What Makes a Person?

According to Wikipedia, "A person is a being, such as a human, that has

certain capacities or attributes constituting personhood". This asserts that
"person" could include other than humans, and that some humans might not be
persons. Humans that are "persons" have certain capacities or attributes
constituting personhood. . In the case of physical organs such as brains there are
good empirical reasons to think they exist, but nonphysical souls do not appear
to factor into our best descriptions and explanations of our behavior, and this
gives us some reason to think they do not exist. What we perceive are limited to
sensory organs but we have a dominion over animals and we use our brain to
think in order to differentiate ourselves from animals. We also have the sense of
purpose in life. It is a factor of determining a person. They say that if you dont
have purpose in life then you are not a person. According to William Jaworski,
Persistence is a philosophical term for existence over time. To say that
something persists is to say that it exists one and the same individual at
more. It means what makes us a person is our identity that differs from animals.
Persons have psychological persistence conditions and their identity over time
depends on psychological continuity. Our identity as human beings is very
unique compared to animals.

As for the word "person" it means human but individually. There isn't any
other living being which can be called a person. And no, a robot or even an alien
can't be called a person. Person is a human being. Persons are human beings
alone and nothing else. One of the central problems of metaphysics is what it is
to be a person. The answer ought to account for central phenomena of
personhood; rationality, command of language, self-consciousness, control or
agency, and moral worth or title to respect, are amongst the salient
characteristics that have been thought to distinguish persons from other forms of
life. The immaterial I that possesses conscious experience, controls passion,
desire, and action, and maintains a perfect identity from birth (or before) to death

(or after). Modern philosophy of mind has frequently been concerned with
dismantling the cluster of views that make it plausible to think in terms of such a
thing. What am I? What sort of things, metaphysically speaking, are you and I
and other human people? What is our basic metaphysical nature? For instance,
what are we made of? Are we made up entirely of matter, as stones are, or partly
or wholly of something else? If we are made of matter, what matter is it? Just the
matter that makes up our bodies, or might we be larger or smaller than our
bodies? Are we substances or is each of us a state or an aspect of something
else, or perhaps some sort of process or event?

We therefore conclude that a person is a human being. A being, in

regards to living things, is an independently, self-sufficiently existing living
organism, as opposed to an organism's parts, which do not exist independently
or apart from it. There are many types of living beings; just observe the wide
variety of living organism in our world. But to be a person is to be a human being.
Neither beast nor plant nor bacteria are persons.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person
http://media.johnwiley.com.au/product_ancillary/82/14443336/DOWNLOA
D/Chapter12_Persons_Jaworski.pdf