Posted on 03/09/2003 4:26:55 PM PST by MadIvan
I have no idea what this mystic nonsense is supposed to mean. In any lucid language, "awareness" is "consciousness." There is no such thing as a "congnition" level, since cognition is aspect of rational/volitional consciousess, that is, the intellect, and no "cogition" exists at least until the rudiments of language are developed.
As for evidence of consciousness, there is absolutely no objective evidence for consciousness in any creature except in my case, my own consciousness, and in your case, (and I'm only assuming here) your own consciousness. I have to take your word for it that you are consciousness because there is no way you can demonstrate it to me, because it is your own subjective experience.
Hank
No, wait, that argument is deeply flawed...
You can put a conscious animal (or an adult, if medical ethics allowed for it) on a heart and lung machine that would do the breathing for them. This is a direct analog of what a mother does for her child in the womb.
You may also want to look at marsupials (pre-placental mammals) which are born in a fetal state and then climb into their mother's pouch to suck milk instead of developing a placenta. But the more important to realize is that human children and chimpanzee children develop very closely until about the age of two (when language and the "sentient brain" turn on in human children). There is no "present attribute" criteria sufficient to declare humans conscious and protected while allowing the killing of animals as non-people. Indeed both Michael Tooley and Peter Singer have used this to argue that the right to kill children should extend post-natally with Tooley following the argument to the logical extreme of about two years of age.
More accurately, the question is whether it is something that you can be in the future. Indeed, that's the only question that matters. Infants are often less intelligent than adult animals when born. And it is by no means a given in human nature that killing an infant is murder, given the prevalence of infanticide throughout history though the modern day. That said, we've decide that infants are full humans and to kill one is murder. Why? I think for much the same reason why a key element in defining "clinical death" is whether the patient can ever recover. We look the the future. And must.
Indeed, murder is not wrong for the immediate pain it causes. Murder may be performed painlessly and extreme torture can be inflicted yet murder is considered the ultimate "capital" crime. Why? Because it robs a living being of its future in a way that no human can restore. And it is that awareness of a lost future that makes us grieve more, for better or worse, for a young child two dies than an elderly person in a nursing home at the twilight of their life. And it is that awareness of the absence of a future that allows us to consider the perminently brain dead that will never recover "clinically dead" and which allow some to accept that killing the terminally ill could be considered "mercy".
Science fiction is full of examples of the detachment of the present capacity of an individual from their "personhood". The original Star Trek series had an expisode where two crew members were reduced to foam blocks. One was crushed while the other was restored. The implication was clear to any who watched it. The crewmember who was crushed as a foam block was "murdered" because they could no longer be restored. Though is was fantasy, the scene would have had no emotional impact if, looking at the inert block of foam, the audience simply concluded "no brainwaves, no heartbeat, and no conscious so no murder was committed."
As to the hall of life, the key question is missing from this essay. Why does the author (or their father) wander from "yes" to "probably" and eventually to "no"? By what criteria are those transitions made? By how the fetus "looks"? The truth is that there are no non-trivial criteria that will let you declare a human fetus, or even a human infant, a "person" while denying that status to my pet cats. It is only looking at what something can become, if given time to grow or recover, that we can develop criteria consistent with how we define persons from the animals and the clinically dead in every other case.
So all the neurons you'll have as an adult are essentially present at birth. The 3-4x difference in brain weight from the time you are born to the time you are an adult (most of which is gained in the first few years of life) are the additional components to make the neurons you are born with actually function.
Abortion may be evil, but saying that a fetus is conscious is a real stretch. Babies are essentially born with the level of awareness of a lizard. Which is plenty of brain for bootstrapping; lots of animals never have more than this level of consciousness.
There is a better approach to this. If you decide to set some criteria based on the results of specific tests of brain activity and physiological reactions and call that consciousness, that is fine. This is not really the question. There is a bit of bait-and-switch going on.
No doubt adult human beings are conscious, and I believe other adults have the same kind of consciousness I do, but that is not what we are talking about when people start using consciousness as an argument for or against abortion.
The consciousness they are talking about in that case is the difference between conscious (as in being awake and aware) and being unconscious (as in asleep or under anaesthesia). There is no question that all sorts of brain activity develop along with the physical development of the brain, but none of that is necessarily evidence of being conscious, in the sense of being awake and aware.
If you know a little about anaesthesia, auto-suggestion, pschysomatism, it is even possible for adult human beings to be "awake" and not be fully "conscious" as in aware of such things as pain, or even other sensations.
That the unborn can react to stimuli, develop memory, and exhibit other activities associated with the development of the brain is without question. Whether any of these mean the unborn actually consciously experience anything as a result of these activies cannot be demonstrated, and must seriously be doubted. As one other commentator on this thread mentioned, those born prematurely seldom exhibit any activity indicating "awake" consciousness for some time.
By the way, I believe abortion is wrong, but I believe almost every argument made by those who consider themselves the "anti-abortion" movement has done more to harm their cause and promote abortion than anything the pro-abortion people have done.
Hank
Most animals (including some very stupid critters) can recognize the voice of their parents. It is a low-level brain function hard-wired into animal physiology. This is not evidence of consciousness any more than it is for any other animal.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the higher brain tissue is non-functional until several months after birth, and generally isn't fully "online" in any meaningful sense until a human is around two years old. This is one of the reasons humans don't have memory below a certain age; the parts of the brain that would store and process such memories don't function when you are born and slowly become operational over the first few years of life. The higher brain isn't fully functional until around the age of three.
And since we consider the killing of babies, once born, as murder, that suggests that current mental capacity is a bit of a red herring argument, doesn't it? If you look only at the current mental capacity of a being to define "personhood" and still desire to treat animals as non-persons, you will quickly find yourself sliding down the slippery slope towards two year-olds. I invite anyone here who doesn't believe that can happen to read the opinions of Michael Tooley and Peter Singer on infanticide and to research the history of infanticide throughout the ages and around the world. Abortion is simply pre-natal infanticide. Is infanticide murder? I'd hope most people would say "yes".
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