Aardvark

It's called culture. Seen any chimpanzee artists around anywhere?

It would be a very useful adaptation. The individual having the ability to alter its own genetic expressions according to circumstances. If an organism was bred in a deliberately constantly changing environment it might be possible to artifically select for some sort of genetic redundancy mechanism. But the selective pressures would have to be extreme.

Shock, horror. USA government plans ahead and develops strategy to promote own interests. Gasp, how wickedly cynical of them. Yawn.

Tell them to run into the sea, after all, all they need is faith for the waters to part, right?

Considering that your entire post was dedicated to demolishing your own argument you might want to reexamine that assumption. As Sayonara is arguing that consciousness is not yet definable that is your task not his.

I think we might be at crossed purposes here. I am not arguing that countries do not follow strategic interests at all. I am arguing that where there are no great interests, such as the presence of large oil fields, western governments act in an arbitrary manner, following the camera which shows the most sentuimental picture of the week. How else do you explain the wests indifference to 20 years of suffering in Sudan which was then reversed the moment some reporters began beaming some sad pictures from the area? Last year the homeless, hungary, brutalised people weren't important, this year they are? On what basis was that judgement made other than irrational sentementality?

So we would define self awareness and therefore rights by the development of part of the pre frontal cortex? On the basis that this is required for an internal monologue, which is required for self awareness? It all sounds a bit like the Nazis going around measuring peoples skulls for racial classification. Forgive me for being perjorative, but that does not sound like a rigourous scientific measurement, simply another baby step on the tortorous road to understanding consciousness. I don't think you' date=' or anyone, has been able to give a reasonable definition of self awareness. Your system of measurement, the development of part of the pre frontal cortex, seems, at the very best, to be speculative and crude. That completely ignores the question of whether that interest is conscious. How do we know that a cat avoiding pain is acting consciously? I would strongly argue that avoiding pain is a deep rooted instinct that the cat unconsciously acts upon. It still all depends upon a clear defintion of consciousness or self awareness, which i do not believe we are anywhere near producing.

Excellent, welcome to the dark side of devious debating techniques. Never accept the other guys assumptions or allow him to set the terms of the debate. I love spreading discord and chaos!

I guessed as much

Understood, but if you do that then you are conceding the ground the debate will be conducted upon right from the very start. This automatically places you at a disadvantage.

Reducing the moral argument to arthimetic over casuality figures is foolish.

You explicitly stated that 'you cannot say that our efforts are worth the casualties (killed and maimed)' after making your comparative analysis. Stating that you 'never stated an opinion' seems disingenous. By the way, i can't find any reference to 150,000 missing ballot papers for the Kurds on the news sites i check. Where did you get that information?

Maybe because you're a sensitive guy who doen't feel comfortable imposing his own moral and political values upon others?

This use of arithmetic to calculate morality seems fundamentaly flawed. You can't define the badness of Saddam or the coaliton by casaulty figures. The people who cause the highest causalties are the bad guys? It doesn't make sense. You start calculating how many lives overthrowing a ditactorship is worth, 10 million lives to get rid of Hitler, but not 11 million. 1 million to get rid of Pol Pot but not 1.5 million. The argument about overthrowing Sadaam and installing democracy has got to be about more than comparing causalty figures, that's just infantile.

I think that is to ascribe more strategic thinking to our governments than they deserve. For instance Sudan has suffered from a terrible civil war for more than 20 years, the humanitarian crisis has been horrible. But, it is only when the media started showing pictures from Darfur last year that the international 'community' suddenly leapt into action with a major aid program. There are no goals or interests for western governments here, simply a case of follow the cameras which randomnly and capriously choose Darfur as their humanitarian crisis of the week.

To reject facts and observations because they disagree with your beliefs makes your beliefs delusional. People who twist all facts and observations to fit with a delusional system of thinking are, by definition, mentally ill. Therefore creationists should be secured in mental health hospitals.

Both by observation of foetuses reactions during ultra sound scans and by dissection. The facts are, It has been definitely established that by the 26th week of pregnancy all the pain receptors, the relevant nerve pathways, the spinal cord, the thalamus and the cerebrel cortex are fully operational. At the most conservative estimate by this stage the foetus will fully experience pain if hurt. The pain receptors have developed by the 7th week of pregnancy, but as the brain is still not fully formed it is ambigous what the foetus will experience. My hypothesis is, Pain is one of the most fundamental senses, even when all other senses have failed to be developed, in babies born without sight or hearing, the ability to feel pain is universal. This would mean that it is reasonable to hypothesis that this sense develops relatively early in the womb.

I think you are mistaken on a point of fact here. Foetuses have been clearly shown to react to pain in a manner which demonstrates suffering. Pain is one of the most primitive parts of our physical make up, there is every reason to believe that it develops in foetuses at a very early stage. You seem to assume that we will agree that these scenarios are obviously absurd. On the contrary, i can see a real argument to be made for them. As such i don't think that they work in backng your argument that security or convenience can come before life.

I'm afraid that i don't understand your distinction. In what way can you define a rabbit as being conscious whereas an insect is not? I think it is generally accepted that rabbits act on the instinctive and emotional level rather than the concious level, but even if this were not so, what objective grounds could be used to distinguish them from insects?

You should be careful about assigning people into different categories. After all, can a people be completely good or completely bad or even completely a monster? It would be so lovely to be able to point at a person and be able to say, 'you are bad'. But people are more complex than that, we all have both good and bad within us. Unless you can find some way of getting inside someones character and just killing the bad part, to talk of killing the bad people is dangerously simplistic. How would you judge people to divide them into these groups? After all good people sometimes do bad things and bad people sometimes do good things. Human nature is a lot more complex than good, bad and monsterous.

By not basing my ethical system on the importance of self awareness. It is apparent that subjects lacking what we define as self awereness place a very high value on their self preservation. Creatures such as rabbits or foxes high very keen responses to threats to their lives. Yet i think we can agree that they are not what we would term self aware. The fact that these responses could be dubbed instinctive doesn't alter their existence with these creatures clearly experiencing emotions similiar to our own in terms of fear and pain amoungst others.