personhood

[Flint]

Originally Posted by henry quirk

By the way: your attached image is off the mark. You say BOTH ARE TRUE but that's nonsensical.

What does my poll ask?

A human being is...

...bio-automation, organic machinery.
...sumthin’ more than bio-automation, not only organic machinery.

I already covered BOTH ARE TRUE.

...and...

It may be really complicated, and it may take a loooong time, but I think -- one day -- we'll understand it.

The way I figure it, it's not important for us to be able to understand it. Insomuch as it's difficult to understand, the details may be easily explainable at a level that's beyond our grasp. That is to say-- we don't understand how biology could produce consciousness, but that's not important.


What we DO know is that water and amino acids are ubiquitous, the conditions for life aren't as delicate as we once believed, and the one place we've seen it arise, it happened almost immediately. And this is the flaw in reasoning that we can't avoid-- we're looking at a small sample size. Although there's a nearly infinite number of chances for life to arise, we only know the details about this ONE instance. There's no conclusion we can really draw from that.


But...


The odds, the way a bookie would figure them, that our planet is the "winning lottery ticket" are as likely as, well, winning the lottery.

The bet I'm taking is the conservative, "play it safe" bet. The odds are that matter organizes into life almost everywhere, and when it does it has consciousness by default, because consciousness is just a biological operating system. Does that demean the value of a human life? I don't think it does. And even if it did, it doesn't influence the odds one way or the other.