Reply To: Updated Definitions of F

[Juan E. Sandoval]

I’m still a bit confused. I don’t see how the self can be abiotic. “A funny person” is still a person and this biotic.

It may be only in word but not in experience -- depending on the context. The word "person" can be an object too.
To give an example, across history, people have treated other people as inhuman. A slave may have been thought of as an object, rather than an agent. A CEO may see his employees as chess pieces, rather than as agents. The issue isn't literally about whether the [object] in question happens to be a biological-organism or not, but whether or not it is treated and seen as one.
(This is why the category of F as registration of cognitive agents is more correct than 'biotic'. There are non-biological agents (i.e. A.G.I.) that we will have to contend with eventually.)
It may be more useful to think of this all from a phenomenological perspective. The experience of something as a willed-being, an agent, is not reducible, just like red cannot be described as anything else but what it is. The visceral registration of an agent's willed reality is the same way. That attribute is given to an object ["person"] from within the phenomenology of the observer. The same object ["person"] may or may not be given that attribute, depending on what the observer sees. The attribute of cognitive-agency is something that F assigns to things, and it's not literally contingent on the object being in-itself organic or inorganic.
For example, we sometimes don't think of chicken or beef through this phenomenology, and sometimes we do. Someone might give the attribute of will and agency to chicken and meat, while others don't. In excluding them from the cognitive category, we are removed from the ethical dilemma. In ascribing that 'a priori' category to them, ethical dilemmas come to the fore.