When is it a human being?

When the egg and sperm fuse we see the beginning of an individual human ORGANISM. When that individual is born and undergoes socialization we see the process of an organism becoming a social cultural being--a human PERSON. But let me add that this is MY interpretation. I would hesitate to impose it on others. At the same time I would resist the efforts of others to impose their interpretations on me and others with respect to government policy.

Boundary fixing is entirely an exercise in functional relativity. The mathematical topic called "fuzzy logic" is based on the fact that set boundaries are usually a "grey area". When for example does "an apple" cease to be "an apple" when successive bites are taken out of it ?.....a trivial example but one which illustrates the problem.

The "human being boundary" is variously faught over by theists, animal rites activists and would be eugenicists. Each has a vested interest to pursue. Let no-one underestimate the fickle nature of their own "reasoning". In times of war one of the first moves is to shift the boundary in order to "de-humanise" the enemy. Could any of us claim to be immune from such social pressures ?

Depends...exactly what ethnicity are we talking about?

To an atheist, a human is an organism and nothing more, correct? No soul, no spirit, just an animal, right?

I don't know if you're an atheist or not, but my point is that even if you are, a living human being is in existence from the point of conception.

First I take offence at 'just an animal'. Being an animal should be something to aspire to. You wouldn't beat your wife, drive drunk, or rip-off your elderly parents.

Second - we all have different definitions of what a 'human being' is. You have your definition firmly implanted in your brain and you read everyone else's response to the question thinking that they are talking about the same 'human being' you are. They are not.

Real Life, I AM an atheist, not in the sense that I believe in a "No-God" and worship him. The idea of God as theist define him simply makes no sense to me; it rings no bells for me.
To me a human is an organism, an animal, but as far as we know with a greater potential of becoming much more than s/he is now. Read Emerson's notion of the Overman and Nietzsche's notion of the Ubermench for insights into mankind's nature-as-potential.
But this has nothing to do with the question of when a human becomes a human. Read Fresco's earlier comment in order to free yourself from your present "hardening of the categories."

Does a dog have to 'aspire' to be a dog?

Does a fish have to 'aspire' to be a fish?

If humans are animals, why must they 'aspire' to be so?

What I was saying oh literal one, is that many humans would be a lot nicer if they aspired to be animals, and therefore your phrase 'just animals' is erroneous as animals are far superior to humans in ethical terms.

I'm with JLN we are animals - and there's no 'just' about it.

I want to track down this book, review follows:

Don't worry, be happy


Psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues for a return to the wisdom of the ancients in The Happiness Hypothesis. Forget metaphors of information processing, says James Flint, it's all a question of horses and chariots

Saturday July 22, 2006
The Guardian


The Happiness Hypothesis
by Jonathan Haidt
320pp, William Heinemann, £18.99
The idea of the "divided self" is nothing new. Forget RD Laing: Buddha compared the experience of being human to that of a trainer (rationality) sitting astride an elephant (animal impulse); Plato to that of a charioteer (the rational mind) trying to control two horses, a noble one pulling to the right and a libidinal one pulling to the left. And of course there's Freud's Victorian version: the mind as buggy in the bucket seat of which "the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver's father (the superego) sits on the backseat lecturing the driver on what he's doing wrong".

In the late 20th century these pictures were dismissed by many in the social sciences and replaced with metaphors of information processing and rational consumption, metaphors which in turn reflected the preoccupations of their time. When Jonathan Haidt suggests that we now abandon these and return to the idea of elephant and rider as a template for the workings of the mind, it seems at first blush rather an unpromising start to a book purporting to tell us how to be happy. But unlike so many of the world's purveyors of self-help and lifestyle philosophy, not to mention its economists and computational psychologists, Haidt knows what he's talking about. Thanks to having taught psychology at the University of Virginia for 20 years he has a deep understanding of his subject. He adds to that the distinction of being broadly right.

What horses and chariots and elephants with riders draw attention to, he argues, is something that psychologists have only recently begun to realise: "that there are really two information processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes".

You can do a lot with automatic processes. You can navigate by the stars (migrating birds), fight wars and run fungus farms (ants), even make tools (early hominids). The mechanism central to all of these highly specialised automatic systems is dopamine release, little bursts of this neurotransmitter being the way the brain rewards animals for doing things (like eating, building nests and having sex) that are good for the survival of our genes.

Controlled processing, however, is an altogether more slippery - and rarer - beast. To start with, it requires language. "You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex or to analyse the causes of past successes and failures, you need words."

But automatic processes have been around for millennia, giving them plenty of time to perfect themselves. Higher cortical functioning came on the scene only around 40,000 years or so ago, and is weak and buggy by comparison. This, Haidt points out, "helps to explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, maths and chess problems as well as any human can" but no robot that can walk in the woods as well as a six-year-old child.

So here we are: not charioteers in charge of wild horses, but a self-reflexive rider sitting atop a large and lumbering automatic elephant that has plenty of its own ideas on how to do things. What has this got to do with happiness?

The answer to that is at the crux of this marvellous book. Haidt's key insight is that emotion is just the expression of the mechanisms by which rider and elephant interact. Happy people are the ones in whom the interaction is smooth, in whom the gears mesh, in whom the different levels add up to a more or less coherent whole. Unhappiness occurs when rider and elephant have major differences about how to do things, a fairly common situation since, while the rider tends to be more interested in happiness, the elephant is bent on achieving prestige and the possibilities for gene dissemination and survival that it brings.

It doesn't help that, despite being big and lumbering and bent on being alpha animal, the elephant is also a total scaredy-cat. A "negativity bias" against strange people and new experiences is built into the actual structure of the brain (in the way the amygdala and thalamus are wired), but though this might be annoying, it does make sense: "If you were designing the mind of a fish, would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats?" Of course not. Miss a chance for a meal and the likelihood is that another one will be along in a while. Miss the sign of a nearby predator and it's game over.

Having thus developed his metaphor into a detailed and robustly argued picture of the mind, Haidt then takes us on an extraordinary journey. On the way he explains why meditation, cognitive therapy and Prozac are all extremely sensible ways to treat depression, why Buddhism is an over-reaction to the state of things, in what way religion is a canny cultural solution to the problems of group selection in evolution, why lovers often behave like children and what this means, how gossip is the key to human culture, and why journalists are miserable. He also has a stab at explaining the current political divide in US politics, though this is one of the very few moments in the book when things begin to sound a little glib. That aside, I don't think I've ever read a book that laid out the contemporary understanding of the human condition with such simple clarity and sense.

Some animals eat their young, hingehead.

Is that what we should aspire to?

Don't kid yourself that animals do not fight and kill their own kind. They do.

Learn a little bit about it.

And some humans stick their kids in cars and drive them into lakes.

The animal's motivations are far more ethical than the humans.

Re: 'Learn a little bit about it'

If I only learn a 'little bit' I guess we'll be on equal terms, right?

hingehead,

You point out that Haidt refers to the "Wisdom of the Ancients". In fact his "two system brain" seems no more than a watered down version of the "three brained being" (Intellectual-Emotional-Instintive or Head-Heart-Guts) expounded by Ouspensky and others in the early 20th century. According to this "ordinary man" is little more than any other animal because his "intellectual brain" is often dominated by the other two.

(BTW I think "twenty years teaching psychology" and "knowing what you are talking about" is a dubious correlation! :wink: )

So, back on topic ..... is it too incredibly illogical to assume that egg and sperm are not the bottom of the microcosm of the development of life as we know it? Is it pomposity to consider oneself as more than a clump of germinating protoplasm?
How far down the tunnel do we descend before we reach the base of our ascension ... where does the fact of our being, life, the reliquary of our soul truly exist .... or does it?

Gelisgesti asks: "is it too incredibly illogical to assume that egg and sperm are not the bottom of the microcosm of the development of life as we know it?"

I think, whether logical or not, that it is true. But it is MY "subjective" intuition (a notion shared by minds throughout many cultures and ages) that my True being or nature has no discernible beginning or end. My false ego-self began sometime during the individual's post-natal development (some will trace its origin to the pre-natal moment of conception), and that's the part with which we usually identify.
More importantly, I do not consider this (mine or others') intuition grounds for insisting that others agree or that it form the basis for national policy.

The major issue for religion and inter-group relations today should be that of ideological tolerance, anti-dogmatism, the ending by means of education of naive literalist fundamentalisms and separation of religion (i.e., the church) and politcal power (i.e., the state).

Baddog1, one definition of "person" from Wikipedia is: "it is capable of reasoning, that it is self-conscious, and that it has an identity that persists through time."

As Eorl, noted, if you concur with this definition, then presumably you do not consider infants to be persons.

Roger, infants have awareness but not self-awareness. The differences in how they respond may be due to innate variations in brain chemistry and wiring. If so, identical twins would have the same responses until they are old enough for their brains to be modified by individual experiences. Don't know if any experiments have been done on this.


Persons who are mentally retarded, blind, or deaf CAN interact with others, and people in some types of coma/anesthesia may be able to hear even if they can't respond. But as I said, it becomes human when it BEGINS to interact. I said nothing about losing your status as a person if you are temporarily incapable of response. If the brain completely and irrevocably loses its capacity for awareness, the person no longer exists even if the corpse is kept "alive."


I do not agree with the Dred Scott decision (which declared him a non-citizen, not a non-person), the Constitutional acceptance of slavery, or the Founding Fathers who declared that "all men are created equal" but kept slaves and ignored the rights of women. Slaves and women meet the basic requirements for personhood, as do convicts, children, natives, aliens, and other sentient beings regardless of their past or current legal status, but they did not have to formally be declared non-persons to be denied voting, property, privacy, and other rights under various regimes throughout history.

To me it is all very simple. A person begins when the umbilical cord is severed. Then the infant is no longer a part of the mother, and relies on it's own lungs, it's own mouth and belly.

Besides, the definition from wikipedia falls on it's face when it says 'capable of resoning'. This assumes that we know what is reason and what is absolute drivel. The two are mistaken frequently.

And from my viewpoint, most people are not self conscious. They are aware of a self, but very few people know very much about the nature of this self.
Being aware of it is not enough, though. What use is quantum mechanics to me, for instance, if I am aware of it's existence, but oblivious to what it actually is?

Since the egg may be decades old and the sperm only a few days, there is no easy answer to "when." Eggs were formed by the division of reproductive cells in the mother's ovaries before she was born, but sperm are produced constantly (and though its DNA contribution is less than the egg's, it is equally important). Ultimately all eggs and sperm are the descendents of an unbroken line of cells reaching back billions of years. Before that, we were stardust.


Life is not created from nothing, but is assembled from various types of cells which are manufactured in other cells according to DNA instructions. The instructions for making human beings are incredibly complex and took billions of years to evolve. The animation/energy comes from biochemical processes, specifically mitochondria. No magical or spiritual energy is required or detectable. This site shows the process of fetal development.

I have doubts about whether machines can ever be self-aware in the way that we are, since our awareness is inextricably rooted in sensory information from our bodies and the feelings/emotions that are the result of biochemical processes.

What other qualities do you consider mandatory?


So when do you think that the human organism becomes a human being?


Perhaps that's why some people see the need to fix boundaries that cannot be shifted by advances in medical technology or retreats in moral/legal acceptance of women's rights. I believe that the current boundaries are correct and am disturbed by the concerted effort to move them to the extreme right.

In what way is one eating his/her young to be considered 'ethical' ?

I'm not sure I understand your distinction between self-awareness and self-consciousness. I think most people have a pretty good idea of what the "self" is, even if they cannot put it into words. You do not have to be an engineer to drive a car.

If eating some young now will enable the animal to survive and have more young at a time when they are more likely to survive to reproduce themselves, it is ethical.