Consciousness and Personhood in Medical Care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current paradigms in Western medicine often fail to differentiate clearly between consciousness, responsiveness and personhood. The growing number of individuals who exist with sustainable cardiopulmonary systems but who are behaviorally unresponsive has prompted a cultural reconsideration of the relationship between the presence of consciousness and what it means to be a person. This article presents relevant clinical situations that exemplify the different modes in which personhood and consciousness can be associated and dissociated: disorders of consciousness, emergence from anesthesia, and neocortical death. We draw from these examples to call for a reflection on and possible revision of the dominant approach towards unresponsive persons to one in which care providers may work from the default assumption of the existence of an individual's personhood as part of their therapeutic intervention. Behavior consistent with this assumption aligns with the principle of respect for persons in the face of the uncertainty created by the high rate of misdiagnosis of unconsciousness in unresponsive patients and is most consistent with a therapeutic approach to care considering evidence suggesting that attributing personhood may in fact evoke consciousness in these patients.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".