Personality, Player, and the Coherent Volition Regimen

'Game' occurs significantly in human descriptions and even analysis of human affairs. As described earlier in this blog series, 'game' appears to be a Kantian a priori, an unknowable thing in itself. It is here, in gameplay, that anthropomorphic errors happen frequently with respect to animals and even machines. Clever beasts can play simple games to a set of rules. Smart machines can play complex games to a set of rules. Mistakes are easy.
The focus of these mistakes is the nature of 'player', a participant in a game who, or which, is proficient in gameplay, an adept. Given the a priori nature of 'game' and the significant use of the game metaphor in human society, it is very easy to mistake player for person. Persons are human beings. Players have a capable coherent volition regimen but are not necessarily persons.
Dogs are players. Observe a clever dog playing frisbee. They are proficient at simple game play. I once kept a clever Labrador which I taught to play a rudimentary game of football (Labradors' jaws are so hinged that they can grip a football) The dog became a proficient player, an adept at the game, and even attempted to teach the game to other dogs. That is a player. That is not a person.
Smart machines are players. Observe the amazing success they have achieved in board games against expert human opponents. They are players. They are not persons.
However much animals and machines are players, however skilled their coherent volition regimen, they are not persons. They cannot estimate and codify the rules of the rules of 'game'. Therefore they cannot possibly be moral or legal persons or any person at all. They are limited to the society of dogs, a dog pack, or the society of smart machines, a scaled-out network. Human society is reserved for persons who may, in fact, keep machines and animals, both of which having roughly the same moral and legal status.
Next blog: Personality and the Coherent Volition Regimen; A Summary
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Personality, Legal Person, and the Coherent Volition Regimen

Legal Person:
An individual or group that is allowed by law to take legal action, as plaintiff or defendant. It may include natural persons as well as fictitious persons (such as corporations)

So, the derivation is personality defining person and person being eligible to be a legal person, subject to a body of law, expected to behave to those laws, and participatory in the process of the law. The body of law itself is rooted theoretically in a social contract, a negotiated quid pro quo of what I can do and can't do and what you can and can't do. The social contract, a baseline reference for rational social behavior, is only a useful fiction. The law is a living thing having many contributing factors including the possible.
Artificial intelligence, having a functional coherent volition regimen (CVR), and the machines it drives have no personality and therefore cannot be any person and definitely not a legal person. Like a dog, which also has a CVR but not a personality, it is subject to the regulation of law, especially in terms of liability, but not participatory in that process. It must be in the 'keeping' of a legal person, or owned as commonly construed, in order to rationalize liability and dangerous behavior and bring smart machines into social and legal accountability, very much as the law treats working animals.
It becomes essential on the force of this argument that we, as persons, agree on the logic that machines, as much as is economically possible, adapt to humans and not vice versa in order to empower humane social existence. We need to negotiate, as a social contract, the role of owner as that of empowered keeper, a steward of a specified domain, usually an object or enterprise, but including smart machines and real property.
On that basis, smart  machines must then, logically and legally, be in the keeping of a legal person, licensed to such a bonded person, in order to effect the redress of liabilities for wrongful action. They may be subject to licensing fees for redress of the social cost of their employment, which is to say, just as a runaway horse's keeper is liable for consequent damage, so a robot's keeper is liable for consequent socioeconomic damage. A smart machine is not a simple drill press. It is closer to a mechanical draft horse.
Next blog: Personality, Player, and the Coherent Volition Regimen
Do Well and Be Well

Personality, Moral Agency, and the Coherent Volition Regimen

I am here involved in the search for differences and equivalents in human, animal, and machine psychology, to use the word loosely, in an effort to adequately place smart machines in a large context socioeconomic system. Being oriented in one's context is an essential starting point for the building of a sane mind and we cannot be sane in our employment of such machines until we can adequately place them in our context.
The topic of the first blog was personality as a special case of coherent volition regimen (CVR). Today's subject is moral agency as essentially human. What is moral agency? It is the deployment of personality into the world as directed by a codified value system, rational and irrational. A value system is the rules of the rules of a game of existence, material and social existence. However, not even humans can abstract the rules of the rules of a game from experience. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the logician, we can only estimate them. It appears that 'game', the rules of the rules, is a Kantian a priori.
Animals notoriously play games. They can figure out the rules of  some games. They apparently have 'game' a priori also. However, they cannot estimate the rules of the rules of a game, much less approximately codify them into a somewhat rational value system. That is what makes moral agency an essentially human role.
Artificial intelligence can also figure out the rules of a game. It can, to certain and increasing extent, explain itself. We will have to wait and see whether it can codify the rules of the rules without an a priori construct. I am betting that it can't. I am betting on human exceptionalism. However, with estimates of 1000 IQ for neural networks currently in development, the odds are close to even.
Moral agency, like language, like the opposable thumb, like the large complex brain, like the penchant for technology, is an important component of the argument for human exceptionalism. Dogs have a CVR but they cannot codify a value system. An AI robot has a CVR but it probably cannot codify a value system. We are very likely alone in that.
Next blog: Personality, Legal Persons, and the Coherent Volition Regimen
Do Well and Be Well

A General Concept of Personality; the Coherent Volition Regimen

First, and make no mistake about my intent, personality is an essentially human phenomenon. Using the word properly, dogs do not have a personality. Chimps do not have a personality and, above all, machines do not have a personality. However, the consistent anthropomorphic mistakes made in reference to other creatures and even machines indicate that something like a personality is present. In this blog I am searching for that something.
What is a personality? Personality is what makes a human being a person, a special being capable of moral and legal behavior, capable of somewhat rational social existence. A personality is the specific attributes of a specific human being. In the Aristotelian construct we know as 'qua', a thing in the role of other, it is the defining characteristics of the human thing who assumes social roles in the larger construct of social existence. In a simple example, Rex, in the role of lawyer, makes his case to the jury. In the Aristotelian sense, water qua ice, Rex qua lawyer is essentially the same bundle of attributes differently configured. He has the same personality. The problem, then, is to rephrase an essentially human phenomenon so as to account for anthropomorphic errors. Let me try.
A personality is a type of 'coherent volition regimen'  (CVR) composed of idiosyncratic manners of perception, cognition, volition, and action in concert with a feedback loop so that a consistent pattern of relatively unique cultivated behavior, reasonably adaptive over time, is reliably exhibited. That does describe a personality and a coherent volition regimen.
So, dogs do have a CVR but not a personality, although much more of it is wired into their brains than humans have a priori. A robot driven by machine learning also has a CVR but not a personality. They are not persons in the grand scheme of social existence which I examine in the next three blogs.
Next: Personality, Moral Agency, and Coherent Volition Regimens
Do Well and Be Well