----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Baker" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, November 06, 2004 1:08 PM Subject: Re: Abortion Re: The Magic Ingredient?
> Dan said: > > > You argue from infintesmals...since one cannot exactly define the > > dividing line, it doesn't exist. But, in reality of course, the > > cluster in gene space that defines humans is a number of SD away > > from the cluster than defines the closest apes. > > This may well be so, and yet for any pair of species A and B there are > paths in gene space that have the property that one end of the path is > in the cluster for species A, the other end of the path is in cluster > B, and every point along the path gives the genome of a viable organism > (given a suitable environment in which morphogenesis can occur). (This > is true because any pair of species have a common ancestor if one looks > far enough back in time, so one can head from species A towards a > genome from the ancestral species C, and from there towards species B.) > Given this, if one wishes to define species membership as a binary > predicate, then one will necessarily be able to produce viable > organisms that span the boundary between the "member of species A" > region and the "not member of species A" region, and furthermore to do > so in such gradual steps that the distribution of individuals look > essentially continuous in any variable one wishes to measure. I understand your gedanken experiment and agree that it might have been harder to seperate the humans from the non-humans than it is now. I don't know where the dividing line is. But, I have a pretty good feel for the foundation of our definition. It is non-emperical: beings who perceive as I do. My reflective self awareness exists, but I cannot show it to you. Models of human behavior that include this + all the science we know have no predictive ability than those that simply contain all the science that we know. Fundamentally, I think of humans as those beings who also have this reflective self awareness. This runs into obvious problems....which are referred to in the part of my post that I am mulling. We see that there has been horrible abuse of people based on the assumption: they aren't really like us...the differences are large enough so that we can treat them as sub-human. This history has made me quite suspect of any arguements that restrict humanity. But, there is an obvious cut point that exists. Humans are quite different from the closest species to them in gene space. I'll fully agree that we can go back in time, backtracking evolution until we get to an organism that clearly wasn't human. I'll agree that we probably don't know where the exact point was that people first existed. But, I hope you can see that not knowing where the dividing line between set A and set B is doesn't mean there isn't an important difference. The actual difference is the reflective self awareness. I assume that there is a being like me typing on a keyboard in response to me that goes by the handle "Richard Baker." But, as Wittgenstein pointed out, we cannot even use language to understand the interior sense of the other. So, we have beliefs about that. We use metaphorical language to describe that which transcends the empirical....or at least exists without empirical proof. I think these understandings can be described and discussed....even if we cannot exactly find boundaries. What we can do, though, is set boundaries at the most reasonable looking places. Yes, they are, by necessity, somewhat artificial, but we do that all the time elsewhere. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
