South Dakota is introducing a bill that will ban abortion

[Rogan Josh]

Originally posted by Elok
Geez. "Source" my arse. Try common sense. It's not even possible for infants to be self-aware. When they first come out, they can barely see, their infamiliarity with their own bodies essentially cripples their sense of touch, and they have absolutely no experience with varying conditions that would let them comprehend the concept of sensory data as a clue to the larger world. They're used to sounds diffused by amniotic fluid, the dim and murky light of the womb, the walls of a placenta, and not having to do a single thing to exist. They have no meaningful environment to interact with and learn from until they come out, whereupon they are thrust into chaos. How, from that input, are they supposed to derive the existence of the self? Cogito ergo sum?

Self-awareness has nothing to do with sensory perception. All you are saying is that their minds are trapped in a suffieciently 'alien' environment that they are not able to express their desires in an 'intelligent' manner. But they can still think.

Would you stop being human if we put you in an alien environment where you didn't know what the hell was going on?

[DaShi]

At what point does God breath a soul into the fetus? I think that should be the determining factor. At least for religious types.

[Elok]

Well, DaShi, we can't base laws on "when the soul enters the body," so I ignore the question altogether. Besides, I'm Orthodox. The body, not just the soul, is human to me.

And, uh, Rogan...you're missing the point, I think. Or something. It's too early in the morning to explain it to you. It'll have to suffice to say that all knowledge and understanding is derived from context, and without any sort of meaningful stimulation, the fetus cannot learn. Unless you think the fetus sits there floating in the womb and somehow deduces the possible existence of other lifeforms in the universe?

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Elok
I said nothing about expertise, only that my own experiences indicate that children aren't aware at that age.

You expect me to accept your experiences despite the fact that they contradict the experiments conducted by experts in the field. When you put your opinion on the same level as an expert opinion, then you are implicitly claiming expertise. Similarly, when you claim that you don't need to support your position ("'Source' my arse'), then you are making an implicit appeal to your supposed expertise. The fact that you know next to nothing about infant cognition causes me to doubt your claims in other fields as well -- when five minutes of Googling is been sufficient to disprove your scientific claims, then it does not speak well for future claims that you make.

A child in the womb probably does not hear anything more than muffled sounds and sees little.

I know that I'm being naive in asking you this, but do you have any support for your claim (besides some sort of appeal to your experiences as a fetus)? These bald assertions are getting tiresome.

Oh, and what questions haven't I answered?

Question1:

Originally posted by loinburger
Does this mean that you would have no qualms about wantonly killing a member of a sentient non-human species?

Question2:

Also, how would you respond to the dilemma that I posed to Ben in this post; which Elok in the dilemma possess "humanity"?

Question3 (an implicit question, and for that I apologize -- if you can't recognize an explicit interrogative statement with a question mark at the end of it, then how can you be expected to recognize an implicit interrogative statement without a question mark at the end of it?):

If you can define a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for determining an entity's sentience, then I'm all ears.

Question4 (again, an implicit question):

If you dispute the necessary (but insufficient) condition that I have given, then I'm all ears.

You ignored two of my questions, and instead attacked me for asking you to substantiate your claim, making an appeal to your supposed expertise on the matter (I was not aware that it is possible to nullify data collected in a scientific experiment with a slapped together "thought experiment," but such is life). Furthermore, I asked you to define a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for determining sentience if you were going to continue to dispute the set of conditions that I provided earlier, yet you have not done so.

Originally posted by Elok
I said nothing of the "tautology" you cite; I said that the importance of humanity is something more than brain function alone. What it is, I don't know and hardly care.

So you made an assertion and failed to support it in any way. If you're uncomfortable with my calling it a tautology, then I'll call it a bald assertion. Happy now?

I shot a guy with a tranquilizer dart, stripped him naked, stuck him in a cage and started poking him in the butt with a pointy stick in increasingly frequent intervals.

So a fetus has the same level of awareness as an unconscious person? Unless you mean to imply that sentience can be shut off with a tranquilizer dart, then your inane thought experiment actually implies that you accept the sentience of a fetus.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by DaShi
At what point does God breath a soul into the fetus? I think that should be the determining factor. At least for religious types.

No one has been able to answer that question to anyones satisfaction thus far. For arguements sake, I'll assume you mean when does it become human.

[SpencerH]

Note to self:

Never debate philosophical-type stuff with loinburger without thorough preparation and knowledge of the subject. He's too good at that logic-type stuff. Maybe he's spock incarnate.

[Boris Godunov]

loinburger in full swing is a beautiful, frightening thing, aye. You should have seen him corner Lincoln in the DNA/information argument. In a few posts he managed to shred the logical basis of Lincoln's self-published book.

[Elok]

I did answer most of those questions. How the soul originates is unknown to me, and as far as I'm concerned irrelevant to a legal argument. A sentient non-human species probably has its own rights, but I would likely not give them the same deference I give humans. I implied the answer with my repeated statements that intelligence is not the key concern. I thought the question was pretty asinine, or else rhetorical, so I ignored it. I'm not talking about conditions for sentience; it's not easily definable, and again not relevant to my concerns. Humans are humans, not organic computers valuable for their processing power. I did dispute the crap you presented, you just apparently didn't get it. All the huffy stuff you threw at me didn't seem important, especially not when it takes such a ridiculous form as the "study" you linked to (my second-to-last post was a PARODY of the assumptions they made. Man, I thought you were smarter than that).

There's not necessarily any "memory" going on in that example. They seemed to have assumed that the child was communicating with them, or something like that, and replies more quickly after repeated impulses. More likely it jerks its leg in irritation the first time, and as it is repeatedly bothered it gets more and more sensitive to the noise. Certainly that's a lot more likely than the child hearing the noise, assuming it has meaning, and deliberately responding to it. Or whatever they implied was happening. If that pile of gibberish is "evidence," I'm a squirrel. It can come from a scientific "test" and still be nonsense, you know...giving blind trust to religious doctrine is one thing, but worshipping any idjit thing that's labelled "science" is just sad. Ever hear of Cold Fusion?

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Elok
How the soul originates is unknown to me, and as far as I'm concerned irrelevant to a legal argument.

Thanks for sharing, but I never asked how the soul originates.

A sentient non-human species probably has its own rights, but I would likely not give them the same deference I give humans.

How would you go about determining which species deserve rights and which do not? Are you going to count their chomosomes or something?

I implied the answer with my repeated statements that intelligence is not the key concern.

You've never substantiated these repeated statements -- merely made bald assertions. I was hoping that you might get around to supporting your argument one of these days, but instead you've simply kept to your inane "humans have rights because of their humanity" argument.

I thought the question was pretty asinine, or else rhetorical, so I ignored it.

Which question? You ignored more than one.

I did dispute the crap you presented, you just apparently didn't get it. All the huffy stuff you threw at me didn't seem important, especially not when it takes such a ridiculous form as the "study" you linked to

Excuse me for supporting my position. Would you prefer that I simply make bald assertions?

(my second-to-last post was a PARODY of the assumptions they made. Man, I thought you were smarter than that).

Forgive me. I thought that you were posing a thought experiment, not acting like a douche bag.

There's not necessarily any "memory" going on in that example. They seemed to have assumed that the child was communicating with them, or something like that, and replies more quickly after repeated impulses.

You obviously haven't even read the article. Either that, or you simply lack the ability to comprehend it. The researchers made no reference to "communication," and the presence of memory was detected by the child failing to respond to repeated impulses, not by the child responding more quickly to repeated impulses.


It would help your position if you could provide some justification to your arbitrarily assigning rights to one set of entities while you withhold them from another. I'm sorry, but "Humans have rights because of their humanity, and I'm not going to define 'humanity' because I'm a moral incompetent" is not going to cut it, any more than "Squirrels have rights because of their squirriliness, where 'squirriliness' is a meaningless term."

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by loinburger
How would you go about determining which species deserve rights and which do not? Are you going to count their chomosomes or something?

From what I've read, none of you have adequately defined what sentience is or when an organism achieves it. So how is that a relevent question when even you don't seem to be able to answer it?

[aneeshm]

Re: South Dakota is introducing a bill that will ban abortion

Originally posted by boann
... that the life of a human being begins when the ovum is fertilized by male sperm

Technically , could it be claimed in court that sperm are themselves sexless as a cell type , and thus , proceedings be initiated under the animal rights laws (if any) protecting animal or organism rights .

[loinburger]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
From what I've read, none of you have adequately defined what sentience is or when an organism achieves it. So how is that a relevent question when even you don't seem to be able to answer it?

I said that I do not believe that it is possible to establish the sentience of a single organism. However, I do believe that it is possible to establish the sentience (or, more specifically, the degree of personhood) of a species as a whole -- it's just that nobody ever asked me to propose a means of determining whether an entire species is a "sentient species."

The degree to which a species is capable of reciprocation determines the degree to which a member of that species is capable of being a rights-bearing entity. So, effectively, a species' "sentience" is the measure of that species' ability to communicate abstract concepts (e.g., laws). That's why we buy dolphin-safe tuna at the store and not tuna-safe dolphin -- dolphins have demonstrated that they are capable of limited reciprocation with humans (there are still vast language and environmental barriers, of course, which is why nobody suggests that dolphins deserve, e.g., the right to vote), while tuna have not. In effect, dolphins are treated as sentient or semi-sentient, while tuna are treated as non-sentient.

[Elok]

On reflection, I think I do owe you an apology for my recent rudeness. I'm just irritated, since we seem to be speaking two different language.

With that said, I've reread the study, and you're right (I only skimmed it before, and I was in an obnoxious mood), but it still doesn't assert anything meaningful for our purposes. The kid stops "responding" after a while, but that doesn't imply memory as such; the child's primitive nervous systems could have been overwhelmed somehow, it could be a natural reflex that eventually exhausted itself-to call that "memory" in an intellectual sense, that the child is saying to itself, "oh, that stupid noise again! Maybe if I ignore it it'll go away!" is jumping to conclusions.

I thought your dilemma to Ben had something to do with clones and souls, hence the thing about the origin of the soul. Were you referring to a different quandary?

With the straightening-up out of the way, I called my arguments "thought experiments" in an admittedly self-aggrandizing nod to Albert Einstein's "thought experiments," where he imagined himself running alongside a wave of light and examined the problems with that situation. There, as with the example of fetuses in the womb, the idea is to conjecture on a subject that cannot be reliably tested by current science. While I was being a jerk, I did accidentally have a point, so to speak, in that there doesn't seem to be any way to accurately test "fetal cognition" until we learn to interpret brain waves and hook a kid up to an EEG in utero. Your study observes "habituation" and calls it memory, but that's sketchy.

Beyond that, I'm not trying to say anything about the origin of human rights, only that positing reasoning ability as a requirement for humanity is a very dangerous argument. To use your example, I imagine the very brightest dolphins are smarter than the very dumbest non-retarded humans, in terms of pure reasoning ability. Certainly other great apes have been shown to be just as smart as a man. That doesn't mean retarded people deserve no more attention than ensuring they don't get ground in with our tuna, does it? We don't watch out for other humans because of their IQ, we do it because they're our species and we protect our own. The fetus, having a full and viable set of chromosomes, can safely said to be human, and as its chromosomes are not those of its mother, to call it "part of her body" doesn't hold up. They're members of the human race, and that's reason enough for me.

Hopefully I make more sense now that I'm not seeing red. Again, apologies.

[Ben Kenobi]

With the proposed legislation in South Dakota, how are cases of Ectopic pregnancy to be considered?

Good question.

Far as I can tell, they would not be considered abortions, since the intent is not to kill the child, but to save the life of the mother.

The S. Dakota case includes an exemption for the life, but not for the 'health' of the mother which has been used in the past to justify any and all abortions.

[Ben Kenobi]

I think it's a good move but there are no exceptions for rape, malformations and mother's life at risk

FALSE!

The bill specifically provides for the life, but not health of the woman.