SIG-PRG 2026-10-01 — Personhood Research Group

← Personhood Research Group

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.

Session Recording Summary · 75m 15s · Full notes ↗

Reading: Marcel Mauss's 1938 essay on the category of the person / the self (commonly translated as "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person, the Notion of Self"). Sarah offered both a long version and a shorter excerpt. The text is from French sociological anthropology and traces the historical evolution of personhood through concepts of personage, persona, person, and moi ("me"/self).

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.

Questions & Disagreements: - Is there an intrinsic "person" left once cultural/historical/social layers are subtracted? (Sam) — unresolved; Eric's physical-individuation view offers one answer. - Did philosophy drive social change toward individual dignity, or follow it? Eric leans toward social change leading; he thinks Mauss would credit the philosophers. He calls it likely a "coevolving, endogenous mess." - Is the …

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