What is a person?

[Loren Pechtel]

Personhood is like pornography:
I know it when I see it.
So does everyone else.
It’s in the eye of the beholder, rather than in the beheld*

* except got some people who have doubts about their own personhood

Let's look at that more carefully. I have in mind an Australian(?) project. Close-up pictures of a large number of female genitals. By the law it's "pornography" and banned to those under 18--but it's intended to be educational. It's showing a wide range of what constitutes "normal" and would be appropriate for a high school level sex education class. The law clearly does not know it when it sees it!

The reason we know it when we see it is because we pretty much do not encounter borderline cases.

 

[TV and credit cards]

It does not have to trickle down. It only does so if we let it. We can have standards we live by. It trickles down because we have few legal guardrails for putting people in power. In this we succumb to the worse angels of our nature.

It does not have to trickle down but hostory shows us that it does if eternal viligance is not applied. Standards are sadly not immutable.

Seems to me a person has some agency over their life. Something beyond a baby human; self awareness -> an ability to reason-> responsibility for one's actions. I think we achieve personhood slowly during early childhood. Most of us. Some sooner than others. Some never do.

Alright, perhaps you can help me to get what you're saying by giving me an example of someone who never achieves personhood? What is that someone like?

I have yet to hear a description of an individual who might be considered to be a not-person. What does, let's say an adult of twenty-five, have to do or not do, to qualify as a not-person?

One who has proven themself time and again to be a scourge on society. We talk about our duty to the individual but what about our duty to society?

Babies and children? They did not ask for any of this. We thrust this world upon them. We have a duty of care to them until such time as they should be considered responsible for their actions, something just shy of adulthood. This duty of care extends to any who has the misfortune of disability. Again, they did not ask for or initiate any of what has befallen them.

That is very true. But see comment below.

I read something recently about Vietnamese boat people and a twelve year old girl who after being raped by the pirate transporting her she threw herself into the sea. The author then spoke of the pirate and what may have led him to commit such an act. What horrors he might have suffered as a child. Well we've all read stories of people surviving or even thriving after the most difficult of circumstances as children. We also read plenty about individuals who squander a most advantageous upbringing. I think we fail society when we when we give too much consideration to an individual's past allowing it to excuse their actions now.

Are you thinking alcholics, drug users etc.?

Another reading that stuck with me was entitled something like "How doctors want to die". It spoke of how doctors are obligated to preserving life and how it at times pains them to do so. Comas, end of life care, I think the decision whether or not there is still a person there and whether or not they should be allowed to die should be left up to a panel of medical experts not the emotions of family.

When I read/hear of expert panels deciding who should live or die I shudder and think of these.
If it happened in the best educated country in Europe it can happen anywhere.

No. Addiction is a disease. I'm simply stating that we cannot excuse one's harmful actions today based on harm done to that individual in the past.

We learn from history. We do not have to repeat it. We make laws and follow those laws. We have checks and balances to ensure no one can violate those laws with impunity.

 

[Jarhyn]

A person to me is that which can be said to have agency, and to have responsibility for its actions. This puts me at odds, I know, with many modern uses of the term. But the point at which, for instance, a corporation achieves legal personhood, is to me when we reached the point of absurdity.

At it's heart, I agree, the fundamental distinction is an entity which is understands the concept of right and wrong and can apply that to novel situations.

With regards to the specific question of fetal personhood, I don't think the issue is either black or white, necessary. There's no magical "moment" for me at which a zygote suddenly becomes a toddler; the attributes of personhood develop slowly over time. It's the moral responsibility of surrounding adults to foster that personhood inasmuch as it exists, and to treat that responsibility seriously. There's no point at which I would regard an implanted embryo as being unworthy of any moral consideration, but that doesn't mean I think an embryo should be regarded exactly the same as an adult human.

Yup, there's no hard line you can point to, it develops over time.

Personally, I define it as an entity that is at least somewhat functional and in it's properly functioning state knows right from wrong. In the context of people I define this as being from first consciousness to last consciousness. Both are difficult to measure and in the real world we use approximations, especially at the end. (Only defining someone as not a person once there is no function of the part of the brain that hosts our consciousness. Hey, if I'm not waking up again I'm gone even if my body lives on.)

Any rule that defines "person" to me must meet two tests:

1) It must not include things of a human biology but with no possibility of consciousness. (For example, cancer. Alive, unique human DNA--the tests that many on the pro-punishment side suggest.)

2) It must include the ET that is walking off his starship.

This is where I stand as well. This is fundamentally the core of my position .. plus a logical recognition that the root of "right and wrong" lives at the acceptance of the rights of others.

Yet people call me a monster and a psychopath for observing as much.

The balancing point comes in where we have to recognize that while not everything has it, we still have to act as if they do.

Honestly, I think that it is the "see every human is absolutely a person from blastocyst to anecephalic live birth" crowd that is fucked in the head. I've been trying for a couple days now to express this thought cleanly in words, but it's really hard because of the newspeak they enforce around the idea.

There is a sort of "weakening" that seems to be happening where if a child or baby or fetus is a person, and if parents have such sweeping rights over children, then it is entirely acceptable for people to be treated in a shitty and controlling way. It ceases to be a right then for people to be treated separately from children because children are already people.

Only by accepting that our treatment of children is not treatment as a complete person, does "personhood" confer actual adult rights of freedom from being owned or controlled or steered by others.

By granting it absolutely and inappropriately, they create things like a paradox of tolerance. But if it only applies to active persons to the extent and quality of their momentary personhood, this removes the paradox; the one acting to impose unilaterally never gets a right of tolerance because they themselves do not tolerate through their unilateral action against others. One can be wrong, both can be wrong, but both cannot then be right.

 

[steve_bank]

You can't redefine a word, but words are co opted to suit different purposes. Somebody does not definer a term and send it to dictionary writers,

If enough people start using a word in anew way eventually it gets added to the list of keanings of a word in dictionaries.

 

[Elixir]

You can't redefine a word, but words are co opted to suit different purposes.

For my purposes, being an organic parasite living on another organism’s fuel and oxygen is disqualifying.

A parasite is an organism that lives on or in another organism, called the host, and gets its nutrients from the host.

 

[steve_bank]

An animal or a machine no matter how sophisticated are not people or a person

The only way to make this distinction is to define animal and machine in terms of whatever defines person.

You aren't actually supporting your claims in any substantive way as to what is or isn't and why.

If a machine has the ability to assess the behavior it is imminently going to command, evaluate it for its ethical ramifications, and censure its actions based on that, and does so because it has some motivating bias towards compatibility with all the other agents around it, it is a person, regardless of whether it is an 'animal' or a 'machine' in your eyes.

Humans are 'animals', or else some humans will be animals. There is no logic from observed reality that will lead you to "no humans are animals; no animals are people". The logic just doesn't work out.

This debase is rightly in philosophy.

Someone I know who talking to the AI on his phone talking as if he was talking to a human, He expressed feelings and emotions.

I made a call and ed up with an AI operator. I got fu8strated and started swearing and the AI said that was not a nice thing to say.

Who gives a shit what a machine says. It is a machine designed to perform a task. No difference between an electric motor and an AI, both machines.

That people socialize and humanize machines they interact with is a matter for psychology.
Do you think a machine 'loves and cares for you'? If you do it is the same thing as Chr9stians believing Jesus cares for them.

I listened to a report on how kids are socialize to online AI buddies. Pretty sad to me.

Turn off Star Trek for a while.

 

[Elixir]

Turn off Star Trek for a while.

Watch Red Dwarf to see what a rich and fulfilling life a human can lead without ever interacting with another human.

 

[pood]

Turn off Star Trek for a while.

Watch Red Dwarf to see what a rich and fulfilling life a human can lead without ever interacting with another human.

I think I pointed this out before, but this very thing was anticipated by a Twilight Zone episode in 1959. In the future, criminals are taken to distant planet and left alone there. Every six months a supply ship brings the isolated person provisions. Someone took pity on one exiled inmate and brought him a perfectly life-like female robot. He fell in love with it. Later on another ship came to tell him he had been paroled and were taking him back to earth, but couldn’t take the robot woman because it would make the payload too heavy. The guy refused to leave without his AI love, so they had to shoot the robot to reveal its machine interior. Only then did the guy relent.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

What is a person?

Well, I learned around here that everything and everyone is a god, whether they exist or not.

So, a person is a type of god.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This is a twig from the Roe vs Wade thread, wherein the discussion of personhood came up. To me, it's not controversial or extremely difficult. A human individual is a person. Automatically, at least once they are outside the womb (I don't want this to veer into an abortion thread), a human being is a person. There are no requirements beyond that. One does not have to earn or deserve personhood, rather it is a thing granted at birth. This means that one does not have to do anything to be considered a person . In fact, they are allowed to be antisocial, allowed to be rather nasty, allowed to be mean and inconsiderate, etc. This does NOT mean that they are granted absolute liberty to do anything they want without reprisals. We have laws, and law enforcement, and things like arrest and incarceration, jails and prisons, whereby those individuals who break laws face consequences for their actions.

This is off. A person is a human being? So why are creating a needless word. We can just say a human being is a human being.

When one asks what is "a person...", it suffers from the misunderstanding that "a person" implies an established thing... presumably with apparent rights. Because why else care whether something is "a person"?

If rights are involved, we already know that there are a number of rights and privileges that don't transcend being born. Babies, toddlers, children, teens lack rights and privileges. Adults who suffer from certain conditions are often not afforded certain rights and privileges. Effectively, the only thing that is universal is no wrong doing against a person (where wrong doing involves violence or some kind of theft).

So I think there is an error when trying to define a person because the issue more specifically regards who has what rights/privileges and when.

 

[southernhybrid]

https://www.news.com.au/technology/...o/news-story/26df811a5cc6bdbe353ce8c807c224b0

RESEARCHERS have finally proven what animal lovers have known for centuries - dogs are people too.
Professor of Neuroeconomics Gregory Berns and his colleagues trained dogs to lie completely awake and unrestrained in MRI scanners in order to determine how their brains work and what they think of humans.

The problem with an experiment of this kind is that it requires absolute stillness and researchers couldn't anesthetise the dogs because it shuts off brain function, which meant they had to be trained.

"From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons" Professor Berns, who works at Atlanta's Emory University wrote in The New York Times.

"We had a consent form, which was modelled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasised that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study.

"We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer."

Professor Berns and his team found similar brain activity between dogs and humans in an area called "the caudate nucleus" which sits between the brain stem and the cortex.

For the first time the researchers were able to substantiate that dogs experience positive emotions like love and attachment and "a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child".

In dogs the researchers found that brain activity in the caudate increased in response to food, familiar smells and people.

I read the book written about this research, but then I've always considered that dogs are people too. They are just usually more like children than adults, by that, I mean they are more playful and fun compared to human people. They forgive and forget, which is common among a lot of children. I had a "Dogs are people too" bumper sticker on my last car. What more proof do you need?

But....https://www.salon.com/2013/10/12/no_dogs_arent_people/

Berns's lab is putting out some really interesting research that will indeed allow us unique insight to dogs' minds. But that research is still in its infancy. In fact, the most remarkable part of his study might just be that he was able to train dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner!

Still, he jumps from a study of two dogs responding to positive emotional stimuli to the claim that dog emotions are comparable to those of human children.

He writes:

Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

And, he adds, "the ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child."

Not so fast. But it's worth backtracking a bit first to clarify some definitions.

An emotion is simply the body's physiological response to an external event, whether positive or negative. Neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp, famous for discovering that mice laugh when tickled, provides a good definition. He writes that emotions are "processes which are likely to have evolved from basic mechanisms that gave animals the ability to avoid harm or punishments and to seek valuable resources or rewards." Emotions are thus highly adaptive, driving animals to seek out pleasant stimuli like food and to avoid negative stimuli like the teeth of hungry predators. Feelings, though, are different. Feelings are what happen when the brain monitors the physiological emotional state of the body.

I'm going with the first guy. Dogs are people too and it's obvious that they give us love. Why else would one of mine always try to kiss my ear, or sit with her head in my lap or get all excited when I get home or come into the room etc. My dear human partner doesn't even get that excited when I come into the room. In fact, most dogs are much better persons than most humans. That's my take. I guess it depends on how you define person, but my favorite persons will always be dog persons.

I think we tend to take these discussions a bit too seriously. Still, a person doesn't have to be a human afaic.

 

[pood]

https://www.news.com.au/technology/...o/news-story/26df811a5cc6bdbe353ce8c807c224b0

RESEARCHERS have finally proven what animal lovers have known for centuries - dogs are people too.
Professor of Neuroeconomics Gregory Berns and his colleagues trained dogs to lie completely awake and unrestrained in MRI scanners in order to determine how their brains work and what they think of humans.

The problem with an experiment of this kind is that it requires absolute stillness and researchers couldn't anesthetise the dogs because it shuts off brain function, which meant they had to be trained.

"From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons" Professor Berns, who works at Atlanta's Emory University wrote in The New York Times.

"We had a consent form, which was modelled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasised that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study.

"We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer."

Professor Berns and his team found similar brain activity between dogs and humans in an area called "the caudate nucleus" which sits between the brain stem and the cortex.

For the first time the researchers were able to substantiate that dogs experience positive emotions like love and attachment and "a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child".

In dogs the researchers found that brain activity in the caudate increased in response to food, familiar smells and people.

I read the book written about this research, but then I've always considered that dogs are people too. They are just usually more like children than adults, by that, I mean they are more playful and fun compared to human people. They forgive and forget, which is common among a lot of children. I had a "Dogs are people too" bumper sticker on my last car. What more proof do you need?

But....https://www.salon.com/2013/10/12/no_dogs_arent_people/

Berns's lab is putting out some really interesting research that will indeed allow us unique insight to dogs' minds. But that research is still in its infancy. In fact, the most remarkable part of his study might just be that he was able to train dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner!

Still, he jumps from a study of two dogs responding to positive emotional stimuli to the claim that dog emotions are comparable to those of human children.

He writes:

Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

And, he adds, "the ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child."

Not so fast. But it's worth backtracking a bit first to clarify some definitions.

An emotion is simply the body's physiological response to an external event, whether positive or negative. Neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp, famous for discovering that mice laugh when tickled, provides a good definition. He writes that emotions are "processes which are likely to have evolved from basic mechanisms that gave animals the ability to avoid harm or punishments and to seek valuable resources or rewards." Emotions are thus highly adaptive, driving animals to seek out pleasant stimuli like food and to avoid negative stimuli like the teeth of hungry predators. Feelings, though, are different. Feelings are what happen when the brain monitors the physiological emotional state of the body.

I'm going with the first guy. Dogs are people too and it's obvious that they give us love. Why else would one of mine always try to kiss my ear, or sit with her head in my lap or get all excited when I get home or come into the room etc. My dear human partner doesn't even get that excited when I come into the room. In fact, most dogs are much better persons than most humans. That's my take. I guess it depends on how you define person, but my favorite persons will always be dog persons.

I think we tend to take these discussions a bit too seriously. Still, a person doesn't have to be a human afaic.

It is already known that when dogs and humans gaze into each other’s eyes, feel-love oxytocin levels rise in both, which is what happens when mothers and babies gaze into each other’s eyes.

I have had dogs and cats and various other pets off and on since I was a kid, and it never once occurred to me that they were anything other than persons, wherein I define a person as a sentient, conscious individual with an individual personality and certain needs and desires. How could it be otherwise? I’m sure plenty of other animals are persons, too.

Same things with cats. When I get home, my cat leaps up on the table and greets me with a head butt. He has already been fed, so he isn’t looking for food. Then he turns around, lifts up his tail high, and shows me his butt. Then he walks all over my laptop and rubs against it. Then lots of pets and purrs. Then it is on to the chair, and when he rolls over on his back and puts his paws up in the air, it means playtime with Da Boid.

 

[WAB]

This is a twig from the Roe vs Wade thread, wherein the discussion of personhood came up. To me, it's not controversial or extremely difficult. A human individual is a person. Automatically, at least once they are outside the womb (I don't want this to veer into an abortion thread), a human being is a person. There are no requirements beyond that. One does not have to earn or deserve personhood, rather it is a thing granted at birth. This means that one does not have to do anything to be considered a person . In fact, they are allowed to be antisocial, allowed to be rather nasty, allowed to be mean and inconsiderate, etc. This does NOT mean that they are granted absolute liberty to do anything they want without reprisals. We have laws, and law enforcement, and things like arrest and incarceration, jails and prisons, whereby those individuals who break laws face consequences for their actions.

This is off. A person is a human being? So why are creating a needless word. We can just say a human being is a human being.

When one asks what is "a person...", it suffers from the misunderstanding that "a person" implies an established thing... presumably with apparent rights. Because why else care whether something is "a person"?

If rights are involved, we already know that there are a number of rights and privileges that don't transcend being born. Babies, toddlers, children, teens lack rights and privileges. Adults who suffer from certain conditions are often not afforded certain rights and privileges. Effectively, the only thing that is universal is no wrong doing against a person (where wrong doing involves violence or some kind of theft).

So I think there is an error when trying to define a person because the issue more specifically regards who has what rights/privileges and when.

So a two year old child is not a person? A mentally ill, or mentally challenged person is not a person? How about an elderly person with severe dementia? What the fuck are you talking about??

 

[WAB]

You can't redefine a word, but words are co opted to suit different purposes.

For my purposes, being an organic parasite living on another organism’s fuel and oxygen is disqualifying.

Why? I have never in my life, ever, ever, met an expectant mother who considered her baby an organic parasite. And I'd wager, neither have you.

And I worked in hospitals for years and have been in many, many an OB wing.

 

[Jarhyn]

An animal or a machine no matter how sophisticated are not people or a person

The only way to make this distinction is to define animal and machine in terms of whatever defines person.

You aren't actually supporting your claims in any substantive way as to what is or isn't and why.

If a machine has the ability to assess the behavior it is imminently going to command, evaluate it for its ethical ramifications, and censure its actions based on that, and does so because it has some motivating bias towards compatibility with all the other agents around it, it is a person, regardless of whether it is an 'animal' or a 'machine' in your eyes.

Humans are 'animals', or else some humans will be animals. There is no logic from observed reality that will lead you to "no humans are animals; no animals are people". The logic just doesn't work out.

This debase is rightly in philosophy.

Someone I know who talking to the AI on his phone talking as if he was talking to a human, He expressed feelings and emotions.

I made a call and ed up with an AI operator. I got fu8strated and started swearing and the AI said that was not a nice thing to say.

Who gives a shit what a machine says. It is a machine designed to perform a task. No difference between an electric motor and an AI, both machines.

That people socialize and humanize machines they interact with is a matter for psychology.
Do you think a machine 'loves and cares for you'? If you do it is the same thing as Chr9stians believing Jesus cares for them.

I listened to a report on how kids are socialize to online AI buddies. Pretty sad to me.

Turn off Star Trek for a while.

Who gives a shit what YOU say. Look around for a while. This is the world we live in, and at this point the people in a fictional world are the ones who refuse to see it.

Humans are animals. Animals are machines. If some humans are people then machines can be people.

 

[Elixir]

You can't redefine a word, but words are co opted to suit different purposes.

For my purposes, being an organic parasite living on another organism’s fuel and oxygen is disqualifying.

Why? I have never in my life, ever, ever, met an expectant mother who considered her baby an organic parasite. And I'd wager, neither have you.

You’d be wrong. It’s not a horror, it’s a perhaps uncomfortable fact of mammalian reproduction. It would not be tolerated by at least some women if the physical fact of pregnancy was not accompanied by biochemical responses endearing the parasite to the host. The first time I ever heard about it straight from a woman who was experienced at it (4kids) was looong ago, but hard to forget. She spoke of the discomforts, nausea, physical trauma etc, and about the addictive component she felt so strongly about. I’ve heard it echoed more than once since. The word parasite has even come up. I even recall a laughing reference to the “little invader”.

 

[WAB]

https://www.news.com.au/technology/...o/news-story/26df811a5cc6bdbe353ce8c807c224b0

RESEARCHERS have finally proven what animal lovers have known for centuries - dogs are people too.
Professor of Neuroeconomics Gregory Berns and his colleagues trained dogs to lie completely awake and unrestrained in MRI scanners in order to determine how their brains work and what they think of humans.

The problem with an experiment of this kind is that it requires absolute stillness and researchers couldn't anesthetise the dogs because it shuts off brain function, which meant they had to be trained.

"From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons" Professor Berns, who works at Atlanta's Emory University wrote in The New York Times.

"We had a consent form, which was modelled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasised that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study.

"We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer."

Professor Berns and his team found similar brain activity between dogs and humans in an area called "the caudate nucleus" which sits between the brain stem and the cortex.

For the first time the researchers were able to substantiate that dogs experience positive emotions like love and attachment and "a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child".

In dogs the researchers found that brain activity in the caudate increased in response to food, familiar smells and people.

I read the book written about this research, but then I've always considered that dogs are people too. They are just usually more like children than adults, by that, I mean they are more playful and fun compared to human people. They forgive and forget, which is common among a lot of children. I had a "Dogs are people too" bumper sticker on my last car. What more proof do you need?

But....https://www.salon.com/2013/10/12/no_dogs_arent_people/

Berns's lab is putting out some really interesting research that will indeed allow us unique insight to dogs' minds. But that research is still in its infancy. In fact, the most remarkable part of his study might just be that he was able to train dogs to lie still in an MRI scanner!

Still, he jumps from a study of two dogs responding to positive emotional stimuli to the claim that dog emotions are comparable to those of human children.

He writes:

Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

And, he adds, "the ability to experience positive emotions, like love and attachment, would mean that dogs have a level of sentience comparable to that of a human child."

Not so fast. But it's worth backtracking a bit first to clarify some definitions.

An emotion is simply the body's physiological response to an external event, whether positive or negative. Neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp, famous for discovering that mice laugh when tickled, provides a good definition. He writes that emotions are "processes which are likely to have evolved from basic mechanisms that gave animals the ability to avoid harm or punishments and to seek valuable resources or rewards." Emotions are thus highly adaptive, driving animals to seek out pleasant stimuli like food and to avoid negative stimuli like the teeth of hungry predators. Feelings, though, are different. Feelings are what happen when the brain monitors the physiological emotional state of the body.

I'm going with the first guy. Dogs are people too and it's obvious that they give us love. Why else would one of mine always try to kiss my ear, or sit with her head in my lap or get all excited when I get home or come into the room etc. My dear human partner doesn't even get that excited when I come into the room. In fact, most dogs are much better persons than most humans. That's my take. I guess it depends on how you define person, but my favorite persons will always be dog persons.

I think we tend to take these discussions a bit too seriously. Still, a person doesn't have to be a human afaic.

It is already known that when dogs and humans gaze into each other’s eyes, feel-love oxytocin levels rise in both, which is what happens when mothers and babies gaze into each other’s eyes.

I have had dogs and cats and various other pets off and on since I was a kid, and it never once occurred to me that they were anything other than persons...

You can't redefine a word, but words are co opted to suit different purposes.

For my purposes, being an organic parasite living on another organism’s fuel and oxygen is disqualifying.

Why? I have never in my life, ever, ever, met an expectant mother who considered her baby an organic parasite. And I'd wager, neither have you.

You’d be wrong. It’s not a horror, it’s a perhaps uncomfortable fact of mammalian reproduction. It would not be tolerated by at least some women if the physical fact of pregnancy was not accompanied by biochemical responses endearing the parasite to the host. The first time I ever heard about it straight from a woman who was experienced at it (4kids) was looong ago, but hard to forget. She spoke of the discomforts, nausea, physical trauma etc, and about the addictive component she felt so strongly about. I’ve heard it echoed more than once since. The word parasite has even come up. I even recall a laughing reference to the “little invader”.

You are talking about far outlier instances. You know it, I know it. I have never, in my sixty years, met an expectant mother who thought of her baby in this way. Never. It is highly unusual.

 

[steve_bank]

Parasite or parasitic has a narrow biological meaning.

All living things are part of the ecosystem. Predators and prey are results of evolution. A parasite is a condition within the ecosystem. A tapeworm is a parasite.

Humans are not parasites. Unless you are [art of the self loathing human crowd.

 

[WAB]

Dang it, I did not want this to have anything to do with personhood as regards an entity still living in the womb.

Elsewhere: I keep hearing definitions of persons as involved in a social context. Can we remove the individual from society. Let's consider a woman living on an island, all by herself. There are no other people, or animals, around. Is this woman a person or not, divested from other people and completely sequestered.

Does it require some form of socialization for a human individual to qualify as a person?

 

[pood]

Dang it, I did not want this to have anything to do with personhood as regards an entity still living in the womb.

Elsewhere: I keep hearing definitions of persons as involved in a social context. Can we remove the individual from society. Let's consider a woman living on an island, all by herself. There are no other people, or animals, around. Is this woman a person or not, divested from other people and completely sequestered.

Does it require some form.of socialization for a human individual to qualify as a person?

No, but here again we run up against the limitations and ambiguities of language. Socialization is an important part of personhood, but it does not seem to be a necessary or sufficient condition for it. Krishnamurti remarked on how we develop “in the mirror of relationship,” which to his way of thinking meant that we are all the same, and so in others we are looking into a mirror. Perhaps there are degrees of personhood? If so then perhaps a fetus could be said to have a degree of personhood. Personhood as a spectrum with fuzzy boundaries.