Creation/Evolution in the News

Various ^ | 8/9/2002 | JennyP

[jennyp]

By highliting brain activity you are treating 'brain processes' as more valuable than, say, gastrointestinal processes, you are relegating other necessary bodily functions to secondary status. Last time I checked the human body needs all of its moving parts.

Ah. I thought Cartesian Dualism held that mind was nonmaterial, and the body - including the brain itself - was material, and it was these two entities that were mutually exclusive.

True, the brain needs most all of the body's parts to be working well to survive, but still, we do treat a conscious person who's alive only by the grace of life-support as if they're still alive.

[jennyp]

I'm off to dinner & a latte. Later...

[HumanaeVitae]

"Ah. I thought Cartesian Dualism held that mind was nonmaterial, and the body - including the brain itself - was material, and it was these two entities that were mutually exclusive."

Yep. And that's why I consider it puzzling that you would choose brain activity over, say, the heartbeat. If you're materialist, the whole deal is interconnected. If you're a Cartesian dualist, then you're skirting pretty close to the doctrine of the soul.

[jennyp]

Ah, but the "soul" is a reification of the "mind", which is a higher order non-physical effect of a functioning physical brain. (It's what the brain does, so to speak.) IMO there's no metaphysical distinction between the mind and the brain, although for the most part they are very different entities to try to understand in practice.

[jennyp]

And that's why I consider it puzzling that you would choose brain activity over, say, the heartbeat.

Welllll... If we were to choose the heart as the carrier of a person's identity, then when a person gets a heart transplant, they'd have to assume the identity of the dead person who donated the heart. Clearly that would be absurd, since the person's "soul" (see above) hasn't been transferred.

[general_re]

Actually, IMHO the only value is life. It's the only thing we don't create ourselves.

"IMHO" is a wise disclaimer. If life is the thing to be valued above all else, we can certainly toss classical conservatism out the window - life has not been particularly valued throughout human history, as a practical matter, despite much lip service to the contrary. Valuing life above all else actually strikes me as a rather radical idea to practice, all things considered - we really can't "conserve" practices which are new, even if the idea isn't ;)

In this country, we wrote the Constitution to protect against the rise of an autocrat. Autocrats do awful things like kill and torture people, etc.

Rest assured, I'll be the best sort of autocrat - the benevolent dictator, concerned only with the welfare of his subjects, and armed with absolute power in order to implement it. I think you might like the results. I make no promises about my successors, however.

P.S. Neo-monarchism has it's problems; corrupt monarchs and such. But I understand the sentiment.

A new golden age. Trust me. Conserve the time-honored practices of the past - you won't regret it a bit. ;)

[donh]

Right. Until the doctrine of patraie potestas was was outlawed by Valentinian I at the urging of the Bishop of Caesaria.

...and therefore, as a strict Hobbsean respecter of tradition, you favor the previous doctrine over the radical new doctrine, right?

[donh]

No, but I think that your description of the U.S. as a libertarian society is made much more tenuous by the libertarian failures at the polls.

We don't count the noses of the pigs at the trough to determine facts. It is hardnosed facts concerning the relative freedom of our institutions that jennyp presented you with--this is irritatingly non-responsive. What americans raised in government-controlled schools "think" about libertarianism is about as meaningful to this question as a fart is to a hurricane.

[donh]

I wrote

...Hobbsean...

I meant

...Burkean...

Sorry. Although I wonder if that is not what you actually meant.

[donh]

ethics should revolve around the protection and propagation of human life.

Including the lives of traitors? Including the lives of foreign soldiers on foreign soil with which we are engaged in war?

[jennyp]

CLICK HERE for THREAD II, complete with ALL NEW crevo news articles to discuss.