GWB "has the moral development of a 13-year-old boy"

[Sundog]

If anyone else can answer. Why are Sundog's assumptions about me ok but I am not allowed to make them about him?

Please excuse my reaction to your tirade. Surely I don't need to point out to you that I have never suggested that you need to take courses in critical thinking and philosophy. Surely even a closed-minded right wing apologist can see that such a suggestion is insulting.

And bing, I'm off again. I think I've become completely radicalized by recent events, and perhaps it's true that I can't be very open-minded about politics right now. It's definitely true that I hate these exchanges more and more.

Peace for a while again folks... maybe a limerick before I go...

 

[RandFan]

Your philosophy is not in question here. Your philosophical house can be a beautiful structure constructed with care over many years.... and the conclusions it leads to can still be wrong.

This seems to be contradictory. If my philosophy leads to incorrect conclusions then it should be in question.

I hate to argue ad nauseam but, I accept that I could be wrong. I would like to hear you say that you could be wrong.

Hear me out for a sec. Just because you have this wonderful, airtight philosophy

Ok, now I hate to pick this apart but I have to. I don't know believe that my philosophy is airtight. On the contrary, as a skeptic I hold that I could be wrong. In the Religion and Philosophy forum I make that argument on the hour.

...every plank of the Bush agenda

I reject much of the Bush agenda.

1. I disagree with his spending.
   
2. I disagree with his plans to give amnesty to illegal aliens.
   
3. I disagree with his prescription drug plan.
   
4. I disagree with some of his policies about the 2nd Amendment
   [/list=1]
   
   

   ...everything the right says and thinks...

   • I support a woman's right to choose
     
   • I want to end the war on drugs.
     
   • I want prostitution to be legalized.
     
   • I want government out of our bedrooms.
     
   • I want gays to have the right to marry and adopt children.
     
   • I am for the seperation of church and state.
   
   

   ...is automatically correct?

   Absoluetly not.
   
   

   Oh believe me man, I hear Rightist propaganda all the time! How can anyone avoid it? the "liberal media" is crammed to overflowing with right-wing BS that insults my intelligence immediately. Blatant lies like Kerry's "350 votes for higher taxes"... the accusations that he didn't earn his purple heart... the character assassination against every single whistleblower who has come out to tell the truth of the Bush administration...disgusting garbage like that. If that's the end product of a philosophy, it's a philosophy of cynicism and evil.

   So, as I understand it, there is nothing whatsoever redeeming about any philosophy that is from the right?
   
   There is no reason to make an effort to listen to a talk radio station with a right leaning host? Sundog, it sounds like you are very closed minded.

 

[RandFan]

Please excuse my reaction to your tirade. Surely I don't need to point out to you that I have never suggested that you need to take courses in critical thinking and philosophy. Surely even a closed-minded right wing apologist can see that such a suggestion is insulting.

First off I am not a right-wing closed-minded apologist. Second off your suggestion that there are recovering rightists is very insulting. So rightists are like alcoholics that need a 12 step program?

Sundog, I respond in kind. If you want me to be nice you need to be nice. When someone suggests that my philosophy is equivalent to destructive addition then I will respond strongly.

In the future treat others with respect and you will get in return.

 

[Regnad Kcin]

Originally posted by RandFan
I listen to and read a number of liberal commentators. Hands down my favorite commentator is Pat Caddell. Chris Mathews is a close second.

Chris Matthews is a liberal???!!! That's one I've never heard before!

 

[Kerberos]

The point Singer makes, which you have not yet refuted and which I'm going to run with until you do, is that the ownership of money is a matter of local social convention, and that it's defensible to tax money (or define it as state property if you prefer) to the same extent that "social capital" contributed to its production.

I don't think Randfan disputes this, he is, if I read him correctly, simply saying that he feels that as much money as possible should be retained by/given to the individual. I think much the same can be said of Bush, he's making a value judgement, and I think it's unfair to judge the statement as if he's claiming it's some universal philosophical truth. Of course I'm not Bush, so I can’t say this with certainty, but I don't think you can assume a priori that such statements should be taken as anything other than value judgments.

So if 90% of your earnings are made possible by society and government, it's defensible to tax up to 90% of your money on that basis. You didn't earn the money, society did. (IIRC 90% is a plausible figure).

You might say that I could only earn 10% of what I do without society, and that number could even be to low, but on the other hand society couldn't earn even 1% of what it does without the efforts of individuals.

The conclusion is that it is invalid to argue that money you have acquired through a combination of your efforts and social capital is "your money", as Bush did, unless the tax rate is over 90% (or whatever). Because until then, it's perfectly defensible for it to be considered "everybody's money".

Certainly it's defensible to consider it's everybody’s money, but it is also defensible to consider it as belonging to the individual who earns it (within the framework of society of course). Both are defensible as value judgments, neither are defensible as statements of absolute, objective truth.

 

[RandFan]

Chris Matthews is a liberal???!!! That's one I've never heard before!

You failed to read the entire statement.

I listen to and read a number of liberal commentators. Hands down my favorite commentator is Pat Caddell. Chris Mathews is a close second. Both lean to the left, Pat worked with Carter and Chris worked for Tip Oneil.

I should have said liberal and left leaning commentators.

 

[RandFan]

Certainly it's defensible to consider it's everybody’s money, but it is also defensible to consider it as belonging to the individual who earns it (within the framework of society of course). Both are defensible as value judgments, neither are defensible as statements of absolute, objective truth.

FWIW, I completly agree with this statement.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GWB "has the moral development of a 13-

The heart death criteria doesn’t define death as when the heart stops but rather when the heart has stoped and it’s not possible to restart it. This makes the moment of death very blured, but a person dead by the heart death kriteria can’t be brought back.

That looks to me like a practical definition that us very handy for medical work, since it precisely defines the point at which further efforts are useless.

But it can't be a full definition of death, because it's technologically relative. It would be very weird if a person in a given condition was dead (as opposed to dying) in 1000 AD but would be alive in 2000AD.

Cool, here we go: I don’t think I’m using any value judgment, some judgment is going on of course, since the definition of life is, as I’ve said, not god-given, but it’s not mine and it’s not about values. Looking in a book about microbiology I found the following three characteristics of life. Though the definition is only meant for cellular life it can be used here too:
1. Metabolism
2. Reproduction
3. Evolution

It can't actually be used here too, as you realise yourself a bit further on. The reproduction and evolution criteria are completely useless in this context, as you figure out for yourself, because they exclude such obviously living things as mules and eunuchs.

Metabolism is the relevant criterion.

My organism as a whole clearly becomes incapable of performing these functions, long before every cell in my body is dead. With brain death I can no longer do at least 2 and 3, and while I’m uncertain about the degree to which I can metabolize food I’m certainly unable to do this, without having my heart artificially kept going by a respirator. This definition is not perfect, since we don’t consider a sterile person dead, but the same problem applies to the cellular level.

No it doesn't. A sterile cell could still be alive. In fact, I believe muscle cells are incapable of reproducing in an adult in the normal state of affairs. They're still alive.

As I pointed out above I consider a human (or horse or deer) alive on two levels the cellular and the whole. Am I correct in deducing that you don’t think there’s any, for our purposes relevant, difference between the way we’re alive and the way a germ colony is alive?

Multicellular life has different characteristics to colonies of bacteria, but at the end of the day there is indeed no difference. The germ colony is not 100% dead until every germ is dead, and a dog is not 100% dead until every cell is dead, and their ability to reproduce is neither here nor there.

I’m not so sure you’re correct in assuming these things. I studied biotechnology for two years and I I know for a fact that the human metabolism involves parts of the brain.

It does, but mostly the regulatory functions of the brain are effected by chemical intermediaries that take their time circulating around the body.

Even if it was purely a nervous signal deal, though, we could get the same effect in theory by popping electrodes or neurotransmitters into the right places with the same net effect as an iron lung or a ventilator: the subject is kept alive artificially, but undeniably they are still alive.

You seem to have misunderstood me. Were not talking about things that a human should be able to do, but rather things that every living organism should be able to do and which it no longer can perform.

I think I have shown that this version of the argument fails to work too, because not only is what an organism "should be able to do" a value judgment and not an objective judgment, but that you are really arguing that death is defined by an inability to cope, rather than being a consequence of an inability to cope.

I mean, suppose medical technology improved to the point where we could sustain a person who meets the current definition of "brain dead" indefinitely, and even facilitate their reproduction? The definition would look really weird then.

I might be misreading you (again), but you seem to think that the distinction between a live and a dead cell is sharp, but it really is rather fuzzy. You refer to the cell as being alive when it does it’s “cell things” (can’t get much more fuzzy than that ), but what exactly are those things? You refer to metabolization, but that is a lot of different processes. If we begin gradually to remove parts of the cell there will be no single moment where you can say that the cell is now dead, so your definition really is no saner, simpler or clearer than mine, unless you will define life as any chemical process, and I don’t think you’re prepared top do that.

Well I am, because life is indeed a chemical process.

It's also quite fair to say that there is no line to draw that precisely demarcates life and death even for a single cell. Death is a process, for humans and cells alike. But a comprehensively defunct cell, like a decomposing corpse, is undeniably dead in a way that a "brain dead" person or a cell that just just received an apoptosis trigger is not.

Many of the crucial processes in a bacteria’s metabolism is tied to the cell wall, so a bacteria without a cell wall wouldn’t be able to metabolize, and could thus be considered dead rather than dying by your definition. Of course as I said above the distinction between dead and alive is fluent.

Sure. I think it would take some time (a fraction of a second, perhaps, but I'm guessing) for the nucleus to realise what had happened. Up until that point the cell is like a human who was suddenly decapitated an instant ago. It's not going to be with us long at all, but calling it dead is a wee bit premature.

Actually I think I’d have to agree with you by my next post for you prediction to come true, so you’re nearing the deadline. Unless of course you wish to abandon your doomed course before it’s to late.

Okay, let's sum things up then.

Death is a process, not a binary state which flicks on or off. As long as an organism continues to metabolise, it's not sensible to call it dead because the chemical processes that we call life are ongoing. You can't call it 100% dead until those processes have stopped, even if you think you know for certain that those processes are doomed to stop in a second, a day, a few days or a century.

This is the only sensible, universal definition of life because it's the only one that applies to everything more complicated than a virus. (Viruses and prions are borderline cases in anyone's book, so it's okay to leave them in a problematic middle zone. It's where they belong). We need definitions of "life" and "death" that cover bacteria, slime molds, cockroaches and trees as well as humans, and this is the way to do the job.

That's why it's just not sensible to call a "brain dead" person dead. To use Singer's term, it's an intellectual fig leaf. It covers a reality we prefer to deny, that the body we are harvesting organs from is not really dead.

Now Singer and I have absolutely no problem with people doing this harvesting. As far as I'm concerned, if the brain is so far gone that the mind will never recover consciousness then it's open season. The doublethink is in pretending that the beating heart the surgeon lifts out of that "brain dead" person's chest is a piece of dead meat, rather than a living organ.

That's settled then, right?

 

[Kerberos]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GWB "has the moral development of a

That looks to me like a practical definition that us very handy for medical work, since it precisely defines the point at which further efforts are useless.

But it can't be a full definition of death, because it's technologically relative. It would be very weird if a person in a given condition was dead (as opposed to dying) in 1000 AD but would be alive in 2000AD.

Any definition of death is technologically relative. In theory we could break a bacteria into it’s component proteins, split these proteins into molecules, the molecules into atoms and the atoms into protons, neutrons, and electrons and, given sufficiently advanced technology, reassemble it. You seem to feel that there should be some objective distinction between life and death, but there isn't. The distinction between life and death is a human construct, it doesn't exist outside the human mind.

It can't actually be used here too, as you realise yourself a bit further on. The reproduction and evolution criteria are completely useless in this context, as you figure out for yourself, because they exclude such obviously living things as mules and eunuchs.

Metabolism is the relevant criterion.

That position is problematic too (you knew I was going to say that didn’t you ). If out only requirement for life is metabolism, then an enzyme or a chemical factory is alive.

Also it occurred to me that part of the fuzziness that comes when we try to use the scientific definition of life as something that metabolizes, reproduces and evolves to demarcate the border between life and death ,comes from the fact that it was never intended to be used in this way. The criteria’s above are meant to determine whether a certain group of things, such as humans, bacteria’s, vira, cars etc. are alive, not to determine when a certain live being stops being alive. Thus the fact that a human can be sterile is inconsequential, since the species humans have the ability to reproduce, regardless of the fact that individuals might be flawed, or that women lose the ability to have kids at a certain age. This still leaves mules hanging of course, but no better definition has been found. So the bottom line is that you’re applying the criteria to something it was never intended to, and of course that you disregard two of the three criteria’s.

Multicellular life has different characteristics to colonies of bacteria, but at the end of the day there is indeed no difference. The germ colony is not 100% dead until every germ is dead, and a dog is not 100% dead until every cell is dead, and their ability to reproduce is neither here nor there.

As I’ve shown above life can’t be reduced to metabolism, if it could scientist would define life by that criteria alone, but it really does create more demarcation problems than it solves. However, even if we used metabolism alone as a criteria, the body as a whole would become incapable of performing metabolism, before every single cell had died.

I think I have shown that this version of the argument fails to work too, because not only is what an organism "should be able to do" a value judgment and not an objective judgment, but that you are really arguing that death is defined by an inability to cope, rather than being a consequence of an inability to cope.

As I’ve said before words have no god-given meaning, so any definition of death entails a value judgment of some sort.

I mean, suppose medical technology improved to the point where we could sustain a person who meets the current definition of "brain dead" indefinitely, and even facilitate their reproduction? The definition would look really weird then.

I’m not sure, if we could do that it would still be us doing it not the body itself. The reason that vira are not considered alive is that they can’t reproduce by themselves, but need a living cell to do all their work for them. The definition would clearly become problematic, if we were able to make it function more or less normally, but even if we could do that to a brain dead person there clearly is a point before the death of every cell, were it is neither possible to resurrect the body or keep it functioning. Unless of course, it becomes possible to reconstruct the individual cells, or to mimic the entire function of the human body artificially.

Well I am, because life is indeed a chemical process.

I said ANY chemical process not just a chemical process, I totally agree that life is a biochemical machine, but I’m sure you agree that not every chemical reaction can be called life. If not I just killed a glass of water )

It's also quite fair to say that there is no line to draw that precisely demarcates life and death even for a single cell. Death is a process, for humans and cells alike. But a comprehensively defunct cell, like a decomposing corpse, is undeniably dead in a way that a "brain dead" person or a cell that just just received an apoptosis trigger is not.

It’s not undeniable, I deny it. BTW what is an apoptosis trigger?

Sure. I think it would take some time (a fraction of a second, perhaps, but I'm guessing) for the nucleus to realise what had happened. Up until that point the cell is like a human who was suddenly decapitated an instant ago. It's not going to be with us long at all, but calling it dead is a wee bit premature.

A bacteria without it’s cell wall, is incapable of it’s complete metabolism, some of the processes would continue for some time, but then an incomplete metabolism could, as I said, be carried out by a single enzyme.

Okay, let's sum things up then.

Ok, let’s.

Death is a process, not a binary state which flicks on or off. As long as an organism continues to metabolise, it's not sensible to call it dead because the chemical processes that we call life are ongoing. You can't call it 100% dead until those processes have stopped, even if you think you know for certain that those processes are doomed to stop in a second, a day, a few days or a century.

But these processes can’t necessarily ever be said to have stopped, if we took a bacteria completely apart and scattered its enzymes and proteins in a glass of water, the processes or at least some of them would continue.

This is the only sensible, universal definition of life because it's the only one that applies to everything more complicated than a virus. (Viruses and prions are borderline cases in anyone's book, so it's okay to leave them in a problematic middle zone. It's where they belong). We need definitions of "life" and "death" that cover bacteria, slime molds, cockroaches and trees as well as humans, and this is the way to do the job.

But your definition also includes enzymes, chemical plant and, taken to it’s extreme, a glass of water.

That's why it's just not sensible to call a "brain dead" person dead. To use Singer's term, it's an intellectual fig leaf. It covers a reality we prefer to deny, that the body we are harvesting organs from is not really dead.

Now Singer and I have absolutely no problem with people doing this harvesting. As far as I'm concerned, if the brain is so far gone that the mind will never recover consciousness then it's open season. The doublethink is in pretending that the beating heart the surgeon lifts out of that "brain dead" person's chest is a piece of dead meat, rather than a living organ.

You seem to believe that the brain death criteria supplanted the scientific criteria of death but it never did, it surplanted or rather complimented the heart death criteria. The scientific criteria of death was, as I pointed out above, never used to define death. In any case there’s no conflict between the scientific definition of life and the heart/brain death criteria since the a heart/brain dead person is unable to perform life functions

That's settled then, right?

So we have established that you only use one of the three criteria’s by which science defines life, misapply the scientific definition of life and incidentally consider chemical plants, enzymes and The Dead Sea to be living organisms. I certainly hope that settles it!
P.S My smilies are better than yours.

 

[Kerberos]

*Bumb*

 

[LFTKBS]

Wow, leave for a couple days and there's a lot to catch up on.

Um, there may have been an argument in this thread that I was supposed to address and I can't seem to find it. If the person who disagreed with me about {something?} still cares, please post here or PM me and I'll answer it; otherwise, I call do-over.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GWB "has the moral development

Apologies for my brief absence. Blame a birthday and a new Playstation 2.

Any definition of death is technologically relative. In theory we could break a bacteria into it’s component proteins, split these proteins into molecules, the molecules into atoms and the atoms into protons, neutrons, and electrons and, given sufficiently advanced technology, reassemble it.

Sure, but it would be dead in any remotely sensible meaning of the word while it was in bits.

It's actually you who are playing the "Black is White Fallacy" game here. There's a bit of a difference between a pile of random molecules that could, in tenuous theory, be assembled into an organism, and a mostly functioning human whose heart has just ceased to beat.

I think it's safe to say, in fact, that there's enough of a difference to hang a distinction on.

You seem to feel that there should be some objective distinction between life and death, but there isn't. The distinction between life and death is a human construct, it doesn't exist outside the human mind.

Yes and no. Even if the dividing line is fuzzy, it's a fuzzy line we have to draw somewhere between "this cell is in a bad way" and "this cell is history". The fact that you can't point to the exact place between those two cases where death occurs in no way makes it legitimate to put the line somewhere entirely different.

Where we put the line is indeed a human construct. But rocks are different from bacteria in definable, purely physical ways and there are very real and very objective differences between them.

That position is problematic too (you knew I was going to say that didn’t you ). If out only requirement for life is metabolism, then an enzyme or a chemical factory is alive.

An enzyme is not a metabolising cell. Life is a chemical process, but not all chemical processes are life. Arguing otherwise is just silly.

Also it occurred to me that part of the fuzziness that comes when we try to use the scientific definition of life as something that metabolizes, reproduces and evolves to demarcate the border between life and death ,comes from the fact that it was never intended to be used in this way.

In other words, you're realising that the actual definition of life will not serve you well, so you want to ditch it now.

I'll accept your rejection of the definition we are using, if you can point to an example of life that doesn't have an ongoing chemical structure capable of metabolism. (I'm happy to count a frozen insect as "kinda dead", by the way).

This still leaves mules hanging of course, but no better definition has been found.

Look, you can't just slap a fig leaf over mules and say "Look, I realise that my definition classes all those living, breathing, eating mules as dead lumps of meat. But let's run with my definition anyway because you don't have a better one".

If it's got an ongoing metabolism, it's alive. That is a better definition for this purpose.

So the bottom line is that you’re applying the criteria to something it was never intended to, and of course that you disregard two of the three criteria’s.

Sorry, but unless you have an actual argument or a case study that shows that metabolism is not the relevant criteria in all cases, I'm going to think you're just waffling. If you don't like that definition because it doesn't get you the conclusion you want, you still have to earn the right to reject it.

As I’ve shown above life can’t be reduced to metabolism, if it could scientist would define life by that criteria alone, but it really does create more demarcation problems than it solves.

Yes it can be reduced, and no it doesn't cause serious demarcation issues. Serious demarcation issues are a warm, pink, oxygen-consuming human who is called "dead", or a living mule that is considered "dead". Get that log out of your own eye before you declare that the inability to draw a clear line between a mostly-dead cell and an all-dead cell is a serious demarcation issue.

However, even if we used metabolism alone as a criteria, the body as a whole would become incapable of performing metabolism, before every single cell had died.

Yes, and that means that every single cell is in trouble and before long every single cell will be dead.

Like I said before, death is a consequence of inability to cope. Inability to cope is not death.

As I’ve said before words have no god-given meaning, so any definition of death entails a value judgment of some sort.

Sure, but the scope for that value judgement is the area between a sick cell and a comprehensively defunct cell. Outside that scope there is no basis for a value judgement.

You are arguing that I can't book you for doing 1000km/hr in a 10km/hr zone if my speed gun has a 5km/hr margin of error. That's ridiculous.

I’m not sure, if we could do that it would still be us doing it not the body itself. The reason that vira are not considered alive is that they can’t reproduce by themselves, but need a living cell to do all their work for them. The definition would clearly become problematic, if we were able to make it function more or less normally, but even if we could do that to a brain dead person there clearly is a point before the death of every cell, were it is neither possible to resurrect the body or keep it functioning. Unless of course, it becomes possible to reconstruct the individual cells, or to mimic the entire function of the human body artificially.

None of this addresses the point.

I said ANY chemical process not just a chemical process, I totally agree that life is a biochemical machine, but I’m sure you agree that not every chemical reaction can be called life. If not I just killed a glass of water )

Now you're being silly. I never said that all chemical processes are life, so why do you keep bringing it up? It's an absurd position that is in no way entailed by anything I have stated.

It’s not undeniable, I deny it. BTW what is an apoptosis trigger?

Then you're being silly.

Apoptosis is programmed cell self-destruction. Cells are told to self-destruct when they get old, infected, cancerous or what-have-you. They secrete toxic chemicals and basically dissolve themselves into goo.

But these processes can’t necessarily ever be said to have stopped, if we took a bacteria completely apart and scattered its enzymes and proteins in a glass of water, the processes or at least some of them would continue.

Sure but no one would ever confuse that with life would they? So it's irrelevant.

But your definition also includes enzymes, chemical plant and, taken to it’s extreme, a glass of water.

No it doesn't.

You seem to believe that the brain death criteria supplanted the scientific criteria of death but it never did, it surplanted or rather complimented the heart death criteria. The scientific criteria of death was, as I pointed out above, never used to define death. In any case there’s no conflict between the scientific definition of life and the heart/brain death criteria since the a heart/brain dead person is unable to perform life functions.

It "supplanted" it in that the "brain death" story is very new, was made up more or less out of whole cloth fairly recently, and is quite disconnected from the normal view of what death is.

I also hope you realise now that the claim above about the lack of conflict with the scientific definition is false.

So we have established that you only use one of the three criteria’s by which science defines life, misapply the scientific definition of life and incidentally consider chemical plants, enzymes and The Dead Sea to be living organisms. I certainly hope that settles it!

Uh, no. On all counts.

 

[Kerberos]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GWB "has the moral developm

Apologies for my brief absence. Blame a birthday and a new Playstation 2.

Apologies for my absence too, my internet went down.

Sure, but it would be dead in any remotely sensible meaning of the word while it was in bits.

It's actually you who are playing the "Black is White Fallacy" game here. There's a bit of a difference between a pile of random molecules that could, in tenuous theory, be assembled into an organism, and a mostly functioning human whose heart has just ceased to beat.

I think it's safe to say, in fact, that there's enough of a difference to hang a distinction on.

The problem is that, as I’ve pointed out before, there is a point before the death of every cell where it is probably no easier to revive the organism, than it is to reassemble a cell from it’s component proteins.

Yes and no. Even if the dividing line is fuzzy, it's a fuzzy line we have to draw somewhere between "this cell is in a bad way" and "this cell is history". The fact that you can't point to the exact place between those two cases where death occurs in no way makes it legitimate to put the line somewhere entirely different.

Where we put the line is indeed a human construct. But rocks are different from bacteria in definable, purely physical ways and there are very real and very objective differences between them.

Yes and a brain dead person is different from a non brain dead person in very real objective ways too.

An enzyme is not a metabolising cell. Life is a chemical process, but not all chemical processes are life. Arguing otherwise is just silly.

Of course an enzyme isn’t a metabolizing cell, but unless you give some indication of how many functions the cell must be able to perform, you have no basis for making the distinction. I checked and the dictionary definition of metabolism is “The chemical processes occurring within a living cell or organism that are necessary for the maintenance of life. In metabolism some substances are broken down to yield energy for vital processes while other substances, necessary for life, are synthesized.“ so unless you define more closely what you mean by metabolism, your definition of life is essentially circular.

In other words, you're realising that the actual definition of life will not serve you well, so you want to ditch it now.

No I’m realizing you’re misapplying the definition, the definition never was used to define when a person died, if you don’t believe me feel free to ask an old doctor if he ever defined death by those criteria.

I'll accept your rejection of the definition we are using, if you can point to an example of life that doesn't have an ongoing chemical structure capable of metabolism. (I'm happy to count a frozen insect as "kinda dead", by the way).

Are you? I don’t know about insects, but there are some animals ( I can find the name if you want) who can be frozen and revived. Considering that you claimed that the brain death criteria is invalid, because it is possible that we might at some point in the future, using unknown technology be able to keep a brain dead person breathing indefinitely it would involve major doublethink for you to embrace a definition that defines an animal as dead that can be fully revived simply by heating it.

Look, you can't just slap a fig leaf over mules and say "Look, I realise that my definition classes all those living, breathing, eating mules as dead lumps of meat. But let's run with my definition anyway because you don't have a better one".

I don’t know how scientists deal with mules, but I suppose I could contest that they didn’t count because they aren’t a species in themselves, but a crossbreeding. Also I think that a few mules actually are fertile. And yes I can say that we should run with my definition until a better one is found, because we would be unable to communicate if we could only use words that had crystal clear meanings.

If it's got an ongoing metabolism, it's alive. That is a better definition for this purpose.

No it’s not, first of all if you wish to maintain this, you will be directly contradicting your earlier claim that it must be impossible, or at least close to impossible, to revive a dead being before it can be considered dead. Also unless you define at least roughly the distinction between metabolism, and an ordinary chemical reaction your definition of life is meaningless.

Sorry, but unless you have an actual argument or a case study that shows that metabolism is not the relevant criteria in all cases, I'm going to think you're just waffling. If you don't like that definition because it doesn't get you the conclusion you want, you still have to earn the right to reject it.

Argument? Case study? You can’t base a definition on a case study. Life is in scientific circles defined by the three criteria I gave. This is not an philosophical question, but and empirical one. I simply trust my biology book and my teachers in university more than I trust you on that question, I can give you a reference to the book if you’d like, or you can ask a biologist. Similarly the definition was never used to define the point of death. This is also an empirical question, and if you really doubt that this is the case you can as I said above ask a doctor.

Yes it can be reduced, and no it doesn't cause serious demarcation issues. Serious demarcation issues are a warm, pink, oxygen-consuming human who is called "dead", or a living mule that is considered "dead". Get that log out of your own eye before you declare that the inability to draw a clear line between a mostly-dead cell and an all-dead cell is a serious demarcation issue.

You’re essentially making an emotional argument here. Is life defined by breathing, oxygen consumption or pinkiness? Mules don’t have to be considered dead, but I agree that some “waffling” has to be done to make them fit in. It would be prettier if we could avoid this, but you definition definitely doesn’t.

Yes, and that means that every single cell is in trouble and before long every single cell will be dead.

I’ll try a different approach. Do you agree that a multi cellular organism changes in a fundamental way if we take the cells apart in a way that a cell colony does not? If so what would you call that change if not death?

Now you're being silly. I never said that all chemical processes are life, so why do you keep bringing it up? It's an absurd position that is in no way entailed by anything I have stated.

I’m not implying you’ve stated it (well I did, but it was obviously a joke), but until you make at least some attempt to define the difference between metabolism and an ordinary chemical reaction you definition is 100% useless.

Then you're being silly.

Apoptosis is programmed cell self-destruction. Cells are told to self-destruct when they get old, infected, cancerous or what-have-you. They secrete toxic chemicals and basically dissolve themselves into goo.

Damn, I should have known that. In that case you’re making a false comparison, a cell that has received an apoptosis trigger is analogous to a person who will soon be brain dead, not one who already is.

Sure but no one would ever confuse that with life would they? So it's irrelevant.

I could use the exact same defence to dismiss mules, so basically you’re doing exactly the same to a glass of water filed with enzymes that you accuse me of doing with mules. So in the very same post you’re accusing me of slapping a fig leaf over mules, and slap a big luminescent, neon-green fig leaf over whatever you definition fails to cover. Hmmm… Splinters and logs.

No it doesn't.

It was partially a joke, but unless you define metabolism we could not make the distinction. Even then, if we can make a chemical plant that can perform the same functions as a cell, then, by your definition, it’s alive.

It "supplanted" it in that the "brain death" story is very new, was made up more or less out of whole cloth fairly recently, and is quite disconnected from the normal view of what death is.

Yes it did supplant, but not the metabolism criteria, also I don’t understand why you keep dragging the normal view of death into the question since you’re not championing the normal view of death, but rather an extremely unusual one that is not, and never was, used to define either life or death inside or outside scientific circles. [/B][/QUOTE]

 

[Kerberos]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GWB "has the moral deve

I’m not implying you’ve stated it (well I did, but it was obviously a joke), but until you make at least some attempt to define the difference between metabolism and an ordinary chemical reaction you definition is 100% useless.

On closer consideration, I think that my point in bringing this up was that IMO, it makes no more sense to define the death of a human as the death of every single cell, than it does to define the death of a bacteria as the cessation of it's last chemical process. You were essentially saying that for a human to be dead every single cell had to have stopped working, and I then pointed out that we might as well say that every single enzyme had to have stopped functioning, before the cell could be considered dead. This really is a question of whether we consider a human to be fundamentally different from a random lump of cells. Claiming that there is no difference however, if that is what you're claiming, makes no more sense than to claim that life isn't different from a random lump of molecules and chemical processes.

 

[JAR]

It seems to me that Professor Singer is criticizing Bush for not being a Christian fundamentalist and not being amoral.

 

[Cain]

I finished reading this book a little while ago. Not until the last chapter does Singer cite the famous Lawrence Kholberg's stages of moral development (where Bush falls under the category of teenager).

The rest of the book tackles Bush's ethics as they are inconsistent with Christianity, inconsistent with the facts of reality, or inconsitent with themselves.

You can see a video of Singer on C-span here: http://www.c-span.org/search/basic....er+singer&image1.x=0&image1.y=0&image1=Submit

I caught the professor channel flipping, but I turned the television off shortly after an irate caller started shouting "human garbage" and misquoting the _NYT_.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GWB "has the moral deve

Damn, I forgot all about this thread. Oh well.

The problem is that, as I’ve pointed out before, there is a point before the death of every cell where it is probably no easier to revive the organism, than it is to reassemble a cell from it’s component proteins.

Please forgive me in advance if I've lost the thread of the argument anywhere. It's been a while.

That said, I don't see how that's a problem for me. As I keep having to say, being doomed is not the same as being dead, and it's putting the cart before the horse to say that it is.

Yes and a brain dead person is different from a non brain dead person in very real objective ways too.

That's a very silly thing to advance as an argument. That "argument" doesn't make any sense unless you assume that all real and objective differences are equal, which is such an absurd premise I won't even bother explaining why it's absurd.

Of course an enzyme isn’t a metabolizing cell, but unless you give some indication of how many functions the cell must be able to perform, you have no basis for making the distinction.

Nonsense. As I have said before, the sane and logical place to draw the line between life and death is somewhere between a normally functioning cell and a totally defunct cell.

It is not much of argument against that position to say "Whoah, but you can't say exactly where in that space death takes place!". You're pointing out a genuine issue, but it's not one that gets you any closer to your established goal of proving that the line between life and death can be drawn somewhere totally different.

I checked and the dictionary definition of metabolism is “The chemical processes occurring within a living cell or organism that are necessary for the maintenance of life. In metabolism some substances are broken down to yield energy for vital processes while other substances, necessary for life, are synthesized.“ so unless you define more closely what you mean by metabolism, your definition of life is essentially circular.

I don't see how my definition of life is circular, if I define life as being the ongoing chemical processes which are "necessary for life". Necessary does not exclude sufficient.

I think you may have spotted a tautology and confused it with a circularity.

No I’m realizing you’re misapplying the definition, the definition never was used to define when a person died, if you don’t believe me feel free to ask an old doctor if he ever defined death by those criteria.

The current existence of the brain death criteria, and the previous issues with misdiagnosis of death, are plenty of proof that the rules of thumb used by doctors are not prefectly coextensive with the realities of life and death.

Are you? I don’t know about insects, but there are some animals ( I can find the name if you want) who can be frozen and revived.

Find them, and check to see if the animal itself in fact freezes. It's one thing to be below zero, and another to actually freeze.

Considering that you claimed that the brain death criteria is invalid, because it is possible that we might at some point in the future, using unknown technology be able to keep a brain dead person breathing indefinitely it would involve major doublethink for you to embrace a definition that defines an animal as dead that can be fully revived simply by heating it.

Please note that I said "Kinda dead", and leave the straw man alone. The scifi phrase "suspended animation" captures the significance of the frozen state: the ongoing process of life is suspended, but not terminated.

I don’t know how scientists deal with mules, but I suppose I could contest that they didn’t count because they aren’t a species in themselves, but a crossbreeding.

But that would be utterly ridiculous, because a living mule is obviously alive.

Look, there is no sane way around the mule problem for you. It's an ironclad reductio. You have to abandon any definition of "life" that excludes a living mule. (You do know what I mean by a living mule, right? If you do, you have to admit the ridiculousness of your position).

Also I think that a few mules actually are fertile.

It would be news to me, and it doesn't help the ones that aren't.

And yes I can say that we should run with my definition until a better one is found, because we would be unable to communicate if we could only use words that had crystal clear meanings.

White is black argument, to use your terminology. "Some words have fuzzy meanings, so its okay for me to assign words ludicrous meanings".

No it’s not, first of all if you wish to maintain this, you will be directly contradicting your earlier claim that it must be impossible, or at least close to impossible, to revive a dead being before it can be considered dead.

Sufficiently advanced supertechnology could quite possibly blur the line between death and life, and/or move people back and forth across that line, but that's okay. They are very slightly fuzzy terms used to point to distinct and important states of being, and thus still useful to us at this stage.

Also unless you define at least roughly the distinction between metabolism, and an ordinary chemical reaction your definition of life is meaningless.

You did it for me above: the kind of business that goes on in cells that is necessary (indeed, sufficient) for life. I can define it sufficiently by pointing at it.

Argument? Case study? You can’t base a definition on a case study. Life is in scientific circles defined by the three criteria I gave. This is not an philosophical question, but and empirical one. I simply trust my biology book and my teachers in university more than I trust you on that question, I can give you a reference to the book if you’d like, or you can ask a biologist.

A reductio ad absurdam trumps an appeal to authority, sorry. I don't care what your book and your teachers said, mules are alive and I'd bet my bottom dollar that if I asked your precious teachers "Hey, are mules a life form?" thay'd answer in the affirmative. Because, I'd like to think, they're capable of basic thought.

Similarly the definition was never used to define the point of death. This is also an empirical question, and if you really doubt that this is the case you can as I said above ask a doctor.

Again, the ad hoc tests and rules of thumb used by field workers are not the same as the reality they attempt to check. What on earth makes you think they are? The simple fact that mistakes get made proves this.

You’re essentially making an emotional argument here. Is life defined by breathing, oxygen consumption or pinkiness?

For pity's sake! There are borderline cases, and there are things that are obviously freaking alive by any remotely sane perspective! Mules! People! Is it an emotional argument to point to an elephant and say "That there is evidence elephants exist"?

I think you have confused a simple and persuasive argument, expressed forcefully, and an emotional argument.

Mules don’t have to be considered dead, but I agree that some “waffling” has to be done to make them fit in. It would be prettier if we could avoid this, but you definition definitely doesn’t.

Again you try to make all cases of waffling equal.

I am "waffling" about where in between cell life and cell death the dividng line lies. You are waffling about whether creatures that are obviously alive to any mentally normal observer are alive.

I’ll try a different approach. Do you agree that a multi cellular organism changes in a fundamental way if we take the cells apart in a way that a cell colony does not? If so what would you call that change if not death?

I'd say that organism was in a very bad way indeed, that it would be very dead very shortly, and that if the organism ever had consciousness that consciousness had irrevocably ceased to exist (with current technology).

I’m not implying you’ve stated it (well I did, but it was obviously a joke), but until you make at least some attempt to define the difference between metabolism and an ordinary chemical reaction you definition is 100% useless.

Well, I did that. Now what?

Damn, I should have known that. In that case you’re making a false comparison, a cell that has received an apoptosis trigger is analogous to a person who will soon be brain dead, not one who already is.

I thought I was making exactly that comparison. I'm too lazy to check, though.

I could use the exact same defence to dismiss mules, so basically you’re doing exactly the same to a glass of water filed with enzymes that you accuse me of doing with mules.

The difference is that people who aren't idiots will tell you immediately that a cupful of dirty water is not a life form, and a mule is. They'll be right, too.

Look, this is going badly for you and it's not going to get any better until you abandon the position that mules are walking, breathing, metabolising lumps of ambulatory dead meat. You can tu qoque all day, but that dog won't hunt because my position is not ridiculous, and yours is.

So in the very same post you’re accusing me of slapping a fig leaf over mules, and slap a big luminescent, neon-green fig leaf over whatever you definition fails to cover. Hmmm… Splinters and logs.

Equating the manageable fuzziness of my position with the ludicrousness of yours is behaviour that staggers belief.

It was partially a joke, but unless you define metabolism we could not make the distinction. Even then, if we can make a chemical plant that can perform the same functions as a cell, then, by your definition, it’s alive.

I don't see that being a problem for me, any more than a person with an aritificial heart is a problem for me.

Yes it did supplant, but not the metabolism criteria, also I don’t understand why you keep dragging the normal view of death into the question since you’re not championing the normal view of death, but rather an extremely unusual one that is not, and never was, used to define either life or death inside or outside scientific circles.

I keep bringing it back in because my view of death is not extremely unusual, it's just a slightly more focused and precise refinement of the usual view that eliminates some of the ambiguities that always existed but only became important with the advent of modern life support technology.

Wherea's your view is full-tilt testicles-out insane, and since that's kind of a weakness in a view it bears pointing out.