Quote:
Originally Posted by Latenter
GAH! This post is the same as your last. I think you skimmed mine again. I'M NOT ARGUING ABOUT SOULS! Yes, as a human being, I am biased toward humans. I don't claim not to be. The same way that I would be biased in favor of my favorite sports team, or my company in a negotiation, or my country in a war. You can claim to follow cold hard materialism, throw out all the rules, reevaluate everything society has decided. Fine. That's your stance. Not everyone agrees.
You mention sentience. How is that defined, exactly? Is there a pass/fail test for people who are near that line? If someone's suffered brain damage, but is still partially awake, could a man who can eat and look around maybe even recognize people be classified as non-sentient for otherwise lacking certain characteristics? It's a concept, not a definition.
I haven't mentioned religion once. I mentioned souls as a way to describe an innate value of human life that we don't apply to animals. You can disagree, but it's disagreement with the value I put on life, not that I'm a psycho-moonie-crazy person.
I'm fine with you attacking my argument, but you're not. You're creating a straw man and saying that's my argument. You've made your point, I've made mine, neither of us is changing our minds based on what the other has said. I think I'm done debating these points.
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"Fundamentally, yes, I am discussing the "imparting of a soul", but on grounds that are not religious, and you don't even need to believe in a soul to agree with the argument. If you are being so impartial as to rank someone based on the number of synapses firing per second, fine, but that doesn't reflect our society at all. There are intrinsic elements and rights that we grant to human beings, ignoring history or race or disability."
You make the assertion of soul (But! but! but!) as soon as you do that, you've thrown your lot in something immaterial. It's perfectly justified to position your argument on that and respond to it as though you've taken a step into another world, which you effectively have.
If you want to talk about sentience, but in the same breath make comparisons of full grown adults, disabled or not, to clusters of cells that have the first rudiments of a nervous system, but nothing that you could actually describe as a nervous system... in the same way a jellyfish has nerves but no nervous system... well that's just odd.
If you want to think about sentience and vialibility, then do you care to give some animal kingdom examples, or are you claiming DNA-privilege? What type of behaviour would an entity have to demonstrate to show sentience in your opinion?
You're the one positing a 2-week old embryo as in some way privileged, so i think it's up to you to justify.
And as for "cold hard materialism" i think materialism, fully grasped, is incredibly warm and beautiful. I'm an atheist, materialist with no hope for anything but for my life to end as and when it will. That doesn't make me 'cold' in any way.