Sayonara

Not as long as I have my explorer's action sandals with me.

Maybe we should approach this from a new perspective. ParanoiA, do you consider yourself to be [equivalent to] a blastocyst?

They might be able to bargain for a longer rope or something.

You are just as capable of reading different newspapers, and many of the people who habitually read the editorial pages do just that. The advantage that newspapers have here is that the views in the editorial will actually be the editor's considered opinions, rather than the co-dependent cribbing that so often goes on in the blogosphere. That's a mechanism triggered by the reader, not by the source.

All that morality stuff is something I would consider an attribute of a human being, rather than a human. Just to rattle the cage a little

Yeah, everyone knows orange is the new black.

Kind of, there is a thread where the truth and myths of that incident are heatedly discussed in the depths of the politics forum. If he did wipe out a whole village, it would have to contain the entirety of a race in order to be true genocide.

Yes, of course. I take the view that the editor of a newspaper which may have a readership numbering in the millions will not necessarily massage his viewpoints to please that readership, but he does have to be absolutely sure about his facts and his convictions before he commits his editorial to print. Otherwise readership may suffer, which has financial implications and may cost him his job, and the newspaper will be inundated with letters to the editor, which they are traditionally obliged to print and which may embarrass the institute. A blog author such as myself, on the other hand, can and will splatter any old nonsense onto the page, without the above constraints. Of course I am not saying that there are no trustworthy opinion-based blogs, just that you need to be very careful selecting them, and in general you have a better chance of finding a well considered opinion in an editorial than on someone's personal diary.

I have two counterpoints here. Firstly, if you are going to claim that the fundamental basis of abstract thought is genetic, you need to provide some evidence (or at least one really shiny citation), because that is a really BIG thing to use as a supporting claim. Ironically enough that paper I posted may point towards some intriguing possibilities in that area. Secondly, even if it does have a genetic basis, an unexecuted genotypic encoder in a cellular structure is not the same entity as an active abstract thought process. If there is no equivalence between two entities, they cannot be considered "the same". I of course agree with this. But I would argue that they are not evident (and, therefore, probably not present) in the blastocyst stage, whereas they are abundantly evident in everyone from infants to mature humans. I realise that's your position, but I see you equating a genetic pattern to the thing it may at some point produce, and I perceive that as a reasoning problem. I know the feeling. Our discussions always seem to go this way, but at least they are interesting

What you really have to remember is that brutal execution is not a punishment or a deterrent for maniacal dictators. Instead, it is a means of ensuring they are no longer a threat to whatever society they are in, and a form of retribution for the survivors. Technically speaking, he is not guilty of genocide, by the way. He may have genocidal tendencies, but he has never had the means to execute them (if you will pardon the pun).

That was humorous

An editorial is a vastly more trustworthy opinion piece than a blog post.

What I find entertaining is that the USA and UK have intervened in Iraq at every level for years now, righhhhht up until the point where the puppet they installed, lost control of, then toppled has been sentenced to the kind of death that both governments publicly denounce. And now all of a sudden the interventions seem to have dried up. I wonder which (if any) politicians, religious leaders, charities or organisations will risk protesting the sentence?

The noise will make them easy to target.

I am talking about what separates mankind from the animals, in the sense of the faculties which we have and they do not. The answer "his genetic code, ho ho ho" is a flippant one which does nothing to acknowledge the attributes of a human being for which there are no known genetic causes. You are the same as a blastocyst because you are both human. You are different to the blastocyst (and animals) because you have a particular set of attributes that make you a human being, and which are not shared by the others. I think in a perverse way we are very argumentatively agreeing with each other on at least one key issue. But the ambiguity of the concepts is problematic. Erk. There is nothing in the log for this thread to indicate that any posts have been removed (in fact, the log is empty). What was the gist of it?

I worked a treat on PAGD. Although admittedly the psychological problems are more pronounced there than they are here...

That's why I am campaigning to have IRC use acknowledged as a medical condition.

Sorry, I should probably have mentioned/expanded... Consider this: the reason a human is different to a human being is (essentially, for our purposes) the same reason an animal is different to a human being. Integrate that concept, then apply it to a comparison between yourself and a blastocyst.

I think Immanuel Kant would have a thing or two to say about that comment, if he were not so utterly dead. Come to think of it there are any number of philosophers and psychologists, living and otherwise, who'd certainly be able to make better arguments than I can. If you want to talk about boxed up thinking, consider first that you are basically making the argument for nativism, which is much less maneuverable in this discussion than the converse argument for tabula rasa (not that I think either is entirely correct, more that the probable point of accuracy is more likely closer to the latter). An interesting, recent, and relevant paper: Spontaneous and evoked synaptic rewiring in the neonatal neocortex (Le Be JV, Markram H.) Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 Aug 29;103(35) Dictionary.com is never an appropriate reference source on this site. It doesn't actually mention phenotypic expression. What it does do is allude to the actual meaning of "human being" by stating that they are distinguishable from animals, and by stating that a human being may represent the human species. It is unfortunate that it stops there, but that's what they get for buying definitions from Merriam Webster. The web is littered with references that define "human being" as "n. A human". That doesn't make it right. It's simply a product of the fact that dictionaries do not aim to delve into complex philosophical problems, but rather to tell the average Joe how the word will work in his everyday life. If I lose a hand, I am still human and still a human being. My mental abilities have not changed (I should hope), and neither has my genotype. If I lose the ability to think in abstract terms (let's say I am in a coma with absolutely no higher brain activity) then I am a human, and not a human being. Some people may consider it abhorrent to say that a person in such a state is "not a human being". This is simply because - as is so often the case - they hear the term being used in everyday life, but don't actually know what it means. And that's fine - the common tongue usually works great for everyday conversation. Where it does not work as well is in a scientific debate where technical precision is a prerequisite for successful communication. So? One has to start "being" at some point. The only way you can make a valid argument after birth is by applying special conditions, such as the coma scenario.

Or, alternatively, this might be an effort to encourage better posting quality and more careful thread-reading, and it has taken you all of 24 minutes to start scuppering the plan.

Ah, I see what has happened here. Somewhere along the way the terms have been fuddled up. Nobody is saying a human being is "just an organism", as you put it. We are saying that a human per se is just an organism. A human being has additional attributes that are not simple phenotypic expressions, and which are not evident in a blastocyst. This is what we are terming the human per se element. Same here. It's a human per se, certainly. True, a blastocyst is not dead in the common sense of the word. The point of mentioning the corpse was that you stated one has to have food, water air, etc to be a human being, and that is true - because once you die you cease to be a human being but are still human. Where the blastocyst and the corpse are similar is in the fact that they do not have thought processes, abstractive or introspective capabilities, emotive responses, etc. Hence they are not human beings.

Post your nominations for "post of the week" here. It can be a single post, or just part of a post... just funny, or a great intellectual contribution. The best nominations will enter into a public vote on Friday. My nomination for this week is the first line of this post: http://www.scienceforums.net/showthread.php?p=309711#post309711

Nominated for "Post of the Week Award", which I just made up.

But there is a difference between "human" and "human being". Unlike a human, a human being is not just an organism, it is an aware, communicative, and mentally complex entity. It's hard to have psychological and emotive states or self-awareness when one is dead. A corpse can be identified as human, just as a blastocyst can. But it is not a human being, it is a human was.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6119428.stm I wonder if his lawyers will advise him to boycott that too?