Cap'n Refsmmat

I'd say it's the selfhood that makes a person important. For example, if someone's suffered a major brain injury in an accident, we are more willing to turn off their life support, because their selfhood is already destroyed. People are still upset about pulling the plug, of course, but that's because it signifies a loss of hope that the selfhood might return. But then: do we really want to worry about potential selfhoods? I think we've covered this problem already in this thread.

What if human life starts with the zygote, but re-integration is still irrelevant because it's not a tragic loss in the same way there's no tragic loss in my thought experiment?

Roughly speaking, yes. Well of course it would be tragic if I never existed, but as for most people... Jesting aside, I think the tragedy, if there is any, has to come from the loss of life rather than the loss of "potential." We need to establish that the life does, in fact, exist. I suppose we could look at the situation like so: When a zygote starts, just fertilized, it has much potential but is hardly an independent living being. It's just a cell. As it goes on, it "uses up" that potential, so that when it's developed into a 90-year-old person it doesn't have much potential left, but that potential is "turned into" life. (I'm a physics major, so I'm drawing analogy to potential and kinetic energy.) What we should focus on is the life, not the potential. At what point in the exchange does the life's "value" become significant enough to worry about? The point of the thought experiment is to explore whether it is, in fact, a consistency problem at all. If the reintegration of two people is not a tragic event, then aborting a zygote can be immoral while re-integrating twins is perfectly fine. There can be a difference between loss of life and tragic loss of life.

There will be a public comment period before the final decision in May.

The Biblical roots of this claim are pretty scant. Historically, the "Catholic" church only gained preference over the numerous other Christian groups by the 200s or 300s AD. After Jesus's death, there were numerous different groups, and the fight over which one became orthodox took several centuries. In any case, papal infallibility has only been invoked once, and it wasn't on the issue of sex. So there's nothing wrong with doubting the church, even if you're Catholic.

Yeah, I believe that's right.

Good grief. I spent an hour with a Catholic friend on campus arguing with a born-again minister about evolution and Christianity in general. I'm not sure I'd like to repeat that experience every weekend. (Apparently my Catholic friend is "spiritually dead" because he hasn't been born again. I conveniently omitted my lack of religious status in conversation.)

The question is whether it's bad. Someone dying is bad even if nobody killed them. Is a zygote re-integrating and thus causing a loss of one life "bad"?

How far was the star from us when it exploded?

I think the trouble here comes from trying to do "life accounting." "Let's see, we've got a chimera here, so we have to put that under Lives Receivable, plus 20% in Assets..." "Life" is so poorly defined that life accounting is impossible. If one wants to figure out how many lives were lost or gained, one needs to figure out what constitutes a "life." Then one has to figure out if a loss of life is, in fact, always bad -- zygotes re-integrating might cause a loss of life, but is that bad?

Alternately, one could say that the zygote "lost" in re-integration does not "die" but merely becomes part of another. It's not, in fact, lost. Thought experiment: It's 2174 and we have the amazing technology to extract a person's "personality" from their head and save it to a computer system. It works flawlessly. We can also impart memories of a person into another person, which has certain ethical qualms but is used wisely. A married woman, who has been married to the same spouse for many years and loves that spouse dearly, is mortally injured in an accident. In the brief hours before she dies, her memories and personality are saved by the computer system. Her spouse comes, and is with her as she dies. The spouse then elects to receive her personality and memories. (This doesn't cause multiple personality disorder or anything -- it's all under conscious control.) The spouse now is, in fact, both of them -- incorporating the lives and experiences of two people. The spouse now loves the woman's family as much as she did, knows all her childhood friends, and merely has significant differences in anatomy (although perhaps lesbian marriage will be well-accepted in 2174). Did the woman "die"? Should we give her a funeral even though she lives on in another person's body?

UN sanctions against Australia and New Zealand for having Internet filtering schemes?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8548190.stm Interesting, but not quite what I want to talk about. If the Internet is important enough to be considered a "right" for every human, it must bring benefits to every human. What benefits does regular Internet access bring for the average human? (I don't mean things like electronic banking systems, since those are used by the banks, not individuals. And "more cute cat pictures!" is not a valid answer.) It's often said that the Internet allows free discourse and cross-cultural discussions, but just how often does that really occur and how much does the average person benefit from that?

I think debates are too intimidating and labor-intensive for most members to want to start any. An ad-hoc system would be interesting; what would be the motivation to challenge one person to a debate instead of continuing on a normal discussion? (also, good grief! how many secular/free thought/skepticism/rationalism forums are there these days?)

Nice to see you guys here. I hope you enjoy SFN! You may want to go over to our Chemistry section and do a search. There have been many threads on this subject.

Are birth certificates always validated against state records, or are there cases where they're just trusted?

Identification is a hard problem. It's all based on birth certificates in the end -- you just bring in your birth certificate and a social security card to prove your ID when getting a license -- and those are ludicrously easy to forge. Making the card itself better won't prevent people from getting one through fraudulent means. Also, if one is to design a "secure" biometric/cryptographic identity card, it had better be a public process with review by independent security experts. Nearly every "secure" identification system, like RFID tags in passports, has had major weaknesses because someone thought it better to keep the details secret.

I live in Austin for school, and I can walk right down to the Capitol building, so I can go beat them over the head with a biography of Thomas Jefferson.

No, it's English. For the moment, you can view it here: http://www.ismmosaad.uni.cc/wp/

There's still a final vote to be had in May after a public comment period. There's still hope. Incidentally, I wonder if I should start organizing a public comment drive for people to vehemently oppose the rules.

There's also these things: http://web.mit.edu/2.972/www/reports/sucker_rod_pump/sucker_rod_pump.html but as the "Efficiency" sections point out, they're quite efficient. But as Fuzzwood points out, many wells pump water in to force the oil out, since the oil is difficult to remove via ordinary means. A bucket wouldn't help at all. Now, this is the third or fourth time you've come here with this idea. Any reason why I shouldn't ban you for evading your bans yet again?

Whenever you may be interested in the negative root as well as the positive root.

Any more entries?

The court was asked to rule on California's law on mandatory pledging, not the addition of the words to the Pledge. (Although as they point out, pledging isn't strictly mandatory.) Has there been a case strictly on the addition, not mandatory pledging?

Please don't make this personal.