I just know John Wilkins is going to gasp in horror and write frantic letters to Pieranna Garavaso, the organizer, telling her she’s making a horrible mistake, but I’m going to be on a panel at the 31st Midwest Philosophy Colloquium on 26 March, here in Morris, at (zut alors!) the Newman Center just off campus. Perhaps you too are reeling at that cascade of improbable associations, but really, it makes sense. Eric Olson of the University of Sheffield is giving a talk on defining the boundaries of the beginning and end of human life, so they dug up a local biologist, me, to contribute a bit to the discussion, along with Mark Collier, local philosopher, and Ben Waterworth, local student. Here’s the short summary:
The gradual nature of development from fertilization to birth and beyond leaves it uncertain when we cease to exist. Many philosophers have tried to answer these questions. Olson will argue that most of these answers are wrong and that a simpler answer follows from the apparent fact that we are biological organisms.
I was a little concerned — “simpler answer” in these discussions too often means “stupid answer” — but a quick skim of a few of his papers tells me he’s got some interesting ideas, and that I’m going to have to do some studying over spring break. I see a few places in his argument where I might disagree, but I have to dig a bit deeper and see if he’s already covered my issues elsewhere.
Mark Collier is in Morris now? Send him my regards!
PZ, my birthday poem to you can be read at my blog. Enjoy!
PZ the below is just a small part of the convulted thinking that makes up the mind of the philopher, in this case John Wilkins.
All I can say is good luck, don’t fall asleep and have fun!
“There seems, then, to be an animal sitting there, where you are,thinking your thoughts and reading these words. It is tempting to infer from this that you are that animal–that you and the animal are one and the same. For if the animal were not you, there would be two beings there, you and the animal, thinking the same thoughts. How could you ever know which one you are? Any reason you could have for believing that you are not the animal would equally be a reason for the animal to believe that it is not the animal.
Yet it would be mistaken. If we were not animals, we could never have any reason to believe that we are not. No one who accepts this can believe that we are anything other than animals.”
Umm, PZ, you are aware that the Newman Center is a Catholic institution, correct?
Watch for booby traps!
All too often overlooked and certainly never lauded as should be: Roe v Wade is a brilliant legal document. The simpleton viewpoint on this issue has always been human life begins at conception since, by definition, the life that begins is that of a Homo sapiens. The obvious real question is, at what point does the developing fetus have rights- some of which being equal to those granted by society to the mother, or, when does an embryo have a stake in society (and visa versa)? I suspect the student panel member and 2/3 of the audience will be fundies. Good luck PZ!!
When does the whirring of a fan end?
A philosopher might point out that “life” is an ill-defined cluster of properties that has no beginning as such, but instead forms a Sorites of increasing similarity to the prototypes of living things we have in mind.
Catholic doctrine makes no sense biologically, and must only be based on the doctrine of psychic creationism – that the soul is created at conception, in which case all the arguments about biological commencement become otiose and red herrings.
If a philosopher were to be included, instead of those fusty old biologists over 50.
PZ… I think you should focus just on the beginning and end of the Pharyngula stage.
But wait! That’s what this fusty old biologist would argue! And actually, having browsed some of Olson’s stuff, he very clearly states that identity does not begin at conception, so this may be a panel that rankles everyone in attendance.
The pharyngula stage is an interesting point in the discussion, but personally, I don’t think individual identity coalesces until long after that.
Explain something to me: Exactly what does “[t]he gradual nature of development from fertilization to birth and beyond” have to do with “when we cease to exist”?
For sane people, ceasing to exist is what happens at the other end of the process… Or did they mean “start to exist” and mis-type?
…”identity” being what, I wonder? Sounds like someone worth reading, though.
PZ,
As a philosophy major, I bet there are some topics and issues that are *sure* to arise during this conference; the philosophical topic of *personal identity* is a very topical issue in contemporary metaphysics. I bet your familiarity of these topics would lend some sophistication to the discussion.
Some reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity_(philosophy)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/theseus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
http://www.pitt.edu/~csd6/metaphysics2001/Handout20.pdf
Cf. Hume’s “Bundle Theory,” Locke’s “Prince or Cobbler?” Brain-Switching paradox, Statue/Clay(Lumpl) paradox, etc.
Applied to issues of personhood, abortion, robots, zombies, the topic is incredibly interesting.
A certain philosopher (known for his odd, twisted arguments), has applied the “Paradox of The Heap” (The sorites paradox) to humans, arguing that he, too, does not exist!
I mean, every cell in our body is replaced ~8-10 years, right?
Best,
M
A philosopher might point out that “life” is an ill-defined cluster of properties that has no beginning as such, but instead forms a Sorites of increasing similarity to the prototypes of living things we have in mind.
An informed philosopher, perhaps, but many philosophers are vitalists, Platonists, and other confusedists. Also, I’m not sure what that has to do with the beginning of an individual living entity, which is formed from already living entities.
It’s really quite straightforward to define the beginning of a human being as the formation of a zygote and the end as brain death. The problems come when people draw all sorts of unwarranted “philosophical” inferences from these definitions; that’s not “philosophy”, it’s “philoconfusion”. If we were pick different definitions and, say, declare that a human life begins at birth and before that it’s “merely” a proto-human or pre-human, that wouldn’t change the physical facts about human (and proto-human) beings; neither of these definitions is more “right” than the other, other than the degree to which they reflect the way people actually use the words (as Wittgenstein said, meaning is use).
Catholic doctrine makes no sense biologically, and must only be based on the doctrine of psychic creationism – that the soul is created at conception, in which case all the arguments about biological commencement become otiose and red herrings.
Well, no, because Catholic doctrine is derived from fallacious reification — vitalism. The notion of a soul originated from a failure to understand biological reality, a failure to understand life as a process or “an ill-defined cluster of properties” (but not all that ill-defined). It is Catholic doctrine that is otiose, a red herring, and biological arguments are relevant to recognizing that. There are philosophers who are competent in conceptual analysis, and then there are philosophers who have never completely freed themselves from their theological indoctrinations.
personally, I don’t think individual identity coalesces until long after that
“personal identity” is not a physical property, so I wonder just what you mean by that. Certainly we can and do identify an embryo as a single unique object through all its stages, and this concept of identity is not any more problematic because the organism undergoes change than is the case for any other object — consider the Ship of Theseus.
Identity is as identity does.
For instance, I am no longer “The Laden.” It was fun, but I tired of it. I am now a Pharyngula. At least until tomorrow morning.
A certain philosopher (known for his odd, twisted arguments), has applied the “Paradox of The Heap” (The sorites paradox) to humans, arguing that he, too, does not exist!
The paradox is how what appears to be valid logic clearly isn’t, because it leads from true premises to false conclusions, but there isn’t any question that the logic is indeed fallacious and leads to false conclusions, so any philosopher who makes such an argument is being silly (or is trying to make a pedagogical point that apparently has been missed).
Dualist philosopher Selmer Bringsjord once stated, quite seriously, that he would model a proof that consciousness isn’t physical on the fallacy of the beard. He has also claimed to have a proof that P = NP (one commenter wrote “The paper addresses this with the eloquence of two stoned hippies around a bong”). Amazingly, this fellow is the chair of the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Well, I’ve been to RPI, and there were two hippies and a bong. I admit it was not the cog-sci department … it was the radio station …. but there they were.
Maybe I was one of them maybe I wasn’t. It was a long time ago, I honestly don’t remember….
On the same discussion list where I found that Bringsjord statement, I also found this essay by Marvin Minsky that has a great deal of relevance to this issue of the meanings of terms such as “life” and “identity”, etc.: http://listserv.uh.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9607&L=psyche-d&D=0&H=1&T=0&P=10018
Maybe you could find a place for this graphic in your discourse. It is from a t-shirt the person at the site created.
http://perso.orange.fr/spiffyfrog/godsurprised.jpg
I’m cynical enough to think PZ is being played for a fool.
This whole subject of “life” is driven by desire to promote certain values. It really doesn’t matter whether the apologetics for the values are reality or science based or not: the people holding the values often simply switch apologetics as convenient. They can do that for the reason that all the apologetics either have the is/ought problem or are based on other values.
The reason to invite in somebody like PZ is to focus attention on the scientific end of the is/ought problem, concealing the problem. That way they can bash folks with equally fallacious apologetics as “unscientific”.
The whole issue of “life” is silly: the real question is what life we value and how much. We can’t live ourselves without killing other life. If PZ could force them into discussing the fact that they’re talking about subjective valuations, rather than anything objective, that would be a win.
Nah, this is a small university, and I know Pieranna and her family. This is a philosopher coming to speak on a problem from a biological perspective, so she asked a biologist to sit in on it and contribute to the discussion. From what I’ve read so far, this fellow is not trying to push a simple-minded, values-driven agenda with his ideas.
Really, we can have a community of trust here.
Having followed the links and read some of John Wilkins’ papers on identity, I confess it seems to me that some of these philosophers are making too much of the problem. The straightforward linguistic observation, that needs to be accounted in any philosophical explanation, is that our speech involves multiple notions of personal identity. There is a sense in which my father was a twinkle in my grandfather’s eye, and is now a body in a grave. There is another sense in which my father no longer exists. There is a sense that Santa Anna could say, when leading his army to Texas, that part of him, his formerly amputated leg, remained in Mexico. These notions overlap significantly, so in ordinary speech it often isn’t required to disambiguate them. This allows all sorts of philosophical puzzles to be constructed, whose resolution requires such disambiguation. Perhaps for the first time. The fact that we can understand Santa Anna when he says he was divided in two parts, and that really his personal identity is in his “leg complement,” doesn’t mean that he is two persons. It just means that there are many notions of personal identity. There aren’t two of “you” sitting at a desk reading this post, because the process of counting assumes the selection of some notion of identity, by which “you” are counted at most once. In a ward holding 7 living and 2 dead patients, there are either 7 patients or 9 patients, depending on how one is counting. That doesn’t create some deep puzzle about there simultaneously being and not being someone in a bed; it’s just that what we mean by “someone,” and hence how we count “someones” can vary, depending on our purpose.
Of course, this seems easy to me because I am a strict nominalist. All categories are invented. The world doesn’t come with labels. Ontology as metaphysics is nonsense. ;-)
I’m always amazed at how perky God’s nipples are. It makes me wonder if they’re pierced.
Funny…I always notice Adam’s lack of pubic hair, and wonder if plucking and shaving were common practices in Renaissance Italy. Well, that and Adam’s bellybutton is another curiosity.
Agreed. 4.5 decades and I’m still working on mine.
Just remember that there’s no justification for giving an embryo more rights than the guy next to you on the bus. And that if they want to give an embryo rights that it hasn’t earned by time, development, and experience, what’s to keep you from demanding your pension RIGHT NOW!?
huh. I, too, might once have been one of two hippies around a bong at RPI. We might even have dropped and explored some underground tunnels. We were pretty clear on the animal-identity thing too as I recall.
So…if it’s diploidy that has defining significance, then sperm and egg cells must be a) dead or b) not human, and I’m pretty sure neither applies.
truth machine: Selmer is quite the character. I sort of gave up listening to him when I saw a video of him from a CAP conference asserting without any discussion an agent-causation viewpoint.
Russell: A nominalist? Really? Are you a practicing scientist? If so, what field?
(Yikes! That’s one long post from “We don’t want a bunch of Mexicans showing up at Temple.”)
Oh my god, I can’t believe that comment finally ended.
Keith: For a real hoot, read Bringsjord’s “proof” that N = NP: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/scb_pnp_solved22.pdf
Aside from the lack of logic (somehow Selmer thinks that, because soap bubbles happen to produce what appear to be optimal solutions to a handful of Steiner Tree problems with small n, that one can necessarily find laws of physics such that soap bubbles provide optimal solutions to all Steiner Tree problems for all n), there’s the astounding arrogance:
and
But what does Scott Aaronson say about this “power” in his excellent review article, NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality?
truth machine: Yikes. Penrose’s noncomputable tiles again, after a fashion.
Wow. That’s one way to kill a thread.
Post a huge comment of crazy and people get so freaked out they stay away.
What the hell was that about?
How do we know “anything”
when we can’t “know” anything?
For a solution,
see “The Nature of Awareness” at http://www.anglingtek.com