Does consciousness begin at conception?

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No, consciousness exists a good ways both before and after.

The human brain (and that of animals too) has areas and features that work logically and those that work based on emotions. There is no need to introduce a concept of a soul for the brains of humans or animals to work as they do. Anything you say about a soul is pure speculation on your part.

How does your premise lead to your conclusion? There is not one shred of reasoning or evidence to take you from the premise of the non-existence of a soul (it's poor logic to phrase your premise in the negative, by the way) to the conclusion that human beings would "operated" based on logic and reasoning alone.



Then you know nothing whatsoever about human neurology.

Human emotion is rooted in the amygdalae, a pair of neural groups found bilaterally in the medial temporal lobes of the brain. They are primarily connected to emotional response and memory, and so play a vital role in laying down memories associated with emotional events. They are affected by the sensory system (with distinct connection to the olfactory bulb), and they effect the sympathetic nervous system via the hypothalmus which serves to increase reflex response ("fright or flight" for example), and activating endocrine secretion (particularly dopamine, noepinephrine and epinephrine).

Now that is not to say that a soul does not exist. But it serves to demonstrate that your proof for the soul's existence cannot stand up to even elementary scrutiny.

by interests i mean inclinations, desires, preferences, and intentions. when you say hunger and thirst occur independent of consciousness do you mean independent of conscious thought? all experience entails consciousness, according to my understanding. how do you know that hunger and thirst express themselves independent of consciousness (unless you mean conscious thought)?



i do not understand how you determine whether one has legal interests. it seems to me that a sensible determination of 'legal interests' would be derived from a probable or expressed conscious interest. when you say one "has interests," do you mean the same as, "one is considered to have interests [for the purpose of legal proceedings]"? what matters to me, i suppose, is whether one has interests phenomenologically.



it matters to how i determine what importance to assign to the alleged interests of a conscious or recently conscious entity.
i suppose i had considered that whether a person has the capacity for interests or preferences is important in determining whether and to what extent their interests should be taken into account. in my experience, it is necessary to construe a distinction in order to experience a preference (even with reference to hunger one must conceive of the possibility of a state of non-hunger in order to prefer it (though not to act on it)). it seems implausible to me that an unborn conscious being would have the capacity to construe many distinctions, if any.



to my understanding, in order for a person to have interests there has to be some capacity for conception. conception seems to be contingent on events that can only take place after birth. to my mind, it's implausible for an unborn conscious being to have interests other than those projected onto them by society. it may be useful to consider a human being in a permanent vegetative state as legal person because people tend to project their conception of a personality onto the body. they can imagine themselves in that situation (even though the situation is probably most notably characterized by one's absence) and would like to have their present interests protected in that case. perhaps that is how it goes with the interests of unborn persons as well.



i suppose the difference to me is that a person necessarily has the capacity to have interests that would require legal protection. your definitions are fine.




how do you know? do you mean they matter to you personally?

how do you determine how much the future interests of as yet non-existent persons matter?
it seems to me that they matter to the extent that they are construed as mattering by existing persons, as the interests of existing persons attributed to their conceptions of non-existent persons.

Last edited by wornlight on 03 Jan 2013, 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That sounds as an attempt to divert attention away from an argument and move the focus towards the person making the argument. Which motivates me to extend on the argument so that attention isn't lost. This time with big paragraphs so that it is even harder to get it hidden.

Christianity is a strong assertion and a very complicated one. First of all is the lack of evidence of a god that is remotely like the Christian god. We have run out of things that are not attributable to natural law. So the super natural is not needed to explain this world. Then we have how the world itself contradicts the idea that it is being run by a deity that is simultaneously all-knowing, all-mighty and good. Clearly this Christian god is not doing anything about the evil problem.

The assertion that prayer works. It seems provenly false. God seems to prefer to cure diseases that can cure by themselves. While god is usually the cultprit for cancer patients entering remission without intervention , it is a very odd thing that God has never healed an amputee. Not even in the bible.

And finally, the Christian god seems a bit ... err, dumb, impulsive and evil? We have the Job episode in which he ruins a good guy's life on a dare? Or how about when he destroyed the whole world including animals for the sins of men? Or, like I mentioned, the plan to get his own son killed really makes no sense...

These many things compose a lot of baggage that makes the god theory too overly complicated to be a "simple explanation". It seems that you have to explain and justify more and more and more things that complicate the whole theory. If god created everything, where's the evidence ? OOH, he hides the evidence "because free will". What is free will? What is the nature of god? ... Tons of questions with answers that go less and less satisfactory the more you think about it. If god is almighty why is there evil? Oh...

That's the issue right now. We do not need any of that to explain the universe at this moment. No need to overcomplicated our theories with philosophical discussions that lead to nowhere and are not useful at developing new technological solutions.

So, in short, Ocam's Razor largest victim is the Chritisan god, and most god theories for that matter.

Given that fetal brainwaves have been detected I would hazard the guess that consciousness (even of a minimal kind) might emerge as early as three or four months after conception.

ruveyn

Yeah ruveyn, stop taking Fox News as science.

I doubt it, considering the underdeveloped brain.

I'm personally opposed to abortion. But I don't believe that the state should have any involvement.

Metta consciousness is a very simple idea. In the judeo-Christian belief, they obviously see consciousness as the foundation of reality, not matter. Matter is something that was created by a cosmic mind. That's why they carry this belief of an omnipresent intelligence. To me, I have difficulty believing the omnipresent intelligence part, but I am open to the idea of an omnipresent consciousness. I don't think they're one in the same. Having experimented with meditation, I think there is a lower layer to consciousness that's mutually exclusive from ego and the intellectual faculties of the brain. You can slip into states of purer forms of awareness that have nothing to do with abstract throught processes and conceptualizations that we normally confuse or lump in with our idea of consciousness. Having experienced such states, I'm open to the idea that some more simplistic form of awareness may be present everywhere, beyond the realm of human experience, just as there's more simplistic organizations of matter beyond the realm of biological organisms (ie. minerals, simple molecules, atoms, ions, etc), .

Just as there is an ultimate/metta reality to matter, space, and time, otherwise known as the energy singularity of the big bang, its really not absurd to think there may be a dimmension to consciousness that transcends self, time, and space as well. I don't really think its a localized phenomenon that the brain generates, but rather something that it channels like a radio reciever. Just as photons are condensed and tuned in through the machienery of the eye, so this mysterios phenomenon, consciousness, may be something that's condensed and distilled through the brain and body. Consciousness may be something that transcends all empty space, but the ego (our distinction of self from other), is created through a warping of a trans-universal consciousness field that creates the distinction or contrast between the self and the rest of the cosmos, much like how matter creates a gravitational field that's distinct from the space surrounding it.

I also think consciousness may have a much bigger role than just being some rare anomale confined to the animal brain because physical reality would have no relevance to speak of without something consciously observing it.I don't really think we should rule out the possibility that consciousness may be a property of empty space that the brain abberates, rather than something it completely creates on its own. The fact the electrons in our brains are channeled from the environment, rather than created by the brain, lends credibility to this idea.

Are you implying that there is no qualitative difference between a human and a animal?
If that the case, then you are surrendering your humanity to prove you are correct.
I value human life and my own, I guess that is the only difference I can come up with.



At least I put something down and challenged you for it.
I stood up for what I have conviction for, I fairly accept that there will be those who disagree, your not hurting my feelings.
I readily accept that you will disagree.



What's the alternative, TallyMan?
Are we randomly guided, soul-less, inhuman, heartless human beings who arrived from esssentially hot air and cultivated as a species into a world we are in to today? Tell me, please. I would like to know.


Best Regards,

Jake

I am not implying that the presence of brainwaves in a fetus makes the fetus a person with rights. It just means that the brain is functioning at some level. Consciousness comes in degrees. A fetus can respond to a stimulus at 5 months development. That does not mean a fetus can think.

I regard any organism that can respond to a stimulus as a conscious organism.

Most of the mammals and reptiles on the planet have some degree of consiousness.

PS. I don't watch Fox News.

ruveyn

Since humans are a four dimensional life form consciousness begins at conception.

What is human we make up. We also chose to see non human life as having no rights.

Historically, a Roman father could kill any of his children, no questions asked. Children born deformed did not live, they were killed outright, or exposed.

It seems we have always culled babies, and in many burials of older children, by the Inca, around Stonehenge, older children were given back to the gods because of defects.

Baal, the first fruits were given to the god. In many other cultures, first children were given away. That improved their chances of survival having a fourteen year old mother.

Being born a girl lead to death in the east. After that girls and old people were the first to die in a famine, long before food ran short. The same happened during sieges.

Today we have State Institutions where defective children reside for life. Before about 1920, no such children existed. Drowned in the bath, smothered with a pillow, were considered natural forms of death.

Hunter gathers left children and old people behind, and reports for the last of the nomadic people also said one in ten young males were killed, as they neared adulthood, just because they were not good for the people. We have jails.

All cultures got rid of the defective. In times of ecomic stress, they got rid of those not defective or involved in crimes. On top of that no babies born during a famine survived.

Species Survival first.

We have a split view, before and after birth which does not make sense. Texas will kill you for murder, California will put you in prison for life for three crimes commited. California will kill you for mass murder, after fifteen or twenty years.

All of them have awareness, that was not the line for our ancestors. They killed to protect the economic interests of the people. They also enslaved many, put them to work in mines, and made a profit working them to death.

The slaves of Rome were not buried, they were fed to eels, a popular food supply.

All of life has awareness, more or less, and there is something universal about it. We still eat it.

In the 1930s there was famine in Russia and China, and the age old pattern took over. In planning the invasion of Russia, Germany got rid of those in prisons, nursing homes, the defective, because they needed the beds and the medical personal for the troops.

On the local front Katrina almost all of the 1570 that died were older white women in upscale neighborhoods, because of the cost of reaching them, and FEMA needed the money for five star hotels. It was much cheaper just to let them die of thirst and heat.

New York and New Jersey who pay a lot more taxes are also having a problem collecting Sandy damages.

I find it hard to pick a Moral Stance,

If the rights of the mother are greater than the developing child, she has an unlimited right to get rid of it. Almost all is for economic reasons. At $250,000 to raise one, it is the road to poverty.

On the other hand the world got all upset when someone in Africa said they were going to kill all the people that had been sentenced to death for crimes. Texas kills one a week or more, but all hell would erupt if they killed them in batches of fifty.

5,000 of our troops died in Iraq, no one seems to care.

American weapons sold to the Saudis have killed 60,000 in Sryia.

We do not hold human life very highly,

Nor should we, we have people who after being released for their first murder as a teen, killed again, were released again, and killed again, and are now doing double life without parole, and will spend sixty years in a cell, at great expense. Why are we spending millions where the only path is to the grave?

Sure, the Law at the time, but what about the famine? What about children who do not kill getting an education? What about the next war?

We kill for economic reasons, and the future does not look so good.

Life and universal awareness has survived much worse and kept going.

There is no Moral Highground.

Already the utterance fails at this point. We understand what 'matter' is by referring to 'material' objects like rocks, flowers, etc. We more or less understand how they behave, through laws of physics.

On top of that, we a system (say a human, as opposed to a rock) is 'conscious' if the system interacts physically is certain way. In this sense 'consciousness' does not refer to any singular entry. Therefore it makes no sense to say 'consciousness' is the basis of anything.

Really, the Judo-Christian god is nonsense to begin with. Even you admit the idea difficult to believe.


That seems no different from feeling different after taking certain drugs.




If that is the case matter in the brain behave differently, but we have not found a sherd of evidence.


More nonsense.

I value human life and my own too, however, humans are animals. Simple as that. Your moral objections to this are irrelevant; it does not dispute the fact. Our brains differ little from that of other ape species, except in size. It could be argued that the most significant advance in our species are the parts of the brain associated with language as it allows us to communicate knowledge to others and to our descendants, giving the illusion to some people that we are radically different, when we are not. Strip away the thin veneer of clothing, technology and language and we are simply a species of hairless ape.



We have evolved to be the most intelligent animal on the planet. We may be "soul-less" but that does not make us inhuman nor make us heartless.

No, I disagree, humans are not animals. Humans behave based upon a set of qualitative values, whereas animals do not.
If you are basing your conclusion upon natural selection, while in some instances it may be true, not all people act viciously towards on another.



Why do you think that? You said you value your own life, but then you make the claim that we are just another species of hairless apes?
If that's how you define "value" in your life, you might would want to reconsider your language.



It makes us entirely inhuman. If we are "soul-less" then man would act on primal instincts and all of humanity would be cold-blooded murderers. You are assuming way too much. Man operates upon a set of morally objective values and codes that separate us from the animals. There is a difference, however you don't seem to see it that way.

Going back to the topic of abortion, I can see now why you would think the way you do.

Best Regards,

Jake