So masturbation and menstruation are murder?
I’d say at around age 19.
The OP contains too many words that mean entirely different things. “Sentient” simpy means teh ability to perceive or feel things. Fetuses have been proven to pass this point while still in utero. “Consciousness” can mean “being awake and aware of one’s surroundings” or “awareness by the mind of itself and the world”. Infants arguably pass the former at birth, the latter is much more difficult to ascertain.
Consciousness is an emergent property, so there’s no hard line of when it happens, it’s a pretty thick line and a series of somewhat thinner, but still fuzzy milestones. So it’s really more a question of what milestones we consider to be relevant to consciousness as we’re able to relate to it. But then if we’re talking about earlier or developmental stages of human consciousness, at various points they’re more or less akin to animals. Is a chimp conscious? What about a dog? Maybe a mouse? Every time we think we’re so much better than these creatures, we find out that some of the apes can actually meaningfully communicate, or that crows and octopuses can solve complex puzzles. Is human consciousness that point when we finally achieve mental faculty that surpasses non-humans, or is it just a point when we have a sense of self-awareness?
If it’s the latter, we’re probably talking at least toddler age, possibly even later. Hell, there are even some mental tasks that even full grown humans are surpassed by chimps, for example, a typical human’s eidetic memory is generally inferior to a chimp’s. If it’s the former, then it seems that self-awareness is something that happens perhaps slightly before birth, as it’s clear in a typical late-term pregnancy that the child has self-awareness. Or maybe it’s just all about the seed, the ability to grow into a human, precisely because of the fact that it’s emergent, and thus it’s essentially indeterminable from any point after the first brain cells differentiate.
With all of that, I consider consciousness to be more or less analogous to self-awareness. As such, I’m going with late pregnancy. But really, depending on your definition, I could see it being pretty much any of the options.
How do you derive that from what I said? I said I believe consciousness is eternal (predates the creation of the universe), how does one come up with murder of something that is eternal. To me it is impossible to ‘murder’ consciousness, there is simply no way to do so.
Is it possible to put a end to a physical body which a consciousness is operating in, certainly possible except for those who have already transcended their physical body’s form (or in some cases taken out), which they will just leave before the destruction of the body, and what is destroyed is a empty shell.
As for when it all starts, I believe the moment of conception is the moment that the consciousness has linked into that body by a decision of free will. Before this it was a disembodied soul, doing whatever they do, and they do have a life in that form too. As such the ‘baby’ selects the parents (as well as the parents invite the baby).
Whatever the end of the physical body will be it is going to end, that is normal and good, the soul/consciousness lives on and advances.
While I do, personally, believe that there is an aspect of what makes us human that transcends the human form, which, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just call a soul, I think that’s fundamentally different from consciousness. Even if we go with the most generous forms of reincarnation or, even with only a single incarnation an eternal pre-life with significant memory, consciousness isn’t a property of the soul. That is, the soul is the non-corporal aspect of what we are, but we are not self-aware, in our bodies, until the soul and the body are sufficiently intertwined to operate as a human being. They may be intrinsically linked, but as we do not have self-awareness or memory from conception, even if we accept that there are memories from past-lives or pre-life, there is still a gap from those memories to the memories we form as humans in this life. I would argue that that gap is due to our consciousness emerging. So, running with all of that, I would argue that the arising of consciousness is an innately human property, and while our souls may be eternal, I don’t think it’s reasonable to call our souls human if they’re not connected to a body.