To start, I am gonna spew all the really poorly thought out arguments for what makes us people and machines not.  First is citing our method of birth as the reason we are a person.  However, that is just saying that we are human beings; a species.  Do our rights as a person come from simply being the correct species?  Like we won some genetic lottery?  And what of the human beings born in labs, completely externally.  Did they lose their rights as a person as well?  This is a weak defense, to say the least.  The second common defense is that we were made by God and given souls.  However, it is a bad claim for it can neither be proven nor refuted by science.  Science, and to some extent I believe philosophy, has no place in the realm of the supernatural.  Science tries to explain the natural, philosophy tries to prove the existence of the supernatural.  However you cannot prove an objects existence by simply stating that it must exist.  Life is not that easy.

I think the best claim against my point is the claim that robots do not have a free will.  They are bound by the computer code which they are programmed by.  Thus if a robot is programmed to feel an emotion; anger, jealousy, even love, they are not truly feeling that emotion but rather just the programming.  However this leads to the question; do human beings have free will?  In religious terms it can be summed up easily.  If God is all knowing and infallible; meaning He knows everything that will happen and he is never wrong, then He will know your thoughts and actions before even you do.  And if he chooses to predict your actions and he is never wrong, then can you really decide for yourself?

In scientific terms; is our behavior and choices determined by our genetic makeup and environmental upbringing?  Are we really free to choose whatever we want even if we are born with no legs or into poverty and famine?

In the end, I am too tired to figure out the answer.  But what I believe is that free will is not the key to becoming “a person.”  Because even though robots do not possess it, it is not clear that human beings do either.

Descartes, in his epic struggle to rid the world of skepticism, once quoted the now famous; I think, therefore I am.  So in a world where one cannot have absolute certainty on anything including the existence of one’s own body; one can conclude that because one has the capacity for thought, one must exist.  This is the assumption which Descartes bases his skepticism rebuttal on.  However, does The Matrix not give us another option?  In order for this to work I will need the skeptic to accept that there are two realities.  There is virtual reality (the matrix) where everyone is born into and lives in, and there is the real world.  Of course the skeptic can simply say that we cannot be certain of the real world, but this is an indefinite loop which I do not want to be stuck in.

So the matrix is our dream world, where although everything seems real; none of it actually exists.  Thus the skeptic will know that he must exist in some form, for he has the power of thought, but cannot be sure that anyone else he meets exists.  For it is possible that they are simply part of the computer code.  Here is the new dilhemma.

The ‘agents’ in the matrix do not exist in the real world.  However, they are able to exist in the matrix.   More importantly, they are able to think and make assertions such as, “I exist.”  Thus here we have a being which can think, but does not exist in the real world.  Does this not violate Descartes original proof?  I think there must be more to existence then simply the ability to think.