Considering that you are completely wrong, yes.
I don’t know if these “dramatic changes” are anything more than what’s to be expected (reactions to first breath, blinding light, lots of noise etc.), but I’m interested in why you think they’re so significant. Cite?
If attempting to understand why human life should be valued and what makes life human results in devaluing it, so be it.
Obviously there is a continuum of ‘taking over’, and we must first determine where on that continuum the current situation lies. But really, if you disagree, do you mind telling me some non-emotional reasons for calling a newborn definitively a person?
Thanks for that link. By rules of thumb do you mean a simpler categorization of human/nonhuman rather than the gradations I asked about?
But there isn’t a fundamental change in the physical baby, as far as I’m aware (mswas is claiming otherwise), just in it’s location relative to the mother. Yes, that allows for easier interaction with the baby, but does that really affect the baby’s fundamental personhood?
I personally think that 100% of people are nothing more than deterministic automatons (though capable of more than just mimicry), and yet I can accept that being a complex machine and personhood are not mutually exclusive.
At that point, it can survive unassisted. Now, not for long, sure. Babies need frequent, near constant care from their parents. But they do not require constant (as in, every single second, without pause) assistance from another person. If a baby is not taken care of for a period of 1.5 minutes, it won’t die due to neglect. But if a fetus is apperified out of the womb for 1.5 minutes, it will probably die, depending on how far along it is. Certainly, an early fetus would die.
What that means is that a birthed baby has some measure of autonomy at that point. Not much autonomy, granted, but there is a small amount of it. A baby can do things by itself. A fetus can’t.
And if we define a person as an autonomous human*, then a baby most definitely qualifies, while a(n early?) fetus does not.
*A very simplistic version of the most accepted definition of person currently.
Oh? Prove that you are a person.
What’s to be expected? You mean what’s to be expected from a person who has just been born?
Well it seems like we need a strict delineator. Human beings are people. If we treat it differently then it opens up a whole other can of worms. Not too long ago negroes were not considered people.
So what order of complexity of a machine imparts personhood?
I think so. I had in mind examples like “Birth” or “Third Trimester” or “26th week”. The underlying phenomenon is a continuum. That does not imply that we can’t draw lines somewhere, though it makes the policy decision more challenging.
The justification for those lines should be scientific and biologically based, IMO. But I acknowledge that this POV is controversial in this context.
I opine that mswas misperceives his fellow posters, btw (or more likely exaggerates). After all, no chatterbot has yet to pass the Turing test. The kneejerk cynicism that prompted his remark on his perceptions of others sentience was not especially original or substantive. <Translation: somebody always makes that lame argument when the discussion turns to human vs. animal or fetal intelligence.>
Is there a quantitative limit whereby an argument has been advanced so many times that it suddenly becomes invalid?
1+1=2 is an overused argument too. I guess it is no longer true either. ;p
Well Measure for Measure’s link has Carl Sagan himself disagreeing with this logic. Let me see: if your statement ‘a person is an autonomous human’ is true, lets see if the inverse holds up. ‘A non autonomous human (or autonomous non human or non autonomous non human :p) is not a person’. Is Stephen Hawking sans equipment not a person?
To be fair, usually it’s posed as a mere unsubstantiated grumble: mswas is at least provided some followup.
Incidentally, I now see from wikipedia that some chatterbots have passed the Turing Test in a limited way. Turing test - Wikipedia For our purposes though, I’d want the chatterbot to pass the test reliably: furthermore it would constitute a necessary though not sufficient test for personhood.
Let me clarify: is the ability to survive outside of the womb indicative of personhood? The development of organs (besides the brain) and limbs and such are hardly defining factors of personhood. like MfM said, the brain and the mind it houses is more “human” than the rest of the body combined. If a fetus were to prematurely develop an advanced intelligence, yet could not survive out of the womb, would it not yet be a person?
Much of Western literature is about this very subject. ‘Til We Have Faces’ by C.S. Lewis is an interesting one on this subject. The basic idea is that one has to EARN their personhood. And the earning of personhood is a core tenet of Christianity, and thus a central theme of Western society.
But the answer is actually quite simple. Personhood is based off of potential, not actuality. The idea that someone must ‘become’ a person is a well-worn philosophical idea. But we recognize that every baby has the potential to become a person, and that is what is being protected by law. I do not think there is a hard set date as to when one becomes philosophically, a person. I think a recognition of personal responsibility is key to becoming a person, and I notice a distinct lack of that trait even amongst adults who are older than I am. They are still lead around by their hungers, incapable of controlling their basic bodily urges. Simple organisms are driven by the need to feed and procreate. If that is all that drives you, then can you be considered to actually be a person? Should we consider those who eat themselves into the grave to be people? What about those who drink themselves there? What about those who cannot control their libido, and rape, or are simply promiscuous dropping children that they cannot feed and care for left and right?
It is specifically because the criteria for personhood can be so subjective, that we have adopted a hard physical limit. The exit from the womb. Because the exit from the womb represents the road toward physical autonomy. (such as it is, no organism is truly autonomous) We recognize the right to Life, Liberty and the PURSUIT of Happiness. The Pursuit is key. I don’t mean hedonic happiness as in pleasure. I mean the satisfaction in a purposeful life. A life lived with meaning and purpose, and not one lived simply bouncing around as flotsam in the tidal flow. It is this right to the PURSUIT of Happiness that supplies the infant with implied personhood, even if they have no yet actually earned a personality.
Though, I think a lot of people have misconceptions about infants. My daughter came out of the womb and looked me in the eye. We bonded immediately upon birth. She tracked voices and looked at whoever the speaker was, while we were still in the birthing room. This idea that everything is simply a blinding morass to an infant is a bit of an urban legend. Infants are born with more neurons than we as adult actually have, and they are forming connections at a rapid clip, immediately upon birth. Certain cognitive functions were developed while still in the womb.
From wikipedia:
If Stephen Hawking had no access to medical equipment, yes, he would probably be dead. (And that’s not the inverse, that’s the contrapositive.)
Unfortunately, yes. In order for us to define someone else’s intelligence, it must be showable in some way. Imaginary hyper-intelligent fetuses are not able to demonstrate their intelligence primarily because they cannot survive out of the womb. Does this potentially mean defining a person as a non-person? Potentially. However, we are defining other people from our point of view, meaning that we can’t get it perfect.
We’re arriving at the old tree-falls-in-a-forest paradox. “If a human has a soul, but cannot express it, is he really a person?”
And I say no, not legally, anyway. Because the law works on things that are demonstrable. If we have no evidence for it, then ruling that it exists is illogical.
Eh, I was going within the history of Western Jurisprudence, and picking an arbitrary post-birth ceremony. You want to cover exposing babies on a hill, we can, but the point being that the period where a baby is considered a human does have a defined range. It’s just wider than most people think it is, historically.
The question is, does anyone have a pre-quickening post-2 years old date they want to add into the span we’re discussing, or is this span wide enough to hammer down on, now we have it set?
Why stop at Bob’s living cells? Why not just come out and say all we are is a system of highly organized molecules? Dead matter. Because, we feel, a priori, that we’re somehow more than that.
Everything we know about a functioning human being, while reliant on living cellular tissue, is that Bob is something more than the sum of his parts. Those parts have to interact, transmit information, metabolize fuel into energy, and spread oxygen throughout the whole system. Out of all that, a self organizing and replenishing system arises, and eventually a mind will surface. Dismembering Bob into his trillion or so constituent cells destroys who we call Bob. So, In this case, Dismembered Bob is 100% dead; even if his cells are kept alive. Good for the cells… bad for Bob.
Wait, that made complete sense in my head… (and that inverse thing headslap). Well as long as we’re arguing in hypotheticals, a baby without help is just as dead as Stephen Hawking without help. Which is more of a person for the days or hours that remain?
This is dodging the question. Forget the problem of how, just say that we know. How can you make the claim that a mindless lump of flesh is more human than a thinking lump because it can survive a little longer on its own?
That’s a trick question. A person’s personhood (at least on the levels we’re talking about) is binary–either they’re legally a person, or they aren’t. You’re conflating that with a value judgment about the person’s life.
Two things: first, a baby is not mindless. It may not have the same level of self awareness as a 5-year old, or an adult, but it has some level of awareness and self awareness.
Second: the courts don’t operate on faith, and neither should we. If there’s no way to know that something has a soul, then it effectively doesn’t for our purposes. That is critical to our definition of personhood and you can’t simply take it out of the equation! Consider someone who is brain dead. This is someone whose brain is so deteriorated that the body cannot survive without assistance, and cannot communicate in any way, shape, or form. Is there still a soul in there? Maybe. Maybe not. But it doesn’t matter, because there is no way for anyone to perceive it. So we consider them dead.
Point being, a ‘hyper intelligent fetus’ literally CANNOT exist from our point of view, unless it can communicate with us somehow.
Well I think we’ve been talking past each other a bit then. I thought this was a discussion deliberately removed from legalities and convention, and more to do with what fundamentally makes a person and when. Hence the value judgments. As for this one last point though:
This at least can be remedied with the right observational tools and knowledge. The fetus doesn’t have to be an active participant. Mental activity is nowhere near as intangible as a soul.
In Judaism it is the bris where the name is given. However, I think this custom came from the understanding that many babies died in the first days of life, and that the solemn event of giving a name was going to be wasted unless you waited some period of time to be more sure that the baby was going to make it. I didn’t have all that much to do with abandoning children on hillsides.
Have you ever been at a birth? After the baby emerges and the cord is cut, it is an independent entity, breathing by itself, crying, seeing, grasping, living outside the mother. And of course it is stimulated in ways it never was before. That’s a pretty fundamental change.
I can buy personhood being assigned somewhere between the development of brain waves as Sagan said and viability as John Mace suggested. I’m not aware of cases where a fetus who could live on its own was aborted, are you?
Present day AI/chat programs aren’t capable of my level of conversation; certainly not for years. Basically; my evidence that I’m a person is that barring aliens or time travellers hooking their AI to the Internet there really isn’t an alternative.
Because cells are alive, while individual molecules aren’t. Life is a particular process; one individual molecules ( at least the sort we are made of ) are too simple to engage in. In humans, the cell is the smallest part that is, in itself, alive.
Yes, I agree. I’d say we have three levels of “alive” here; the individual cell; the body itself; and the mind.
It brings up the interesting question of whether or not Bob ever was alive. Our bodies certainly are; but are our minds really the same sort of process that we call life? Or are they something else; sentient information processes that run on living hardware, but not themselves life.