"And being generally empricist, I believe that such a thing is developed by experience."

A 1 month old baby doesn't have a personality.

Well we're both. We wouldn't have the mind we have without the body we have. Hormones can change your personality in minutes. There is no mind separate from the body.

I also wouldn't say there's a perfect moment in which a nonhuman becomes a human, so we have to pick an arbitrary time, just as we pick 18 as an arbitrary time to say a child becomes an adult. Birth is, to me, a convenient time, since by that point, it's clearly a human, whereas at conception, it's clearly not.

@Hunter49r:

But the baby is experiencing and gaining, again, a MIND, the experiencial bulding blocks... learning how to exist in the real world, finding the difference between pleasure and pain, if even rudimentary.

From the first suckling of milk to the initial slap that gets it crying, it is developing, learning, experiencing clor, light, sound, and taking that in and gaining the initial empircal vocabulary for the CONSTRUCTION of a personality.

To put it another way, it is just barely beginning how to draw the letter "A," and will be stuck on that letter for quite some time, but learning how to do that is one of the first steps to writing "Hamlet," so to speak.

You could claim it experiences in the womb, though, as soon as it has sensory organs. Those people who recommend playing classical music when you're pregnant seem to think so.

obiwanobiwan - Is a person (adult for the sake of argument) in a vegative state (i.e. lacking any personality whatsoever) still human per your definition? Why or why not?

@stukus:

I believe there is a mind serperatefrom the body, in that your emprically-constructed being is, yes, gained through the body and the senses, but can, logically, operate outside the body.

Suppose a theoretical (for how much longer is anyone's guess, they are inching closer and closer) scenario in which memories may be transferred from a mind with a dead/severely paralyzed body, whichever you prefer.

The memories, the acquired and accumulated knowledge and goals and diseries and dislikes and beliefs and personal memories and relationships, all transferred to another "brain."

THAT is the mind, and it is in a new body.

A body is but the capsule and the instruments; the mind is the scientist using those instruments to gain knowledge, and in the future, if an instrument BREAKS... we already swap out "broekn" lungs, livers, kidneys, hearts... why not whole bodies someday, if we could "transfer" the mind?

(If you're a Star Trek fan, think Spock- dead body, puts his mind/katra in Bones, and then gets a new body, mind goes back in... Spock's reborn. You can argue the "katra" is closer to a soul than a mind, but it's close enough, I think to suit the idea...)

@stukus:

I have a double response to your idea with experiences in the womb.

I would respond that from the begining to second trimester, the fetus is still not human, it is not viable, ie, cannot survive or experience outside the body. Whatever might be said about the form "experiencing" in the womb, it is still not HUMAN experience, as it is both not yet of human form and not in a human setting (I'm sure that sounds vague and you'll have an objection, but once you raise it, maybe I can make my point better in response, if that reason does not suffice.)

@nola2172:

Yes, the vegitative state person WOULD be a person, a human being, because they are, essentially a broken mind, but still a mind. The fact that they are in a vegitative state is sad, but that they had prior experience means that they HAVE a personality and a prior store of empirical data, they are simply in a broken body/mind.

If, theoretically, they could get a NEW body, as in the "mind transfer" thought experiment, then they could, logically, be able to show that trapped-in persona again, and function so as to again be empirical and gather more data and more "personality," through experience.

Of course unborn babies have experiences.

As an example, the first time my wife felt my first born son was when we went to see Jurassic Park. Was quite a shock to her, but then apparently the noise of the movie was a bit of a shock to him. I suppose you might say that was just my wife's adrenaline having an affect and maybe it was. Still a fun story.

Nonetheless, unborn babies do have sensory organs and therefore do have experiences. I'm not sure at what stage of the pregnancy the first sense develops, but babies aren't coming out of the womb without experience.

By the way, you don't have to have an abortion to spare a woman's life who isn't in a good position to raise a child. There are plenty of parents looking to adopt. Keeping the baby when you aren't capable of caring is selfish. Aborting the baby is a thousand times more selfish.

obiwan, you realize that Blank Slate empiricism has been pretty well completely disproven by genetics and neuroscience? Sensory input is no doubt invaluable and experience definitely has a large role to play in shaping who you are... but babies are imbued with a very significant amount of instinct and indeed, personality at birth.

Also, I doubt very much that you could do a mind transplant... Neuroscience has shown that the mind is quite inseparable from the brain, the brain is not just some blob of meat by which the insubstantial mind controls the body. It's not just the cockpit, it's the pilot too. Just a short look at the sorts of disorders that can result from lesions to different areas of the brain show this quite well as it is plain that the resulting deficit is not simply a deficit of the connection between mind and body but is clearly a deficit of the mind.

"it is still not HUMAN experience"

:D What IS Human experience then? The womb is the one experience that every single person has taken part in, so how can you classify it as not human?

Studies show that if you read to an unborn baby, they will recognize your voice and learn to be comforted by it after they are born. So I think there are definite parts of the personality being developed there.

"cannot survive or experience outside the body"

Then wouldn't you have to also classify older people, coma patients, young children, and other groups as inhuman, since they would not be able to survive by themselves?

@Alderian:

Admittedly I have never had, nor do I ever hope to have, a child (I'd make a rotten parent or husband lol) but I would ask how you KNOW the baby was "experiencing" Jurrasic Park by moving, as opposed to it being a mere physical response to stimuli inside the womb, and thus NOT experience in the human world (my defining THAT as life outside the womb and viable.)

Leading to my secondary reason why I do not consider it a human child/unborn child:

The viability question.

Until the second trimester, the baby is NOT viable outside the woimb, is entirely dependant on ANOTHER life form, not its own... in other words, it is, at that stage, more a part of the mother that can POTENTIALLY become a life form than a seperate life form in its own right.



As for the adoption question, I find THAT unethical, for a number of reasons. Forcing the mother to carry something she does not wish to have that WILL have an ENORMOUS impact on her life, even if she gave it up for adoption, is a violation of natural rights; if this woman has a job she needs to live and no one to turn to, how can you tell her to not work (assume her line of work is one in which she cannot work while in the later stages of pregnancy or immediately afterwrds) you are potentially economically and developmentally crippling this woman.

Further, suppose she gives birth and its a rape baby- the psychological trauma...

And after THAT, assume the "best" case, not a rape baby and she gives birth and gives it away- that child could then potentially spend its life in foster care or a bad situation, and could be scarred by not knowing its original mother; the mother, too, can suffer psychologically.

I fail to see, again, why with all that above a woman and potentially ANOTHER life form should have to undergo such trauma, hurting themselves and potentially others.

@Chrispminis:

Genetics is all well and good, its the hardware, so to speak-

Experience is stil the software, that which makes us truly unique from ourselves and other beings.

A zebra cannot have human experiences (obviously of the higher natures, such as reading Shakespeare or having this discussion at all...)

Imagine a baby that has just genetics and no experiences- it will NOT be a mind.

@Hunter49r:

Not at all, of course THEY are human beings. :)

They are old and feeble, but they can still surive- they will survive BETTER with others assisting, obviously, but they can still literally live on their own.

And the coma patients... see above what I said about the vegitative state patients. ;)

"Admittedly I have never had, nor do I ever hope to have, a child (I'd make a rotten parent or husband lol) but I would ask how you KNOW the baby was "experiencing" Jurrasic Park by moving, as opposed to it being a mere physical response to stimuli inside the womb, and thus NOT experience in the human world (my defining THAT as life outside the womb and viable.)"

Well of course you can't see inside anybody's mind to be completely sure that anybody but yourself is really experiencing anything. But I'm guessing you're not a solipsist? I imagine that Alderian is inferring that his baby experienced Jurassic Park in the same way we all infer that other humans are capable of experience; through our inductive logic and emphatic capacity to notice that others are behaving in a way that is consistent with the hypothesis that they too are capable of subjective experience.

oh, ok . I must have missed that. :)
I feel like we just had an abortion debate a few weeks ago. :/


-So, What about the Human heart? Could the heart really be where the 'soul' is located, after being taught in elementary school that it was just a muscle and that all thinking was done in your brain. There is evidence that the heart can retain memories after a transplant, and it might be able to determine some thought processes. I think that this is very strange, and makes me want to become a donor so that I can test this out when I die (my heart being donated to someone else, and then I use them as my slave, lol). :D And if this proves to be true, are heart transplants then unethical?

"in the same way we all infer that other humans are capable of experience"

Yes- but my point is that they are not human, in my argument, and so I am saying something non-human cannot have a human experience; even something like eating is one kind of experience for a zebra, one for a fetus... and one for a human being.

I will, however, ad one caveat, as I see it as logical and potentially sound:

Out of curiosity, at the time of Jurassic Park, was the life form "viable," ie, it was at the stage of development where it could survive outside the womb?

At THAT point, I might be winning to concede that at THAT point, since it IS developed enough to be, technically, outside the womb and experiencing as a human baby does, it COULD, then, have been having an empirical experience, and if THAT is the case...

I might say that Viable Fetuses ARE human beings, albeit rudamentary and babies in the truest form.

But if not, I still hold it is merely a physical response to the womb and not developed to the point of being a baby.

Ie... I will CERTAINLY hold my belief that a cluster of 24 or cells a human being does not make...

@obiwan, can't you imagine a hypothetical scenario where you *can't* transfer the mind outside the body? I don't think making stuff up really counts.

es, you could theoretically transfer certain data into a machine, but our mind is a result of its time in the body, and so long as there is a body, it is completely linked. If the original human stayed alive, he and the machine mind would act differently, I believe. Besides, even if that scenario, the machine is the body. Can you have a mind without a medium? If so, I'd like to know how. You need some sort of data storage, and way for everything to interact. If the mind and body are separate, how can skull injuries change personalities so much? How many things seem like a good idea at the time when a cute girl is having an affect on your body? Even just ambient temperature can have a massive affect on personality.

obiwan, that's a serious misunderstanding of genetics. In no way can it be metaphorically compared to the hardware of a computer. By no means is your body or mind mechanically determined by your genetics, but that doesn't mean that the mind is not inextricable from genetic influence. Your personality is definitely affected by your genetics. Your genetics also represents true uniqueness (outside of identical twins) in the sense that it is a completely new and unprecedented combination of base pairs. Your experiences also contribute to your uniqueness, but perhaps more important to what makes you unique is how you respond to different experiences compared to others.

I'm not sure what you mean by bringing in the zebra. Of course a zebra doesn't have human experience... it's a zebra. That's just true by definition. I would argue that a zebra does have the capacity for subjective experience. If you're comparing zebras and humans then I would say that genetics is much more important to the difference between zebras and humans than their experiences are, since it is their genetics that create the fundamental difference in mental capacity, ecological niche, and behaviour. It's not like you could try to raise a zebra as a human or a human as a zebra and expect them to be something they are not through sheer force of experience.

I'm on my cell so keeping it short. If I would be shocked if somebody did it to their pet, then I'm just as shocked doing it to a fetus. Both feel pain and inflicting that pain is criminal regardless if the fetus is a human life or not. It's simple and has to do with our being humane not the fetus being human.

@Hunter49r:

I... fail to see your point lol... sorry, about the heart?

It's a replaceable part- albeit an extremely IMPORTANT replaceable part, but its not like the mind, irreplaceable and distinct to the individual as we have all had distinct life experiences, even identical twins have had different lives and different stimuli, and so are different people through empirically-gained personas.

I have no idea if the heart CAN retain memories...

But even if it CAN, I find that irrelevant, how can a heart transplant be unethical- if a heart is being transplanted it means the host it had has died and so is no longer of use in that body and will die if left in that body, no reason to let it die.

Human life isn't a question of philosophy, it is a question of Biology. Life clearly begins at conception. History teaches us that arbitrarily classifying people as "not human" is very, very dangerous.

@obiwan

The response to Stukus is circular reasoning. The assumption that a fetus isn't human implies experiences in the fetal environment aren't human experiences implies a fetus doesn't have human experiences which is then used to claim a fetus isn't human.

obiwanobiwan - In your previous post, the logic you use runs into a pretty clear problem in which you are human at one point in the womb but were not so 3 seconds prior even though your being is pretty much unchanged over that period of time. This is essentially the case all the way back to conception, which is, however, a fundamental change in being.

@obiwan, I don't think you're reasoning about fetuses is very sound. Human experiences make us human. Fetuses aren't human so they can't have human experiences so they're not human. Am I missing something?

Damn you BernieAnderson! Beat me to it...

@stukus:

I find thought experiments, particularly those that are very feasible (as I said before, they are getting clsoer to the mind-transfer idea... cloning was oince science fiction only now...) fine to work with.

But even if you don't, take the mind and body- are they linked?
Yes.
Can the body affect the mind?
Yes?
Can the mind affect the body?
Yes.
Would we need extraordinary measures to seperate the two?
Yes.

Is it FEASIBLE that we can?

Yes.

"define WHAT IS A HUMAN LIFE AND IDENTIFIED ENTITY" - all definitions of this are simple human value judgements - thus all are equivalent.

We may personally find some definitions disagreeable. I think that pretending this definition is a simple matter is neither valid nor useful.

Science can not tell us that 'human life' should be protected - that is a value judgement - science can only tell us how things happen (cells divide and begin to differentiate) it say nothing about what we SHOULD do.

So we can use science to inform us about HOW some cells become what we generally consider a PERSON but not where along this process they become WORTH protecting as an IDENTIFIED ENTITY - (identifying humans as entities is useful for various social reasons)

@obiwan, but there's always A body, isn't there? The mind can't exist without atoms, can it?

Hunter, can you please link me the evidence that the heart retains memories and thought processes? I'm extremely skeptical because I can't think of any mechanism by which this would be possible.

obiwan, you can't change reality with your definitions. You can call a foetus a non-human and say that therefore any experience it has is not human experience, but I could simply say that you're not human and your experience is not human experience and it would hold as much validity. But I can't just define you away. The fact remains that you do have experience, even if I define it as non-human experience, and it is comparable to my own experience in many ways such that my internal moral sense would grant you moral consideration. If a third trimester foetus is capable of experience and suffering, it doesn't matter what you call it, it simply matters what moral consideration you give it.

You're also mixing up viability with neurological development. A baby doesn't gain the capacity for subjective experience just because it's viable... it gains the capacity through the process of neural development. There's no clear cut point, but I would say that the foetus probably has rudimentary sensory experiences before it is viable.

The viability claim attempts to define life by the level of technology externally available. This doesn't seem to make any sense.

Suppose a person invents a medical device that moves back the viability threshold by two weeks, do thousands of fetuses around the world suddenly gain life? Conversely, suppose a woman whose fetus had reached external viability gets stranded on an island without medical care available. Does the fetus go from living to nonliving?