# SIG-PRG 2026-10-01 — Session Notes

Participants:
  - Sarah Friend | utc +2
  - themandalore
  - Sam Mandel (GMT -4)
  - Mike Travers | UTC-7
  - Simon Hudson | utc-5
  - Eric Alston (UTC - 6)
  - Nick Garcia | UTC-5 (ET)
  - ayseayse__
  - misha 🪨 | UTC+2
  - vincent | UTC -4

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## 📖 The 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).

## 🧭 Overview
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.

## 💡 Key Points & Themes

- **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.

- **Symposium (opening chat):** themandalore reflected that the recent symposium showed wide divergence in participants' views on AI and protocols — from strong skepticism to Venkatesh's view of AI as beings we are creating — but debates were respectful.

## 🔀 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 "real" self the public self, the secret self, both, or neither? (Sam, misha) — misha suggested the self is fluid rather than constant.
- What does it mean to "locate subjectivity outside of the self"? (Eric asked ayseayse__ and Simon for unpacking — a genuine, not critical, question.) The answer remained partly unresolved amid overlapping audio.
- General confusion/tangling over the distinctions between *persona* and *person* (Sarah, and others).
- themandalore flagged that no one was certain of the essay's purpose or whether Mauss was arguing a stance versus simply observing how personhood developed.

## 🔗 References Mentioned
- David Graeber — *Debt* (and his discussion of the gift, and of slavery as a kind of "death" / denial of personhood). (themandalore, Sarah)
- Erving Goffman — *The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life*; also his work on asylums, stigma, and "management of spoiled identity." Recommended by Mike as a modern follow-up to Mauss.
- Immanuel Kant — rationality as fundamental to personhood (discussed skeptically). (Sam, Eric)
- Jessica Riskin — *The Restless Clock* (history of science; Cartesian detachment vs. Leibnizian perspective, agency/autonomy of living things). Recommended by ayseayse__.
- *The Bourgeois Virtues* (trilogy) — on the Western/Eurocentric evolution of respect for individual dignity. (Eric) [Note: author not named in transcript — commonly associated with Deirdre McCloskey.]
- Venkatesh — cited as holding an AI-as-beings view at the symposium. (themandalore)
- Margaret Radin — *Property and Personhood* (candidate reading). [Transcript says "Margaret Radden"; this appears to refer to Margaret Jane Radin.]
- Cypherpunk reading workshop; private/public key cryptography as metaphor for soul/mask. (misha)

## ✅ Action Items & Next Time
- **Next session:** October 11, at the earlier time slot (5 PM Sarah's time, Sunday).
- **Next reading:** One text already won a prior poll; two others are tied — (1) animal trials ("rats, pigs, and statues on trial") and (2) *Property and Personhood* by Margaret Radin. Sarah asked members to emoji-react in the main channel to break the tie.
- Sarah will propose four new texts for November.
- Sarah offered to help debug Discord audio for the participant ("LX" — likely Eric/Alston or another attendee) who could hear but not be heard.
- Running joke/aspiration: wear masks if the group ever meets in person (or on video).

## ⭐ Memorable Quotes
- **Eric:** "We're all pretty individuated when we have to use the bathroom, and I'd prefer it that way."
- **misha:** "The private key could be, like, the soul of the digital person, and the public key is the mask — the thing everyone can see."
- **themandalore:** "I feel like I'm so close to the group now after spending last week watching all the talks."