Private persons and minimal persons

It's a commonplace that privacy can now be abridged and abdicated in ways that weren't routinely possible until very recently. I want here to draw attention to an alternative configuration of the mind that these techniques make available, which I will call the minimal person. My explication of minimal personhood is going to take the long way around. I will have to explain what the ethical and political concept of privacy has to do with the older and very different philosophers' notion of logical privacy: this part of the discussion will connect the recent debates over extended cognition and first-person authority to one another. To get into a position where I can do that, I will have to explain how personhood and the laws of logic are also related topics. And to do that, I will start out with an exercise in what Paul Grice and, following him, Michael Bratman have called `creature construction.'1