"It's - disconcerting that you use this as your personhood benchmark."

"Oh?"

"I mean, it didn't happen to turn out this way, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that it couldn't have been that you just can't copy from anyone who themselves can't copy, and we can't, so where would we be?"

" - I can see why that would be an alarming thought.  Given the givens I don't think you would be in any danger from it, at least if you still landed in the same place, even if people found you - off-putting.  And of course children are people before they can themselves copy, never the other way around, though you understandably might not find that entirely reassuring."

"Yeah. Like, the animal intelligence project sounds cool and everything but my culture counts babies as people."

"That - makes sense, I suppose.  They can't really . . . do any people things, though, can they?  - If our babies are actually different from each other that seems like an important thing to find out."

"Babies are very incompetent but sometimes start talking before they're even one Earth standard year old."

"Can you be more specific with what you mean by 'talking'?"

"Saying... words? Sometimes short sentences if they're very precocious - I have seen a video of myself aged three Earth standard talking in paragraphs."

"Aw."

"It seemed prudent to check you didn't mean, for example, the level of conversation we're having now - I think ours are about the same, though I haven't really interacted with any humans that young in quite some time; it could be slightly different."

"- can you copy from people with brain damage?"

". . . Can you elaborate on that?"

"If someone gets hit in the head really hard, not enough to die but enough that they're not going to wake up and be able to copy not-being-brain-damaged, can you still get stuff off of them or do they stop counting as a person."

"I don't know that.  I'm not sure anyone would; how can you tell whether someone's going to wake up until they either do, or die of not - I assume you have technology for it, of course, but to my knowledge we don't . . ."

"- I mean, you wouldn't have to know in advance whether someone was going to die or wake up to tell if you could copy off them, would you? Unless you can't copy off unconscious people in general."

"I have seen two people with head injuries that resulted in them being unconscious in my life, and I wasn't exactly paying attention to that at the time.  I can ask around for you."

"I guess it's probably hard to do statistics without trivial long distance communication and billions of people," he acknowledges.

"It is.  What would it - mean, to you, to have an answer either way on this?"

"- it'd just be informative on how good a measure of personhood copiability is, I don't think it would have practical consequences."

"Yes, but - in which direction?"

"...if you can copy off braindead people that suggests that it's not about their capacities and might just be a function of age or something, and if you can't after some point, it would be interesting to know where the line is."

"Well, I can ask around.  It seems plausible that people in emergency services would know more than I do.  - We are all very confident that personhood's the line, which either means we've investigated it thoroughly enough and you'll come to the same conclusion as we did, or you and I use 'person' to mean different things, or we've missed something important and are wrong about how everything works.  And it seems worthwhile to find out which one."

"I think of toddlers as little people."

"We think of toddlers as going to be people - when do they switch from going-to-be-people into people for you?"