Does life begin at conception?

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Well, I was a well established atheist back in 1930 arguing with the other kids my age about how ridiculous the whole concept of God and heaven and angels and such is and waiting anxiously to become adult enough to discover that good sense prevailed in a mature world. That never happened. I painfully watched my mother and father die after being horribly tortured by cancer and my quadriplegic son die after thirty years on a respirator and this last February my wife died after brain cancer ate her mind silly. If some total jerk tried to comfort me with some crap about God's will and the glories of an afterlife I would respond forcefully with a right punch to the nose but no one had the bad sense to do that. Growing up merely bestowed me with disappointment at having bin born into humanity before evolution had the time to refine intellect to a useful degree.

How exactly did life begin? Did life produce matter or did matter produce life?

If life is created by, and consists of matter, then what is the big deal when it ends? A dead body still exists; it will simply decompose and take another form.

Are you clear as to what you're asking? The concept of life existing before matter indicates a pretty total misunderstanding of the nature of reality.

Yes, I am perfectly clear about what I am asking, and I notice that you did not answer a single one of my questions.

I will not ask you to explain the nature of reality to me because I can guess what your answer would be. I will, however, put my last question a second time: if your life consists of the matter in your body, what does it matter what form it is in?

We do not know exactly. The conditions of the early Earth which produced life can be extrapolated; perhaps some day we will be able to replicate those conditions and the feat. It will be interesting to find out.

Matter and energy (which is at some level the same thing) existed before life*. Life is composed of and arose from matter and energy.

We are complicated, thinking, feeling, interesting creatures. When we die that complexity, thought, feeling and interest is lost to the world. That is the big deal. Imagine someone cutting the Mona Lisa into inch-square pieces and throwing them in a dustbin. Imagine them doing with a billion works of art. That's our death.



*probably long before, unless some life unknown to us can be formed in extreme temperatures from only the most basic elements. Ours had to wait for a couple of cycles of stellar nucleosynthesis and for some planets to grow on.

All of this presupposes the existence of a non-physical soul for which there is not a crumb of credible empirical evidence.

ruveyn

I'm terribly sorry but that is one of the dumbest questions I have ever encountered. My life is sustained by my form and when my form is squashed under a road processor my life is definitely and quite strongly modified. If you have to question that you have a great deal of elementary knowledge to ingest.

Modified yes, but for the better of for the worse? You say your life is sustained by your form, but is it separate from your form? Who is to say what form it was in before or what form it will take after that road processor does its work? It could be an improvement.

Do you really believe you would feel better squashed to a pulp? Improvement for what? to be made into a hamburger? Are hamburgers happy cows?

I cannot answer your questions Sand because I am not the one who believes that life consists solely of the matter that it is composed of.

But you tell me; when you eat a hamburger are you taking part of the life that used to be a cow into yourself and making it a part of yourself? Do you think the cow is then part of something greater?

Is your question rooted in biology, medicine, law or philosophy?

Depending upon what filter you use, the answer will, of necessity, be different.

From a biological perspective, an ovum is a living cell. Before ovulation, the follicle is living tissue. The continuity of living tissue extends back to the first protoorganisms on earth. From that perspective, life begins billions of years ago, because it is an uninterrupted continuum. Even if we restrict ourselves to a single organism, there is a clear line of continuity back to the oocyte as a fundamental starting point of an organism.

Medically, the life of an organism is largely dictated by human biology, but the viability of the organism is a key consideration. Neither an ovum nor any of its precursor cells in oogenesis are viable. There is no natural state in which these cells can survive until the ovum is fertilized and becomes a zygote. Even then, the human zygote is not viable until the blastocyte into which it develops implants itself in the uterine wall (this is the defining event of the transition from blastocyte to embryo). At this point, an embryo is viable, subject to the ongoing health of the mother. That does not mean, however, that it has inherent viability. That cannot occur until later in embryonic development. Generally, the 50 percent survival rate occurs at about 24 weeks gestational age, although there are claims to survival with as low as 21 weeks gestational age.

From a legal perspective, most jurisdictions establish no rights, other than conditional posthumous succession rights on prenatal individuals. But the law is capable of redefining itself in ways that neither medicine nor biology can. Ask the question tomorrow and the legal perspective may well be different, and it will, of necessity, be different in different jurisdictions.

From a philosophical perspective, I think we are concerned not so much with life as a biological process, but life as a euphemism for individuality. Embyology suggests that neuromeres appear at 18 days embryonic age (or about 32 days gestational age). That is an absolute lower limit for neural function. In reality, it's another couple of weeks before the telecephalon forms and you can suggest that there is anything like true brain function. The startle reflex does not occur until 23 weeks gestational age, which is often the first indicator of true, higher brain function.

But all of this is truly a moot question. If we are concerned with the extension of legal protections, then the only perspective that counts is the legal perspective, which can be formed completely independently of the medical and biological realities.

I wouldn't say that life 'begins' at conception, but rather that it continues - being initially just a composition of both parent's cells. At this stage it can no more survive independently than a virus can (and we don't strictly call a virus 'life') - it is dependent upon the mother and therefore is an extension of the mother (who is alive obviously).

Whether something is alive or not is a completely different question as to whether it constitutes a 'person' or not. Personhood starts with establishment of a nervous system, but is not complete until well into childhood (I imagine different ages in different people) when the child finally becomes self aware and aware of its own life. To me, babies are not inherently more valuable than animals, apart from having the potential to develop much more. Before this development into a person they obviously will feel pain etc. and should be protected from suffering, but if I had to choose between the life of a baby and that of a child of 10 for example (or even older), I would always sacrifice the baby who is uncomprehending of death and has no developed persona.

You always fade out in a montaaaaage.

I think assessing on a biological level, life begins at conception. Cells are multiplying and the like, and that sounds like life to me. But I think that you become a person once you're born.

Yes, because you don't start life dead do you? That egg and sperm are both alive, the cells wouldn't multiply if they weren't.
There is no need for this question to even be asked, you're all making something philosophical and deep out of something that is purely biological.

I am not trying to be insulting, merely facing obvious facts. Life is a particular dynamic out of the forms and interactions of matter. The superstition that life is somehow independent of matter is so naive as to be ludicrous. I'm terribly sorry but your concept is so primitive and ignorant as to be totally silly.

Yes, I believe it does. It's at conception that a person's unique physical characteristics; such as gender, eye color, bone structure, proclivity for certain diseases, etc., are established. And since the fertilized human egg is the obvious product of human DNA, the preborn child's nature and essence are undeniably human. Therefore, life begins at conception.