Does consciousness begin at conception?

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b9,

sometimes a point may be made that may appear as mere mockery but in fact have a point that come with it.

I don't believe you're stupid ... nor have I ever said or implied you were. Keep posting without fear.

By the way, b9, I'm not really that popular here. At least not as popular as you think I may be. So don't think that I speak for the site. I just happen to be a very outspoken person here, which is not the same as being popular.

Animals have brains and reflexes. Still pretty legal to kill them.

It pretty much does.

It at least implies that you are taking advantage of the comfort that is brought by civilization.

If you had a generator, you would still be taking advantage of the comforts of civilization.

Unless of course you designed the generator yourself and extracted the materials to make it yourself.

But then... YOU would be the civilization.

It is a very comfortable life you got there. Don't overstate it.




There is nothing that dictates that true artificial is completely impossible. Sure enough, humans might create it some day


It is easy to program something to look spontaneous. So the question is, are cockroaches truly spontaneous or do they only look so? They seem to be instinct-driven... And instincts are programming...



Cockroaches are not beliefs either. So...


My statement was only to debunk the claim that cockroaches are more valuable than all our riches. They certainly are not. Rarity and difficulty to make are not the only conditions for something to be valuable.

The question is. Why would they want to bring them back though? They are hardly the most critical species ever. They don't even make honey. They are not required for plant reproduction.- I wouldn't give a dime for a cockroach. Perhaps if it was covered in gold.

For that matter, there is absolutely nothing magical about life. It is merely an emergent property of carbon chemistry. So, never say never. Maybe one day someone will make a cockroach from scratch. So maybe you shouldn't put the whole foundation of your belief system on that impossibility.

We're in the Kingdom Animalia, but we're not animals. Animalia and animal are not exact synonyms. The Animalia Kingdom includes humans and animals.

Merriam Webster appears to disagree with you in its definition of "animal," at least as that being the most common definition. The first is this:


Their second definition vaguely resembles yours but isn't quite the same, inferring a relationship to humans as lower versus higher animals. If one considers human dominance on the planet, or brain power, as part of a hierarchy, that also fits. But we're still animals.

Last edited by BlueAbyss on 13 Jan 2013, 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Meh. I would say that the brainstem =/= brain, but if you want to call it brain I won't argue with you. In any case, it has nothing to do with consciousness: cows are killed with boltguns to the brain, but their heart keeps on beating because the brainstem isn't affected. Likewise 'pithing' a frog for dissection.

I was part of a code team once on an MVA viticm whose brain was basically liquefied and leaking out of his eyes, ears, and nose, but we legally had to run the code until his heart stopped due to blood loss - his brain stem wasn't what got squashed.

The question cannot be answered yet by empirical evidence.

It cannot be answered definitively, but we can place outer limits. Before nerve cells differentiate and start firing, there absolutely cannot be any kind of consciousness. A jellyfish is more sentient than a zygote. By the time an infant is born, there absolutely is sentience but there might not be sapience. A dog is more sapient than a human infant.

It is entirely probably that even the presence of randomly firing nerve cells and reflex arcs do not represent consciousness, based on what we have observed of humans with damage to various parts of their brains. There has to be some level of organization and communication between neurons before consciousness arises. Sometime in the 3rd trimester, a normally developing fetus will start to show recognizable EEG patterns, albeit interspersed with periods of EEG flatlines which, in an adult, would indicate brain death.

The answer is there is no real answer. There is no solid boundary between person and not a person. Only fuzzy, just like life.

So let us define a Fuzzy belonging function.

isPerson(age).

We know that when age = 0 (birth) the individual is certainly a person:

isPerson(0) = 1.0

We know that at conception, the individual is certainly not a person (1 cell, a bit dull).

isPerson(- 9 months) = 0.0

Actually, we are 100% sure of the lack of person hood until around 1 month.

isPerson(-8 months ) = 0.0

Then it goes harder.

For example, I guess that we could say that isPerson(- 1 month) = 0.85. Not exactly a person but not really a thing either.

isPerson(-7.5 months) = 0.1

Etc.

If we want to be 100% sure to avoid suffering, then we want to promote abortions to happen as early as possible. Thus why I repeat my proposal to include "week after" pills in pregnancy tests. This should stop all potential suffering.

Thanks for reading.

Unfortunately, there is no 'week after' pill. The 'morning after' pill works for about 3 days after sex, and then it's a wait for several weeks until you can use RU486 (mifepristone), or the medical abortion pill. After 49 days (US), it's surgical abortion only.

I think there is a sort of consciousness from maybe 3 to 5 months before birth up to about 24 months after birth, and then your fully developed consciousness starts around age 2 to 5 depending on the person.

consciousness of a sort begins as soon a the fetus has developed a brain and nervous system.

ruveyn

Yup. For example, even though I was born in (January) 1990, I was alive in the 1980s. I would say the line is somewhere between 4-6 months after conception.