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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:35
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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?
The mind needs stimuli to develop in any way; even abstract imagination has to use components of experienced phenomena in unusual combinations, as in mythological creatures composed of several normal animal parts, or sci-fi writers who posit insectoid races with hive minds. Infants have no stimulus to work with until they emerge. With no concept of "other," how exactly are they going to understand the idea "me?" You're arguing an absurdity if you think that's possible. Don't ask me to prove to you that grass is green. Prove that it isn't. Sorry, but I get kinda touchy about people accusing me of Bald Assertions for not citing an NIH study to support the painfully obvious.
And a diploid cell is "human" because it has the full set of genes needed. While species are defined in terms of other things besides chromosome count, human cells with an unusual number of chromosomes are not viable as independent humans. The exception is Klinefelter's syndrome, which is caused by extra sex chromosomes. People with Klinefelter's can live, but they're androgynous, frequently retarded, and are sterile. I'm not saying they aren't human, only that 46 chromosomes appears to be the norm for human life, and a sperm cell is definitely not a full human being.
And I said nothing about souls, only that humanity is best defined only as itself. It's no business of the law what has a soul and what doesn't, though I oppose cloning for any reason as an assault on human rights. Human rights can't be "proven," but I err on the side of caution.
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:35
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Elok: A fetus experiences stimuli while in the womb.
Source
quote:
§ 100 In contrast to the foetal sensory neurons, the foetal motor neurons hypofunction. Thus, when foetal limbic neurons are excited by rejecting womb stimuli and this excitation is transmitted to motor neurons, the latter react very little or not at all. Consequently, the excitation is 'stored' within the neurons. The Sessions show that this 'stored excitation' constitutes a permanent source of potential internal stimuli which, when reactivated, result in extremely strong 'activation' (see R10 p.41). |
Source
quote:
Scientists in Holland say that babies develop short and long-term memories while still in the womb.
...
Cathelijne van Heteren, who carried out the study at the University Hospital in Maastricht, said: "From our study we can conclude that foetuses have a short-term memory of at least ten minutes and a long-term memory of at least 24 hours.
"Foetuses are able to memorise the stimuli in the womb, although they may need more than one stimulus to establish recognition." |
Apparently your supposed expertise in the subject of fetal biology is just as well-supported as your supposed expertise in the subjects of sentience and infant cognition.
That being said, you completely ignored the bulk of my questions. Instead, you've simply asserted or reasserted your expertise in a variety of fields in an attempt to avoid having to give any tangible support to your position, and reiterated your tautological "humans are different from other animals because other animals aren't human" justification for the existence of human rights. I don't see any point to my continuing to bash my head against a wall.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:35
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And yet you're "bashing your head against the wall" right now? I said nothing about expertise, only that my own experiences indicate that children aren't aware at that age. Looking back, I seem to have implied that I "knew" about experiences in the womb; sorry for giving that impression. If you want to be pedantic, it was merely a thought experiment.
And I said meaningful stimulus in the natural environment. Quite possibly an infant who is bombarded frequently by sonic pulsations in utero will become aware, but that is hardly ordinary. A child in the womb probably does not hear anything more than muffled sounds and sees little. I'm not arguing against biological capability, only that "self-awareness" comes from experiences that infants in the womb don't have. Hence they have "the cognitive function of a gerbil" for all intents and purposes, to repeat those ill-fated words.
Claro? Oh, and what questions haven't I answered? 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. Perhaps there isn't anything clear at all, and we must only look out for our own species, in which case any explanation will do as an excuse.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:35
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 I just read that second study you offered more carefully, and decided to try a followup experiment. 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. At first, he needed multiple pokings before he responded by twitching his leg. Over time, however, he apparently learned to recognize the stimulus, and responded to it in more meaningful ways, twitching almost instantly when he was touched and even turning the spot where I was poking him red and bleeding a little to show me he got the message. It appears that not only fetuses, but unconscious adults, are capable of learning!
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Rogan Josh
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quote:
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?
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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?
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:35
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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?
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:35
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quote:
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.
quote:
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.
quote:
Oh, and what questions haven't I answered? |
Question1:
quote:
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:
quote:
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?):
quote:
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):
quote:
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.
quote:
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?
quote:
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.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:35
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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?
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:35
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quote:
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.
quote:
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?
quote:
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.
quote:
I thought the question was pretty asinine, or else rhetorical, so I ignored it. |
Which question? You ignored more than one.
quote:
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?
quote:
(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.
quote:
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."
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loinburger
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Sweet Sauce Jones
Jul 1999
time: 00:35
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quote:
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.
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Elok
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Land of Ramen Dragons
Mar 2003
time: 00:35
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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. 
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09-04-2004 00:22
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