Personhood

The ideas in this post aren't mine, but I thought it was interesting, so I'm sharing it. Suppose we consider Napoleon a person, which is pretty reasonable. Then couldn't a character like Harry Potter also be a person? The only way any of us, the living, know of Napoleon as a person is through historical artifacts, but these aren't necessarily accurate. Perhaps Napoleon is just a widespread tale, much like Harry Potter in this modern day. One might raise the point of the evidence of his existence, like books and physical evidence of his existence. But Harry Potter has books and merchandise like wands that seem to attest for his existence. This isn't to invalidate historians, I'm sure they have done great work and analyses of evidence. But it can never really be enough because we know that humans tend to make stories, so any history we extract could simply be that. I just found it interesting how skepticism can influence how we view commonly-accepted history. This idea was from Henry Cohn, a PROMYS counselor. He also extended this argument to pets and AIs on the premise that Harry Potter being a person is less ridiculous than pets and AI. I didn't think this was a very convincing argument, so I am including this as a sort of extra.