The Glade 4.0

Go tell that to the families of those whose loved ones are braindead, but on life support.

See what happens to you.



Now, I'm not saying I disagree or agree with your core sentiment. I'm just pointing out that the issue has subjectivity to it, and extremely so.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

It seems to me that those families are told that pretty regularly, and eventually most of them accept the fact.. barring the occasional recovery.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Not in the way Monty's advocating, no, they aren't.


Otherwise, yes, they are, and yes, most do.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Appeal to emotion. They may believe their family member is "alive", but that doesn't mean that person still exists. Brain dead is dead.




On an emotional level, sure. On a scientific one? Not so much.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Why don't you ask a doctor if a person who is brain dead is a living organism Monty? Ask him/her what species it is too.

I just posted an article that goes into a lot of detail about what medicine says is alive and dead. You should go back and read it.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

A "brain dead person" is still living, and still human. This is also irrelevant. Neither medicine nor law are concerned with saving "living humans." What they are concerned with is saving persons, and someone who is brain dead is no longer a person, no longer a being. They're just a lump of living human tissue--the person is already gone. This is also why abortion is legal. While the idea is that what makes a fetus an actual person doesn't exist until birth and then magically appears is preposterous, so is the idea that a zygote or early embryo is somehow a person while someone who is brain-dead is not is laughable. And deciding at what point the fetus really gains that which makes it an individual person is rather complex.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

DING! WE HAVE A WINNER!!!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Finally, a rational argument. I was getting tired of arguing with people that want to call an obviously living organism a dead one, just so it would fit their world view better.

Now, regarding your argument. Where I distinguish the two is potential. I put a value on potential, which therefore leads me to value an unborn baby. A brain dead person has no potential. If they are truely brain dead, then what is left is an empty living husk of a human being. My only worry when it comes to discontinuing life support in such cases, is that our knowledge is imperfect. We can't in all cases determine whether someone is really a vegetable for life, or if there is the potential for recovery. However with an embryo, we have a human who will almost assuredly recover from their "vegetable" status in a few months. If we knew someone was going to recover naturally from their vegetable status in mere months, there would be no talk of removing them from life support.

It's funny how often i end up getting that from people.




One can apply the same argument to "What is wrong with contraception." A sperm and egg have the potential to become persons. However, most people do not feel they are under any moral obligation to create as many new people as possible...or even any at all. A fertilized egg does have the potential to become a person, yes, but do we really need to allow it to reach that potential? It's not like a person in a coma with very little brain activity who has the potential to wake up--they are already a person, just a dormant one. I'm not convinced that a potential person should already be given the legal right to life. That right is reserved for actual persons.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Well, there is a difference. The sperm and the egg are cells from their perspective...bodies. The potential of the sperm and the egg belongs to the people having sex, as the egg and sperm belong to the people having sex. The sperm may have the potential of fertilizing an egg, but that potential is still part of the overall potential of the man the sperm belongs to. It isn't until that sperm and egg are joined, and a new and separate organism is formed, that it incurs its own separate potential.

This is where it breaks into philosophy, rather than science. Science determines that it is a living human being, philosophy determines what value, or rights, that human being has. Science can of course inform that philosophy, but it cannot give a definitive answer. Some on this board may have the philosophy that until a being achieves higher brain function it, should not be considered to have rights. In that case science has informed the philosophy, but it is still up to the philosophy itself to decide that such a being has no rights. Science cannot determine that.

I am also tired of arguing with people who do not know what constitutes life and refuse to read quite a good article from a reputable peer reviewed journal, because doing so would not fit with their world views. Alas the world isn’t perfect and we all must push on with our own ‘warped’ views right?

Zygote is not dead (at least imo), because something that has never lived can not die. Again it is simply viable just not yet.



Micro-organisms such as Bacteria have complex and often varied systems for survival. Things such as flagella for movement, heat resistance, antibiotic resistance are only some of the example of adaptation.

Again I ask you, from a scientific point of view, give me one counter to my theory scientifically apart from “because it’s living and not dead’ with out any supporting information.

*headdesk*

A zygote is alive. It can be nothing else. Viability does not define life -it defines life within a specified environment. If something is considered to be viable or not - if the decision is even debated - its already been declared to be alive.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Elmo, I'm not opposed to the idea that it is alive, however you're gonna have to come up with some backing for it. "Because I said so" doesnt cut it with me.
I've changed my views on this many a times, however every time its' been because someone's enlightened me to some new scientific data or a good paper. I believe last incarnation of the board, a wonderful poster showed me why my misconception of equating a zygote to a parasite was wrong.

Rather than using the same argument, give me some scientific references.

If I fertilize a million embryos in test tubes and then immediately destroy them for various scientific purposes, have I comitted genocide?

I don't have the ability to point out in any simpler or more logical terms how it is alive.

We don't judge any item as alive or not by a snapshot of its development on its lifecycle. It is either alive at all points or it never was. A thing cannot be non living and then become living. I can only repeat this because it there is no more simple argument that can be made for it. This is why it is insanely infuriating that for whatever reason you continue to rebuke simple truths.

I don't believe there would ever be a paper published on something which is so elementary.

For example your criteria for life - they get assigned to an object over the course of that objects development. Right now I have not reproduced - does that make me not alive - according to how you apply your definition it does. I won't be alive until I reproduce and fulfill that criteria.

Perhaps I can address this another way. If the first cell of union of sperm and egg are not alive, then of course the next one they produce via mitosis cannot be alive and so no part of the organism is alive. This must then be true for the next two, then the next four and so on. Given that one nonliving thing cannot produce a living thing and that no living thing can consist of entirely nonliving components - how do you judge any human to be alive as we are simply the products of repeating the above pattern?

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

1. Are they human?
2. Are they of a specific race or community?
3. Are they the only specimens of that race or community?

If all are yes then yes you have, if any one is a no then you are simply a mass-murderer.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

How about this... I will personally bake you cookies if you read my link =P although how to smuggle cookies to the US is a different matter =P



If we take a snap shot of you right this moment as you are, you satisfy all the criteria’s for life. Just cause you’re not currently using it, doesn’t mean you don’t have it. A zygote however does not have it no matter how much it may want to use it.



I know this is frustrating for you hun, just as it is frustrating for me. In my training through out uni, it is taught to view certain things at different snap levels. Taking and analysing the contents of a cell is just that, what the cell has at that point in time. Not what it could become or what it was. A person’s stage of cancer is just that, the cancer at that point and come up with a good diagnosis and if simple, then a treatment, not what it could metastases to in the future. Just as you don’t cut out a kidney for someone who has liver cancer no matter how likely, you treat for what you see currently.



You’re missing the part where the cells start to specialise into specific systems necessary for life. If it was purely cell division then it would merely be a tumour. What differentiates a zygote from a clump of cell is it’s ability to form into something more. You’re also missing the part where the cells (depending on where they are situated) start to specialise into specific systems, thus eventually giving life via the stimulation of the brain and it’s connection to the rest of the systems.

This also brings up an interesting idea of AI, but that’s another can of worms.

As Taly so eloquently said above, it's about personhood, Elmo, not "live" or "dead".

We destroy a half a million fertilized embryos every year via our fertility clinics. Someone working in that business for 10 years will have, by your logic, been guilty of a mass murder on a scale only dreamed of by the most horrible dictators we have ever known.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

It is interesting to note too, if not for the whole "zygotes are humans" those destroyed eggs could be used for further scientific research rather than simply destroyed. It is a shame really.

That'd still be only 5 million; they'd need another 10-15 years to catch up to Hitler.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And I, consistently enough, find fertility clinics to be a pretty abhorrent aspect of medicine.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

*sings* It's my thre-ad and I'll lock if I want to, lock if I want to, lock if I want to... you would lock too if it happened to you...

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I give up. It's no use. There is no reasoning when someone is being unreasonable regardless of reason. I'll read your link and I expect the same kind of willful and forceful ignorance to reason that I've encountered here.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville