Reflection on He, She, and It

Ok, a couple of fairly random thoughts: first, I think we may have been overlooking the importance of physical appearance and traits when discussing whether Yod was in fact a person. While it seems fairly superficial, I do think it needs to be emphasized. Honestly I thought that Mike behaved as much like a human as Yod, he clearly had a personality, he interacted with his environment, he was self aware, but because Mike was a box locked in a room, you never think of him as a person. A living entity yes, but a person, no. Maybe that's completely obvious to everyone, but I did feel like we were overlooking it. While Shira says that she doesn't think about what's under a man's skin, maybe the fact that Yod doesn't have a spleen does have an effect on whether he is a person. I think we also need to be careful with our definition of agency when using Jack's definition to define person-hood. If we define agency simply as the ability to affect change, we run the disturbing possibility of cutting out populations of humans from our definition of people. If we look only at people's ability to affect their own circumstances, where does that leave those living in slavery. I don't think that definition is necessarily flawed, but we do need to be careful with it.

Also, was did anyone else think of Alia while reading this? It strikes me that she was in a way fairly similar to Yod. She was born with all of the knowledge of the reverend mothers, just as Yod began with all of the knowledge that Avram programmed into him. The scene where Alia is describing her first awareness during the ceremony sounded very similar to Yod describing his first moments of conciousness, except Yod was without a Jessica figure to protect him. Later, Paul describes Alia off killing Sardaukar as being completely natural, almost like she was intended to be some sort of weapon (St. Alia of the Knife). There were several more parallels, but those are the ones that came immediately to mind. I'm not convinced that it's relevant, but the similarities struck me.