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|4.27.07 @ 9:21AM|#
believers who kill and torture infidels
It's more effective if you do it the other way 'round, of course.
|4.27.07 @ 10:22AM|#
Martha Farah is awesome- one of my professors in college. An interesting spin on this is when the person recognition breaks down, and people can no longer activate the program.
VM|4.27.07 @ 10:27AM|#
Jake -
yeah yeah. details shemetails.
(image of the scene between Erhardt and Schulz from Mel Brooks's remake of "To Be or Not to Be" - "arrezt zem! arrezt zem! den schoot zem und question zem!")
LarryA|4.27.07 @ 10:30AM|#
It's more effective if you do it the other way 'round, of course.
Not necessarily. Killing one infidel can torture another.
|4.27.07 @ 11:31AM|#
Schutz: I've met Farah and I agree with you that she is brilliant. I just think she got it wrong--interestingly wrong--here.
Mike Laursen|4.27.07 @ 12:13PM|#
I know a person when I see one, just like I know a planet when I see one. Well, used to be able to know a planet when I saw one.
|4.27.07 @ 1:53PM|#
A typo, Ron: you refer to Perring as "Dowling" at one point.
|4.27.07 @ 3:06PM|#
Farah and Heberlein then claim that since the personhood network makes frequent mistakes and often attributes personhood to non-intentional systems that "suggests the personhood is a kind of illusion."
F&H's argument as presented here is such an obvious non sequitur that I wonder if their claims are being presented accurately. After all, people make frequent mistakes about a lot of things--about a lot of things that are not "illusions." Also, the only way we could know that someone else is making a mistake about a nonintentional system would be if we knew that the system was nonintentional--in other words, if we were not making a mistake about personhood! So it seems that F&H's claim that personhood is illusory depends upon the directly contrary assumption that we can tell intentional systems from nonintentional systems.
|4.27.07 @ 4:52PM|#
I dropped out of grad school in psychology because ALL the research is like this and it is ALL so crappy. The problem with most neuroscience studies is the fact that they measure oxygen levels, which is only a correlate of blood flow, which is a only correlate of neural activity, which is only a correlate of information processing as a way of locating where information is processed in the brain. That is, there is a large leap in logic from measuring the oxygen in a certain areas of the brain to being able to say that an area is the locus of some form of processing.
Think of it this way, suppose you did a study and found that every time a person ate a ham sandwich their right hand got mayo on it, would you consider the right hand the "ham sandwich eating center"? You probably wouldn't even be able to say for sure that the person was right handed. Sure researchers try to control (not very hard) but their controls are often very silly. Suppose in the previous ham sandwich example you also had a person do jumping jacks as a control and, seeing no mayo on the hand afterwards, then concluded that "yep, the right hand is the ham sandwich eating center."
Aside from HUGE methodological problems there is the problem that people use every day language in what is supposed to be a science. Nobody knows what the hell anybody else is talking about because everyday meanings are not suited to science. That was B.F. Skinner's whole point (not anything about stimulus and response or people being "blank slates"). He wanted to make psychology a science so we could actually use it to describe what happens when other things happen (like in physics) not just for a silly argument over what it means to be a "person" or have a "mind". These arguments are silly and they parrallel the arguments that took place in physics when it was in it's infancy. For example, things bounced because they took part in a quality called "bounciness" and when they contacted other objects they spread their bounciness. Or things were hot because they took part in a quality know as fire. You could describe objects only by measuring the level of all these qualities (their were hundreds of them hypothesized). This is basically what psychology does today and why psychology is complete nonsense (platonism at its worse).
If you understand nothing else from this post UNDERSTAND THIS:
So in short arguing over what it means to be a "person" or have a "mind" using today's psychology is like arguing over what goes on inside a black-hole based on varying mixtures of fire, water, earth, and wind.
Most of psychology today exists only because the funding comes from non-scientists and it's more important to talk a good game than it is to do good science.
If I can get one person to realize this I will die a happy man.
Linda MacDonald Glenn|4.27.07 @ 6:47PM|#
I'm glad to see you write that "We will most likely conclude that personhood is a continuum, not an all or nothing property. Just where to draw moral lines along that continuum will be a long hard fought debate" -- There is no question in my mind that as we continue to learn more about the brain that these findings will have a significant impact on how we approach these issues. Farah and Heberlein suggest that personhood is a kind of illusion; the law has not done much to create a 'bright line' with regards to defining personhood. Traditionally, the law has divided entities into two categories: persons or property; one had to be human to be a person. The difficulty arises, however, when one looks back at the history of the law and realizes that women, children, and slaves were once considered as mere property under the law. At the same time, corporations, municipalities, and even ships were declared to be 'persons' under the law.
Although the law has evolved to ban slavery and recognize the legal rights of women and children (in the US, anyway), new challenges face the courts, legislatures, and law-making bodies. Laws have continued to evolve to recognize categories that fall somewhere in between property and personhood, creating a continuum. There are three areas where traditional legal notions of personhood will be challenged: 1.) Human-machine mergers, 2.) intelligent transgenic creatures, and 3) advances in fetal viability. A continuum approach may help the courts deal with these issues on a case-by-case basis, but does it create an 'underclass'? We, as bioethicists, need to consider that if traditional notions of personhood prevail, that society might be able to deny essential basic liberties to sentient beings. Current laws of the United States or Canada do not prohibit patenting and marketing of DNA sequences, cell lines or stem cells of derivative of human origin. Can we preserve human rights and human dignity despite that fact our 'humanness' and human nature is changing?
Hopefully, as we realize that personhood is matter of degree (much like consciousness -- and anyone who tied one on can tell about altered states of consciousness), it will force us to reevaluate our hierarchical relationship with other beings on this planet and encourage us to adopt a more interdependent, wholistic approach.
wsdave|4.27.07 @ 7:06PM|#
"That...thing...in there; that ain't the Goose."
Mad Max on personhood
|4.28.07 @ 9:03AM|#
These aricles Bailey writes on bioethics and the philosophical/political implications of neuroscience are always superb. I can't think of any other political mag which has such kind of stuff in it (National Review or that Neuhas rag talks about personhood and science, but from a Middle Ages Scholastic point of view). Good stuff!
MJ|4.29.07 @ 7:21PM|#
"...Sagoff makes the extremely interesting point that the notion that personhood is somehow a moral trump that demands that others recognize a being's rights is an historically new concept."
Er, yes, that's actually rather obvious, but why is it interesting? The concept that human rights is a quality of being human is a new concept. Which was why the Declaration of Independence was a fairly radical document, and why, even with it, we still had hard going getting that idea fully implemented. All this has been considered a positive development in human affairs, and not something we want to go backsliding on. Which is what I fear Bailey tries to find rationalizations to do.
"Just where to draw moral lines along that continuum will be a long hard fought debate..."
Yes, it will be. I hope Bailey and his cohorts will be more honest and fair in that debate than they have been in the past. Judging the arguments for a more expansive definition of legal personhood than Bailey would like are not theocrats whose arguments are beyond the pale of reasoned discourse.
Colby Jack|4.30.07 @ 3:37PM|#
You've got me convinced that most of pyschology is psuedo-science, Andronoid. But what the hell do we do about it in this age of irrationalism?
|4.30.07 @ 7:54PM|#
I disagree with the notion of partial personhood. If the fetus were only 50% a person, would they be a person from the waist up or the waist down? Also, there would be no evidence in the physiology that the fetus would be a 42.888329% person as opposed to some other percentage at a particular intermediate point of nascent development. If the fetus as a whole gradually acquired personhood, we could not prove the fundamental identity of the fetus as a whole, in terms of any particular percentage of partial personhood, would change once every day, every minute, every half second. So if the fundamental identity of the fetus would change gradually in terms of degree of personhood, the identity would have to change once with every passage of the smallest possible increment of time, which would be once every 1 x 10 (-33) seconds. There would be no way to identify and quantify any particular degree of partial personhood in the nascent human physiology, and thus, there would be no evidence that any such identity exists. So the notion of partial personhood is denied by a careful evaluation of the facts that surround nascent human physiology.
|5.1.07 @ 2:44AM|#
"believers who kill infidels"
only if they defame Islam, otherwise they need not be killed, they can choose between conversion, pay jizya and respect sharia, or death. God is high, all merciful.
even more :
"If it is found that a person is mentally unstable, or a child or disabled, there should be no punishment. It's a very merciful religion if you try to understand it."
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/rss/print_503977.html
|5.1.07 @ 3:03PM|#
this is more than a legitimate question.
so, one thing that should be clarified further- what is the deeper definition of a 'natural kind?'
if you're going to present personal identity as a universal, you're going to have to admit a pile of other members into that class, too.
conversely, you could just opt for the stance of definition by utility. personhood is a useful term, without a doubt, and gives a great deal of facility in interpreting living experience. that's a kind, too, although maybe not a natural kind.
I'm not challenging the agenda of substantiating personhood. I only think nominal definitive frameworks are more effective.
call it a person, or dont, as sense deems necessary.