What makes childbirth a defining moment between being a human being and not a human being? If that's not the moment at which to protect a human against death, then when does it happen? Is it in the 3rd trimester? Is it at two years old? Is it when they pass some formal IQ test?
I think a newborn can reasonably be considered to be sentient. Certainly it falls into the class of "possibly sentient." It has a working brain, after all. Birth is an important demarcation point, not because of sentience, but because:
1. It is completely well-defined, which is useful for legal-purposes.
2. It is the point at which the infant ceases to be parasitic on the mother's body. One can reasonably suppose that there should be limits on how much a being--even a sentient one--is entitled to impose upon somebody else's body.
These concerns vanish when you are dealing with an early embryo such as is used for stem cell production. There is no debate about whether or not it is sentient, because it doesn't have the neural equipment. All it possesses it the potential to develop sentience in the future, maybe (a large fraction of embryos are defective, and will not go to term regardless)--a property that it shares with the sperm and the ovum (and potentially, as cloning technology improves, with every cell in the body).
do you advocate allowing people to kill and harvest life-saving organs from severely retarded people or people in comas?
Even a retarded person is sentient, so no. Perhaps there are some people so profoundly retarded that it could be argued that they lack sentience, but even if it is ethically acceptable, it does not seem good legal policy to allow such exceptions to be made, especially when the value of making such an exception is very slight. As far as people in irreversible comas, this is already done, and seems ethically quite reasonable.
It's not a physical "addiction" and it's insulting to people with real additions.
It's all physical. There is increasing evidence that "addicting behaviors" and addicting drugs activate the same physical brain pathways.
Still, there is reason to be cautious about applying the term addiction to behaviors. What is unique about addicting drugs is that they directly activate reward pathways that have evolved to reinforce behaviors that improve survival or reproduction--things like eating and having sex. By bypassing the "filters", you end up reinforcing destructive behaviors (e.g. injecting contaminants into your veins), or providing a shortcut to reward that competes with important survival related behaviors.
This isn't really true for "addictive behaviors." Here, the reward pathways are being activated in the "proper" ways. So there is a key distinction. But the brain isn't all that smart in choosing what behaviors to reward--these are very ancient pathways, evolutionarily speaking. For example, many species are vulnerable to "super-stimuli"--exaggerations of the natural behavioral triggers (silicon implants, anyone?). So maybe some of our rewarding behaviors shouldn't be so rewarding. But this inherently involves making a value judgement. If we we say playing a MMRPG is "addictive," we are implicitly making the judgement that the online social interactions and other activities in such games are "excessively" enjoyable--i.e. their value to the person is not commensurate with their reward value. How do we draw the line between a harmless enthusiasm and a harmful addiction
So we are led back to the same kind of criteria that we use to evaluate whether a person is addicted to a substance:
Does the individual in question feel that he is engaging in this activity excessively? Has he tried and failed to cut back? Have there been negative consequences? Are other aspects of his life suffering as a result of this activity?
The eyes need to refocus for the colors, which are not near on the spectrum. Thus it would be difficult (tiring) for human eye to focus if red and blue are placed together.
The eye also gets some depth cues from focus. So red on blue produces a slight "3D" illusion, which was exploited in some of the "psychedelic" posters of the 60's
Part of Shatner's charm is that he has never seemed to full of himself--just an actor who is happy to be working and to have had some success. And he has never seemed to mind poking fun at himself.
It's very easy to sneer at Shatner's overwrought delivery of Kirk's lines. But they were pretty overwrought lines before Shatner got hold of them, and--let's face it--it worked. There's a reason why those shows are still showing decades later, and Shatner is part of it.
For that matter, why should we have the same genetic code as everything else? After all, the genetic code is arbitrary. Having the same genetic code just makes us vulnerable to viruses, which can hijack our genetic apparatus because it is compatible with their code. Not to mention the risk of viruses hopping over from other species. And while we're at it, why only 3 codons? We'll have a lot of extra genomic space, once we get rid of those pesky introns, so why not extend the genetic code and add some error-correction bits?
Science has a rich tradition of total credulity and of missing things and of incomplete knowledge (sounds mostly human).
Sure, maybe there is some good reasons for designing the mammalian eye with the wiring in front of the photoreceptors--and then designing the octopus eye in what seems like a more sensible way, with the wiring in back where it doesn't get in the way of the light. Perhaps we humans are simply too dumb to see why that was a brilliant decision.
But if you want to appeal to the perfection of biological design as evidence of an intelligent designer, it is hard to get around the fact that it simply doesn't actually look all that perfect. By human standards, a great deal of biology looks clumsy and awkward--yet perfectly reasonable in the context of evolution.
Even if DNA is the only possible good replicating information-bearing molecule (which seems unlikely), the genetic code seems fairly arbitrary. It's hard to imagine why it would be the same in organisms of a completely different lineage. It's a bit like finding aliens who use ASCII text in their computers.
In other words, "god" didn't do it the way he _should_ have done it (if indeed, he _did_ do it); therefore, he couldn't have done it. Is that your reasoning?
I think it is the other way around. The question is is whether the nature of biological systems provides evidence for a single, intelligent Designer. The clear answer is "No." Of course, one never exclude the possibility that a nonhuman entity might choose for incomprehensible reasons of Its own to design living things in such a way that they look like awkward kluge piled upon kluge, coincidentally resembling the sort of thing that one would expect from an evolutionary process process without reason or memory. But the biological evidence provides zero evidence for the existence of such an entity.
With all the intelligence we can see and appreciate in our design and the intelligence that we can hopefully recognize in ourselves, you expect me to believe that all this intelligence came from hot water and random circumstances? When we presuppose God wasn't the creator and instead have hot water and inorganic material to thank, absolute ethics are all wet and we may find ourselves in hot water after we die. Well, maybe we will wish for water.
Actually, while our design is very complicated, there are many ways in which it doesn't seem particularly intelligent--and most certainly not the product of a single intelligece (a committee of engineers some of whom were only marginally competent, and who didn't communicate very well with one another remains a distinct possibility).
As for absolute ethics, you are pretty much out of luck whether we evolved or not. Absolute ethics is based upon a rather stupid and completely unverified premise--that a Creator must be good. Never mind that it is something that doesn't seem to hold particularly true among human creators, or that even the Bible provides very little evidence for the goodness of it's self-styled "Creator."
Biggest problem with astronomy...
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The issue here is that, like many complex physical systems, you require initial conditions to define the evolutionary starting point which macroevolution doesn't consider. It is, however, adept at describing the physical system itself. I believe that the nature of this must be metaphysical in nature. What mechanism is unknown, but again, just MHO.
This is no more valid for evolution than for astronomy. You don't need detailed info about the origin of the solar system to apply orbital calculations--you just need info from some time point. This sort of nonsense arises because some people insist on viewing evolution as some kind of replacement for religion. Yes, evolution provides a better explanation than (a foolishly literal interpretation of) the Bible for the origin of species. But that does not mean that it purports to explain the Origin of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
So sites that use anti-leech software will lose visitors who block pop-ups. Even the ones who don't block banners, and who might have patronized the banner advertisers. And they'll lose referrals and links by people with pop-up blocking browsers, and the visitors (some of whom wouldn't be blocking popups) who would follow those links.
Sounds like installing anti-leech is a good way to deliver the coup de grace to a struggling site.
Seems kind of a stupid thing to worry about. We already have to deal with ethical concerns regarding creatures that are far closer to human than any conceivable mouse-human chimera, namely chimps and gorillas--or just about any primate, for that matter.
So, if a few hundred bombers managed to kill 100,000 people over the course of a few hours, what would have happened during a full-scale invasion, complete with urban fighting and an enemy that really, really didn't want to give up? As another example, take the battle for Berlin; roughly 600,000 total dead, equally split between the Germans and the Russians. It's hard to imagine a hypothetical Battle of Tokyo with only a sixth of that number, much less an entire Battle of Japan.
However, if it is purely a matter of numbers, then we should have no great complaint over 9-11. After all, two or three thousand deaths is not that uncommon in war. One could arge that, if the perpetrators believed that they were preventing a greater number of casualties on their own side, then they were justified. But we make a big distinction between the deaths of soldiers and the deliberate or negligent targetting of civilian populations.
Nintendo's decision to aim the new Zelda game at young children cost them at least one Gamecube sale: mine.
This is pretty ridiculous. Zelda has always been a "kids of all ages" series. Personally, I like the new look (which actually is more in the spirit of the original series than the rather generic look of the N64 Zelda games).
I think Nintendo's business model is stronger than ever. There are always going to be kids, and Nintendo is the only company that seems to have found the formula for producing games that appeal to kids as well as to many adults. The only difference is that they have broadened their focus to accept a few of the best teen game, like Resident Evil.
People die all the time from bad food: from infections from bad sanitation, from known toxins accidentally introduced, and from allergic reactions to natural substances. While one might wish that food producers were motivated purely by concern for their fellow man, the hard reality is that the risk of liability is one factor that helps to keep our food (relatively) safe.
Perhaps that's why companies are fighting tooth and nail to prevent marking GM foods -- or even marking foods as GM free. It's really hard to sue someone for GMing an alergen into corn when you can't prove that the corn is GMed.
Nonsense. Proof is trivial. If there is an allergen present, a simple immunoassay will determine its levels and identity. And real-time PCR will immediately determine what fraction of the ingredients are genetically modified (so they can't get out of it by claiming accidental contamination). It would be an instant slam-dunk for the plaintif.
If someone gets a serious reaction to some food in a restaurant, their knee jerk reaction isn't going to be to sue monsanto for GMing an alergen into the rice. It's going to be to sue the restaurant for not being careful enough with their utensils. Monsanto's just going to sit back and laugh.
Again, this is just foolish. You are proposing something far greater than the occasional allergic reactions that occur all the time to non-GM foods. If there is a massive increase in analphylactic reactions, it will be noticed right away by emergency room physicians. Especially in the current political environment, the CDC and our new Homeland Security Agency will be on it like white on rice. And they aren't going to stop with the restaurant. They'll do the appropriate assays.
Tobacco companies were able to do it for generations. There's no reason why Monsanto won't be able to do the same thing if it turns out that GM foods have unintended (or simply undocumented) fatal consequences for some consumers.
Nonsense. Tobacco companies were "grandfathered." As a traditional,natural, nonfood substance, tobacco was specifically excluded by law for control by the FDA. GM foods will enjoy no such exemption.
And there are ways to get around anti-dumping laws. When Sony announced that they would release the Playstation in the US at $100 less than it was selling for in Japan, to undercut Sega's Saturn, they removed the separate RCA video port. That made the US Playstation a different model from the Japanese one, so the anti-dumping laws did not apply.
Now if you take the gene responsible for this allergy and move it to say, corn because maybe you get better pest resistance, what happens when someone eats a piece of cornbread and dies of the allergic reaction?
The company that produced it gets sued out of existence for incorporating a known hazardous protein into a food. It's worth noting that the peanut, an exceptionally hazardous food, was produced without the benefit of genetic manipulation. The chances of producing an equally hazardous product by genetic modification are extremely small. And in contrast to peanuts, a company that produces an excessively allergenic product does not have the defense that "we can't help it; it's a natural part of the plant."
I can't say that I particularly care if they retrieve my info, but if I hear that they are making money from selling it, I'm going to be asking for a cut.
By the way, there exists a broadcast medium for program info. I have a device called Starsight, which controls my VCR. It doesn't have a phone connection, but picks up program info that is apparently co-broadcast on PBS channels. The device itself is decidedly inferior to Tivo, however, because it won't do searches.
I used to have an even better program guide/VCR control device--nearly as good as Tivo, in fact--that used the pager network to deliver the info. Unfortunately, they got bought up by the company that owns Starsight, who discontinued the service.
Well, it's no match for TiVo yet. I'd like to have some kind of TiVo-like service, at least as an option. I find the most useful aspect of TiVo is that it will autosearch for programs and construct a recording schedule based on a defined set of priorities. And having to entire the titles myself would be a real pain. Still, if the TiVo folks are smart, they are thinking about a DVD-recorder equipped version or DVD-recorder peripheral, because I expect that these things will ultimately take over as an archival medium.
On the other hand it's a big step up from a VCR. The media is a bit pricey--the hours per disk they quote are of course for the lowest recording quality, which if my experience with TiVo is any guide, means horribly artifacted for anything other than talking heads. But I'm sure the blank disks will get cheaper in time.
I believe the AT&T TiVo is now going for $200. There are vendors that sell plug & play replacement TiVo hard drives, which is about as easy as you can get.
This is just mathematical proof that you can wrap a rubberband around an apple. I think the rest of us would be satisfied by a videotape instead.
It's more like a proof that the rubber band will pop off the apple if you nudge it a bit. Oh, yeah, and the apple has to be 4-dimensional (and no, you can't count time as one of them). Good luck making that video....
In a purely theoretical prediction like this, I'm impressed if they even manage to come within a factor of two. It's easy to be off by orders of magnitude.
Why not contribute to scientific progress? I can't perceive any effect on the performance of my computer by having Folding@Home running in the background. No, I don't believe that it is particularly cure Alzheimer's Disease or cancer, but it is an important problem, nevertheless. And while the likelihood of actually finding extraterrestrial life may not be high (although nobody knows for sure), a success would be extremely important.
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1. It is completely well-defined, which is useful for legal-purposes.
2. It is the point at which the infant ceases to be parasitic on the mother's body. One can reasonably suppose that there should be limits on how much a being--even a sentient one--is entitled to impose upon somebody else's body.
These concerns vanish when you are dealing with an early embryo such as is used for stem cell production. There is no debate about whether or not it is sentient, because it doesn't have the neural equipment. All it possesses it the potential to develop sentience in the future, maybe (a large fraction of embryos are defective, and will not go to term regardless)--a property that it shares with the sperm and the ovum (and potentially, as cloning technology improves, with every cell in the body).
Even a retarded person is sentient, so no. Perhaps there are some people so profoundly retarded that it could be argued that they lack sentience, but even if it is ethically acceptable, it does not seem good legal policy to allow such exceptions to be made, especially when the value of making such an exception is very slight. As far as people in irreversible comas, this is already done, and seems ethically quite reasonable.Still, there is reason to be cautious about applying the term addiction to behaviors. What is unique about addicting drugs is that they directly activate reward pathways that have evolved to reinforce behaviors that improve survival or reproduction--things like eating and having sex. By bypassing the "filters", you end up reinforcing destructive behaviors (e.g. injecting contaminants into your veins), or providing a shortcut to reward that competes with important survival related behaviors.
This isn't really true for "addictive behaviors." Here, the reward pathways are being activated in the "proper" ways. So there is a key distinction. But the brain isn't all that smart in choosing what behaviors to reward--these are very ancient pathways, evolutionarily speaking. For example, many species are vulnerable to "super-stimuli"--exaggerations of the natural behavioral triggers (silicon implants, anyone?). So maybe some of our rewarding behaviors shouldn't be so rewarding. But this inherently involves making a value judgement. If we we say playing a MMRPG is "addictive," we are implicitly making the judgement that the online social interactions and other activities in such games are "excessively" enjoyable--i.e. their value to the person is not commensurate with their reward value. How do we draw the line between a harmless enthusiasm and a harmful addiction
So we are led back to the same kind of criteria that we use to evaluate whether a person is addicted to a substance:
Does the individual in question feel that he is engaging in this activity excessively? Has he tried and failed to cut back? Have there been negative consequences? Are other aspects of his life suffering as a result of this activity?
Part of Shatner's charm is that he has never seemed to full of himself--just an actor who is happy to be working and to have had some success. And he has never seemed to mind poking fun at himself.
It's very easy to sneer at Shatner's overwrought delivery of Kirk's lines. But they were pretty overwrought lines before Shatner got hold of them, and--let's face it--it worked. There's a reason why those shows are still showing decades later, and Shatner is part of it.
For that matter, why should we have the same genetic code as everything else? After all, the genetic code is arbitrary. Having the same genetic code just makes us vulnerable to viruses, which can hijack our genetic apparatus because it is compatible with their code. Not to mention the risk of viruses hopping over from other species. And while we're at it, why only 3 codons? We'll have a lot of extra genomic space, once we get rid of those pesky introns, so why not extend the genetic code and add some error-correction bits?
But if you want to appeal to the perfection of biological design as evidence of an intelligent designer, it is hard to get around the fact that it simply doesn't actually look all that perfect. By human standards, a great deal of biology looks clumsy and awkward--yet perfectly reasonable in the context of evolution.
Even if DNA is the only possible good replicating information-bearing molecule (which seems unlikely), the genetic code seems fairly arbitrary. It's hard to imagine why it would be the same in organisms of a completely different lineage. It's a bit like finding aliens who use ASCII text in their computers.
As for absolute ethics, you are pretty much out of luck whether we evolved or not. Absolute ethics is based upon a rather stupid and completely unverified premise--that a Creator must be good. Never mind that it is something that doesn't seem to hold particularly true among human creators, or that even the Bible provides very little evidence for the goodness of it's self-styled "Creator."
So sites that use anti-leech software will lose visitors who block pop-ups. Even the ones who don't block banners, and who might have patronized the banner advertisers. And they'll lose referrals and links by people with pop-up blocking browsers, and the visitors (some of whom wouldn't be blocking popups) who would follow those links.
Sounds like installing anti-leech is a good way to deliver the coup de grace to a struggling site.
Seems kind of a stupid thing to worry about. We already have to deal with ethical concerns regarding creatures that are far closer to human than any conceivable mouse-human chimera, namely chimps and gorillas--or just about any primate, for that matter.
This is pretty ridiculous. Zelda has always been a "kids of all ages" series. Personally, I like the new look (which actually is more in the spirit of the original series than the rather generic look of the N64 Zelda games).
I think Nintendo's business model is stronger than ever. There are always going to be kids, and Nintendo is the only company that seems to have found the formula for producing games that appeal to kids as well as to many adults. The only difference is that they have broadened their focus to accept a few of the best teen game, like Resident Evil.
People die all the time from bad food: from infections from bad sanitation, from known toxins accidentally introduced, and from allergic reactions to natural substances. While one might wish that food producers were motivated purely by concern for their fellow man, the hard reality is that the risk of liability is one factor that helps to keep our food (relatively) safe.
Nonsense. Proof is trivial. If there is an allergen present, a simple immunoassay will determine its levels and identity. And real-time PCR will immediately determine what fraction of the ingredients are genetically modified (so they can't get out of it by claiming accidental contamination). It would be an instant slam-dunk for the plaintif.
Again, this is just foolish. You are proposing something far greater than the occasional allergic reactions that occur all the time to non-GM foods. If there is a massive increase in analphylactic reactions, it will be noticed right away by emergency room physicians. Especially in the current political environment, the CDC and our new Homeland Security Agency will be on it like white on rice. And they aren't going to stop with the restaurant. They'll do the appropriate assays.
Nonsense. Tobacco companies were "grandfathered." As a traditional,natural, nonfood substance, tobacco was specifically excluded by law for control by the FDA. GM foods will enjoy no such exemption.
And there are ways to get around anti-dumping laws. When Sony announced that they would release the Playstation in the US at $100 less than it was selling for in Japan, to undercut Sega's Saturn, they removed the separate RCA video port. That made the US Playstation a different model from the Japanese one, so the anti-dumping laws did not apply.
The company that produced it gets sued out of existence for incorporating a known hazardous protein into a food. It's worth noting that the peanut, an exceptionally hazardous food, was produced without the benefit of genetic manipulation. The chances of producing an equally hazardous product by genetic modification are extremely small. And in contrast to peanuts, a company that produces an excessively allergenic product does not have the defense that "we can't help it; it's a natural part of the plant."
I can't say that I particularly care if they retrieve my info, but if I hear that they are making money from selling it, I'm going to be asking for a cut.
By the way, there exists a broadcast medium for program info. I have a device called Starsight, which controls my VCR. It doesn't have a phone connection, but picks up program info that is apparently co-broadcast on PBS channels. The device itself is decidedly inferior to Tivo, however, because it won't do searches.
I used to have an even better program guide/VCR control device--nearly as good as Tivo, in fact--that used the pager network to deliver the info. Unfortunately, they got bought up by the company that owns Starsight, who discontinued the service.
The proper comparison for tape is of course to other erasable media. But you are right that they are comparable for archival purposes.
I don't necessarily want my PC to have to be in the same room with my TV. I appreciate a cheap, self-contained dedicated box.
Well, it's no match for TiVo yet. I'd like to have some kind of TiVo-like service, at least as an option. I find the most useful aspect of TiVo is that it will autosearch for programs and construct a recording schedule based on a defined set of priorities. And having to entire the titles myself would be a real pain. Still, if the TiVo folks are smart, they are thinking about a DVD-recorder equipped version or DVD-recorder peripheral, because I expect that these things will ultimately take over as an archival medium.
On the other hand it's a big step up from a VCR. The media is a bit pricey--the hours per disk they quote are of course for the lowest recording quality, which if my experience with TiVo is any guide, means horribly artifacted for anything other than talking heads. But I'm sure the blank disks will get cheaper in time.
I believe the AT&T TiVo is now going for $200. There are vendors that sell plug & play replacement TiVo hard drives, which is about as easy as you can get.
It's more like a proof that the rubber band will pop off the apple if you nudge it a bit. Oh, yeah, and the apple has to be 4-dimensional (and no, you can't count time as one of them). Good luck making that video....
In a purely theoretical prediction like this, I'm impressed if they even manage to come within a factor of two. It's easy to be off by orders of magnitude.
Why not contribute to scientific progress? I can't perceive any effect on the performance of my computer by having Folding@Home running in the background. No, I don't believe that it is particularly cure Alzheimer's Disease or cancer, but it is an important problem, nevertheless. And while the likelihood of actually finding extraterrestrial life may not be high (although nobody knows for sure), a success would be extremely important.