(HAVING FUN with METAPHYSICS! Getting really deep, and it works,, and its not too painful either! —Only about a dozen paragraphs and great images!—.Thinking about Persons [and Cucumbers!] from “the inside” as Designs in “The World”. This is The Way We Normally Do It and it is worth preserving! TAKING a BIG STRETCH, here in Part IV at The NatureReligionConnection!)

Persons in Our Ordinary View of Things
Our sense of Design culminates in our thinking about ourselves as “Persons.” As persons we design and fabricate objects of value but we are also makers of ourselves and our communities, and in this way we gain an understanding of Design from “the inside”, we have argued. We understand Design as the rules for a structure, or the principles of an orderly cycle of events—including our own lives. From this “inside” perspective, we hold ourselves to be more than just animals or objects, we now have a unique social, moral and political status. We are “One of Us”—“Persons”—and have certain Communication and Response-Abilities to this larger–“Us”– unit.
“Our World” is full of various degrees of “personality”, of various design sophistications, From its dim suggestion in the cycles of the inanimate world, to microbial creatures, to plants, to simpler animals, to highly skilled robots and computers, to non-human mammals, to children, to responsible adults, we “see” a growing progression that Reflect our sense of ourselves and our possibilities as Designs and self-designers. It is an accumulation of Personality.
It is no coincidence that when we think, we often say, “Let me reflect upon that” or refer to thinking as “reflection”. “Thoughtfulness” is an openness to Our Information and our Extended Patterns—- those cycles and designs we have been discussing. We allow them to reach us In Representation and be considered.
This is Not an unusual observation; it is a narrative we find in our Most Common Understanding of things. It is our “manifest image”, as Dennett* calls it following philosopher Wilford Sellers. It is a kind of psychological theory embedded in our everyday world view.




(Reflecting on Selves: Unusual Variations of “Persons”; all somewhat truncated versions thereof. Photo 3: Looking a scallop in the face! “The eyes are the window to the soul” said Bill Shakespeare, and scallop have dozens of eyes!)
In this “folk psychology”, we understand the special status of persons; and we can feel for animals, as if, little or hairy or feathery or other unusual variations of persons, of “us”. We might even wonder if plants have feelings, like some minute Personhood. Pets become dearly-held family members, often; But also, in this “manifest” (or clearly evident and common) view of things, we tend to recognize that these animals, plants and pets do not quite make it. They are persons manqué, not full blown.



(THE SEEDS OF “PERSONALITY” in the world around us. We name our hurricanes, above is Dorian from 2019; after all they grow by feeding off their environment, move, and then die out. And, Single-celled animals are attracted to food and dislike the harmful. The one above drives itself forward through the use of its flagellum. I’m sure it has a busy day ahead for its-self, and Dennett argues it exhibits “competence without comprehension”. It does not understand what it does, but what it does it does pretty well. “What is It Like to be a Bat?“ is a famous modern paper in philosophy by an opponent of Dennett’s who argues that greater complexity in design is not enough to explain Consciousness. Consciousness is a different kind of thing, he contends; it is like some special ‘spark’ or “a ghost in the machine”, a kind of mystery that is beyond much explanation but only privately experienced.)



(GRADUALLY DEVELOPING “PERSONALITY”: A Mars Rover–but not the newest one!–[top right] needed to be largely autonomous in its decision-making. Too far from Earth to be driven and consistently commanded from here [radio signals taking from 8 to 40 minutes travel time], it was programmed and designed to accomplish various tasks [who isn’t] with immediate and particular decisions made through “autonomy software” using observations from its sensors. “Mama’s Last Hug” [left], biology Prof. van Hoof visits Mama, the now aging and dying chimp he had worked with in the early 1970s. Upon a closer look, Mama exhibited obvious excitement and emotion, eventually reaching forth and patting the head of her old friend. [Bottom right)Young Children are a developing Person. They search for autonomy.)
Persons in The World, and Designs Stretching Far Beyond
So, the creative efforts of Design in the universe stretch far beyond humans. We are indebted to it! Cumulatively, these Designs have achieved much success. Most humans now live in a highly “artificial environment”. We call it “civilization”, says Dennett, and it is “an artifact”, a product and an accumulation of our “laws and traditions.” Nonetheless, civilization is “perfectly real“, he contends, and it is ‘out there’ around us. It is a set of patterns as objective as those of physics, just more dependent on us!




(CIVILIZATION IS PATTERNS AS REAL AS ANY IN THE UNIVERSE, BUT ALSO DEPENDENT ON HUMANS: music written into a score, money, written language — Coca Cola written in Chinese [top middle], Hebrew [middle row, left], Korean [middle, right], Somalian [bottom row, middle]. Finally, The Pyramids at Giza are humanly associated patterns with a real objective durability!
We now have “writing, arithmetic, money, clocks, and calendars”, each is a “system of representation” that is so closely associated with That For Which They Are To Represent, that the two are indistinguishable. What is the multiplicity of things, without Arithmetic –1,2,3,4 and 2+2=4? Can we really distinguish our thoughts from the Language we use to express them? When you are thinking, aren’t you mostly talking to yourself? What is Time, without clocks and calendars, and even the orbiting of the earth? What is Time in-itself?** Humans involved in economic activity naturally evolved Money, as a “representation” of that activity; just as human vocal sounds (phonemes) eventually found the designs of our different languages. “Representation” is itself a form of Design. It is Patterns that ‘speak’ to us.
There is no “Nature” vs. “its fundamental Designs” or “Nature” vs. “the Patterns we use to Represent those Designs”. These each are logically indistinguishable. No Nature “in itself” standing in comparison to Designs and Representations! We are mistaken if we think the two can be pulled apart, as when some try to say physics is “The Real”, and civilization is just “Subjective”. There is an evolved sequence of Designs that connect the inanimate motions of the universe to The Functions accomplished by The Human Mind in that Universe!
But, Our Modern World has worked itself ‘into a pickle’. In our thinking we have split Reality into Two Big Pieces. “Objective Reality”, we tend to think confusedly, is that which is unaffected by us, independent, highly predictable and The Really Real. Subjectivity: we are not very sure what this is; some think it is like ‘soul’, very mysterious and inexplicable; others believe it must be some side-show or illusion (phenomena) created by the Brain.

But from the perspective of Design, our habit of thought and action that we call “Personality” or “ a Person” unites the two poles. Subjectivity is an understanding of Design from “the inside”, with its goals, purposes, and rules of operation. Objectivity is a Design from “the outside”. It is “an object” that is “given” to us, unanalyzed; taken for granted and ‘understood’ in its common coordination with our environment. We do not understand, or are not concerned with, its inner workings beyond its parts and their rules of coordination as Person-like desires and motivations. When we understand beyond that, its ”Personality” has been dissolved, it is now an object in an objective background and we speak of it with this new objective vocabulary. It is no longer like a person, but now an object lacking in significant degrees of autonomy and decision-making.
“Subjectivity” is, also, the way Persons treat each other. It is that special moral and political status, a kind of Psychological Theory embedded in our most common way of perceiving ourselves and our world. In Our Manifest Image, Persons are Subjects and not merely objects. This is A Tradition that will remain True as long as it composes the vast majority of human interactions. In this tradition, we can learn to experience Design from the inside and the out, as all the Design given us and around us.
(I will have to think more about these last two paragraphs. Please help me. They may be right. This entire post is highly speculative, an analysis and clarification of The Way We Tend To Think of Ourselves and Our Fellow Living Creatures as Part of This Universe of Massive Forces and Laws. Does it “ring a bell with you? The Finale–Part V–will be on its way soon. In it Persons, themselves as complex Designs and Designers will be sucked back into the Evolutionary Process of Design With No Designer!)
WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A BAT? Not much, would be my guess!

