CyberFish on 10/11/2006 at 12:09

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Thought of this the other day, while reading about abortion laws. The religious objection to abortion is that taking any human life is inherently bad, and since the foetus can be said to become a living human (presumably posessing a soul just like the rest of us) at the point of conception, then abortion is effectively murder.

The first question: If you believe in the human soul, at what stage of development do you believe a growing foetus gains a soul? Does a ball of stem cells have a soul, or does it have to wait until a brain-stem has developed, or what? Or does the soul develop gradually, like the body?

The second question, and this is the interesting one which hasn't been asked a hundred times before on this very forum: Human zygotes are pretty complicated, but if you take them to bits very carefully they're still made up of organic molecules. Every single one of those organic molecules - even the really large complicated ones like DNA and proteins - can by created by synthetic chemistry, built up fragment by fragment from simple starting materials, and based on protein and DNA sequences on a computer. Even if not every molecule you'll find in a cell has been synthesised in the past, they're all theoretically possible. Assembling them into something resembling a cell is more difficult (the cell has some really complicated structures in it), but there's no theoretical barrier to creating a fully-functional human zygote in a well-equipped lab and growing it in an artificial womb (also science fiction at the moment, sadly) with no input of living materials at any stage.

So, would such a construct be alive? Would it have a soul? If so, at what point would it go from "collection of complicated organic molecules" to "biologically active cells based on human DNA" to "live human"? And if NOT, what makes it different from you or I?

Also, any bets as to how long it'll take science to advance until we can actually do this, and how long it'll be before we ACTUALLY do this?

Renegen on 10/11/2006 at 13:39

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You know, I actually feel enlightened on the subject today, here's my answer to abortion: Who gives a crap what you think I should do? Religion will change their stance on abortion every 100 years, and I don't need to listen to their arguments about how abortion is against their beliefs when their beliefs are as fleeing as anything else. Since when does putting -by God at the end of every sentence somehow shields you from being called a fucking moron for your weird ideas?

Renzatic on 10/11/2006 at 14:48

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What about that George W. Bush? Man, that guy really gets my goat! HURRRRRR! And don't even get me started on Republicans. They're all so mean to the BROOOWWWNNN PEEEOOOPPPLLLEE!

Abortion is cool, but I hate Fascists. :thumb:

mopgoblin on 10/11/2006 at 15:24

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The vast majority of them are going die no matter what you do, though. Apparently a fair proportion of zygotes don't make it much further than fertilisation, either.


Regarding a soul, I reckon it'd have to form gradually. A sudden appearance (or disappearance) just doesn't seem possible - in a way, "When does the soul appear?" is a lot like "When did birds stop being lizards?" or "At what instant did my hair change from 'short' to 'long'?". My notion of having a soul (that's not really the word I'd use, but I can't think of a better one) is somewhat linked to my notion of being a person, which would tend to limit the reasoning to the same arguments we've had a dozen of times before, though I'll try to avoid that.

The soul isn't really about some ethereal portion of oneself, it's made up of ideas, and personality, and things a person has changed in the world, and the memories and perceptions of others, all of which form and change slowly. A lot of them won't just vanish when you die either, but for most people they'll almost completely disappear within another lifetime or so. You're not entirely dead until no one could know that you, specifically, ever existed. Not that being entirely dead is necessarily a bad thing. Can't be worse than ending up as a few lines of text on a headstone and some carefully-arranged rust in a bunch of hard disks, which is about all that'll be left of most of us once the next few generations die. That doesn't perserve any of the things that make you a person.

For quite a while before I'd thought much about this, unnecessarily moving or rearranging a dead person's belongings still seemed... <em>wrong</em>, somehow. Pulling up the old carpet, removing the wallpaper, and selling most of the furniture in my father's parents' house was strange enough, and that needed to be done. I guess I knew that we were destroying the only things that could trigger some of the less prominent memories. My other grandmother lives there now, and the carpet feels wrong and the furniture isn't the right sort. I try to avoid going into the house now. It can't be both places at the same time, and the more the new place takes over, the harder it'll be to remember the old one, which is part of most of the good memories. I try not to move things when I need something from the workshop or the garden shed, too. Other than the tools we used in the house or need for the garden, a lot of things are still more or less how they left them, and it seems destructive to change that.

Anyway, to return to the actual point of the thread, since I'd say a soul isn't something that shows up by virtue of species or conception, but rather as the non-physical aspects of a person (and the patterns that remember them), I wouldn't say there has to be any difference between a "real" human, a clone, and an artificially assembled human in that respect. A lack of parents might slow it down a bit at first - in the early stages, most of the ideas would be perceptions and plans and hopes in the minds of the parents. Those ideas are only a tiny fraction of what makes a person in the long run, though, and any that don't shift to a more real form will probably die with the parents (if not much sooner). In the long term, and all else being equal, there's nothing special about people made the natural way.

Goblin on 10/11/2006 at 15:48

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And technically, every time a woman carries a pregnancy to term she destroys nine potentially viable ova.
It doesn't bear thinking about.