Quote:
Originally Posted by Rockstar
Any assumption regarding the presence or absence of awareness in any human animal remains just that: an unsupported assumption. I assume conception brings about awareness, you don’t. So then, at what point in the process do you draw the line where human life achieves awareness? When is it OK to kill it? Save the planet! But kill the unborn when convenient. How sick, twisted and demented we have become. Does Wendy, when she has just beaten Onkle Neal at a game of Texas Hold’em feel elated? I believe not. But there is nothing I can do to shore up those assumptions either.
Its been shown not a tablespoon but a fookin’ SINGLE CELL protozoa took hold of the end of a fibril, and backed off at an angle, as though to tear it loose. When the fibril would not give, the SINGLE CELL protozoon came in again, then backed away at a new angle, working the fibril loose, much as a dog might have done, working loose a chunk of meat. Watching that SINGLE CELL at work, not to anthropomorphize. Did it know what it was doing?
I could care less about religion and politics. Is a fetus as you say just a tablespoon of cells? Or are those cells aware and feel the pain and agony of it being ripped out from its mother’s womb? Do tell! As for me until proven otherwise I believe they should be protected.
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You compare a protozon with a ordinary tissue cell? Then you have not gotten the difference. And in a protozoen you have no awareness, no signal processing, no brain. It will never develope beyond what it is. It will never be able to combine with other protozons to form a higher organ, and organs, and suprastructure named organisms.
Take a developed human body, and then open the skull and take away the brain. Or simply smash it while keeping the rest of the body on life support. And then see what humanness you still find in that torso. None. Except maybe your own echoing memory, if you knew that person.
Humans and higher animals are more than just reflex-driven torsos. Without organs to perceive stimuli that match the organs design, a nervous system to transport electric impulses and a neural network of hugh complexity capable to create this wonder called awareness, a torso is an empty hull.
I know about this topic of near death experiences, but while not being convinced they mean anything (being near to death and being beyind death is not the same and nobody has ever proven anyone to really have returned from the really dead, with clinical definitions having been altered and changed since decades to support advances in organ transplantation business) if they are real they point at a quality that is beyond this awareness that depends on a organic hull whose functioning originally creates it and without which it would not be. A car rolls if you start it, but that is not to say it lives. A muscle cramps if you apply electricity, but that does not mean it is aware, it only means that the various cells in it function according to their role and design. And they will not do anything different than this: cramping and relaxing if nervous stimulation reaches them. They will never detect the impact of a photon like their cell colleagues in the retina or report that event to a brain. For "humanness" organic preconditions must be fulfilled, if they are not met - no brain, no nervous system of a certain developed complexity - its meat, not a human.
I cannot rule out the existence of a supraorganic mind, this something that buddhists would call anathman, the nin-ego. Call it the divune sparkle, call it a cosmic mind way above the level of organically depending awareness, but if this exists, it is certainly completely nondepending on organic or material carriers - and may be the cause bringung them even into form and existence. Some may call this final cause of everything "God". But that is terminology only.
Others talk of morphogenetic fields, or VALIS.
Imagination knows no limits.