her) and invited participants to contribute their own questions as threaded posts and to nominate readings. Anuraj was managing a recap bot, which was not working for this particular call (limited number of concurrent instances), so participants read and typed rather than relying on it.
  • Personhood of natural environments (Lisa): Raised the real-world example of a river in New Zealand granted legal personhood, and asked about the Te Awa Tupua Act as a case worth examining.
  • Category errors and the function of law (Ayse): Argued that law's core function is to standardize and discretize in order to scale to an entire society, which forces living ecosystems (a whole valley, river, or its insects) to be broken into discrete, separable units. She questioned whether an ecosystem maps better onto an organization/incorporation than onto a single legal entity, and suggested this reveals "category errors" in the legal system's framework.
  • Standing as a gating doctrine (Nick): As a lawyer, Nick found the dissent striking on re-reading in light of advancing AI and worsening climate crisis. He explained that standing gates who can even bring a claim. In an adversarial civil system (aimed at equitable relief or damages), there is a conflict with the balancing role of federal agencies: if an organization like the Sierra Club lacks standing, then no one can bring an adversarial claim against private interests that would exploit natural resources.
  • Compromised agencies (Sarah & Nick): The text notes the compromised nature of federal agencies asked to balance impossibly broad concerns. Nick noted Justice Douglas is charitable — explicitly saying the agencies aren't corrupt, just asked to balance many things — which differs from someone who would "speak for the trees." Both felt this critique feels even more potent now (Nick referenced the current Trump administration).