Whereas ‘consciousness’ is construed above as a process going on in neurological systems, ‘person’ is construed here as a process going on in social systems. On this model, a person is not a thing, material or immaterial; a person is a social-semiotic process. A person is a function of each socially-situated body[1] with a semiotised brain: a local process in a more global web of interacting local processes.[2] The biological processes of each body in a social system function as the medium of persons-as-processes, but it is social-semiotic interaction that differentiates persons as individuals.[3]
As social-semiotic processes, persons happen at the three timescales of logogenesis, ontogenesis and phylogenesis. Logogenetically, a person is the process of making meaning in a range of types of social situation. Ontogenetically, a person is a process of creating and evolving a range of situation-specific types of meaning potentials (registers) in a developing and aging body. That is, ontogenetically, a person is a continuous, developmentally-timed adapting of semiotic potential to the range of social situation types experienced in a lifetime. Phylogenetically, a person is a suite of processes that occurs in a particular time-interval in the co-evolution of the specific semiotic system and biological species. Meanings reproduce through humans; human being includes the experiencing of that process and the monitoring of the experiencing.
The individuated differentiation of persons relates to each person being a unique history of interactions. As an evolution in development in social contexts, each person is one set of trajectories in the state space that represents all possible ontogenetic trajectories.[4] The valeur of each person as an individual lies in how each contrasts with other interactants in the social system. Accordingly, individual identity varies with social relations, such that each individual potentially has as many different identities as they have different social relations. The identity of each person depends on the relation between them and those with whom they interact; a person functions as different identities to different people. So a social system isn’t just the integration of different persons, it is the integration of the different identities of different persons.
The process perspective construes ‘beings’ as ‘becomings’: as continuous creation, re-creation and transformation. As processes, persons start and stop. When a person starts, a new semiotic universe begins; when a person stops, a semiotic universe ends. Semiotic universes are continually and continuously starting and stopping. When a person begins interacting with another, a new identity begins to emerge; when a person ceases interacting with another, an old identity begins to fade away.
Because persons are processes, time is the dimension of personhood, of experiencing. But it is not that persons experience time and space; rather time and space are the dimensions of experiencing. Time and space are the frame of reference — a four-dimensional grid that is the measure of difference — in which persons experience difference.
Footnotes:
[1] According to Sartre, the self emerges in the construing of ourselves as an item in someone else’s world. For Ramachandran, our model of self is our model of others applied to ourselves.
[2] This could also be construed as: body as form, person as social function.
[3] A person can be distinguished from an organism in the following way: a social system is a level of organisation supervenient on persons — social beings — defined by the roles they play in the social system; an organism is a level of organisation supervenient on organs defined by the roles they play in the somatic system.
[4] Persons with sufficient autonomy to choose the range of environments that they experience — and which variants — have the opportunity to contribute more directly to their own individuation.