TMF!

For the sake of argument, if it is true that human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence, and to get to point B (birth), there logically must be a point A (conception), then how does one "prove personhood"? — 3017amen

Last time we had a discussion about time I remember telling you that time could be unreal. Doesn't that make your point about there being, how did you put it now, "point of conception" moot?

I think you might be reading too much into it. We use words to communicate to the people around us and it's doubtful everyone is clued into all the nuances that might be impregnated into every word choice. The point being, maybe I meant to use the term "impregnated" here for the double entendre or maybe I was oblivious for a fleeting moment that we were talking about aborting pregnancies and it was just a distracting word choice.

My guess is that it depends upon who's doing the talking and some might mean some things that others did not. I would assume there are languages out there that lack the personal pronoun altogether (as I'm told is the case for Japanese), but I don't think we can then say the Japanese don't fully recognize the difference between people and hats. — Hanover

An completely plausible explanation. Yet, I wonder...pro-choicers are, at the end of the day, making the exact same claim - the fetus is an "it" just as a piece of nail you get rid off with a manicure is an "it" - albeit in different words.

No, because its logically necessary that our existence starts at conception. In other words, contingent, time dependent beings require a sense of time (for them to exist), regardless of whether its illusionary.

And so I think I already have my answer: Personhood becomes moot, no?

No, because its logically necessary that our existence starts at conception. In other words, contingent, time dependent beings require a sense of time (for them to exist), regardless of whether its illusionary.

And so I think I already have my answer: Personhood becomes moot, no? — 3017amen

I don't know what you mean by that? It's all greek to me.

Anyway, I think you misunderstood me. Personhood is a real issue as is amply demonstrated by the heated debate between pro-choicers and pro-lifers. However, time doesn't [seem to] figure in this equation.

However, time doesn't [seem to] figure in this equation. — TheMadFool

Correct...and that's my point. If logically it did figure into this thinking, it would (in principle) make abortion 'logically impossible' (loosely). And that's if the conclusion of ' human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence" is sound. Make sense? ( In other words, 'personhood' becomes irrelevant because anywhere along/within the process of time it's still 'a person'.)

An completely plausible explanation. Yet, I wonder...pro-choicers are, at the end of the day, making the exact same claim - the fetus is an "it" just as a piece of nail you get rid off with a manicure is an "it" - albeit in different words. — TheMadFool

But the French insist upon assigning a gender to everything and they don't use a gender neutral pronoun, so am I to assume they think differently of trees than English speakers? This is all a matter of convention. I might be pro-choice and still refer to a male embryo as a he, even though I don't respect its personhood. The gender designations in English truly refer to genders, not to animate versus inanimate objects as far as I can tell. I would ask a child with a doll "what is her name?", not because I think the doll is a person, but because it has a gender of sorts. I call my dog "she" and I surely don't think it's a person.

Correct...and that's my point. If logically it did figure into this thinking, it would (in principle) make abortion 'logically impossible' (loosely). And that's if the conclusion of ' human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence" is sound. Make sense? ( In other words, 'personhood' becomes irrelevant because anywhere along/within the process of time it's still 'a person'.) — 3017amen

Ah! I see what you're getting at but I don't think time is necessary to make sense of coming into being.

A fetus begins its journey in the plane of existence when sperm & egg unite into a zygote. Nowhere in the preceding sentence did I employ the concept of time.

But the French insist upon assigning a gender to everything and they don't use a gender neutral pronoun, so am I to assume they think differently of trees than English speakers? This is all a matter of convention. I might be pro-choice and still refer to a male embryo as a he, even though I don't respect its personhood. The gender designations in English truly refer to genders, not to animate versus inanimate objects as far as I can tell. I would ask a child with a doll "what is her name?", not because I think the doll is a person, but because it has a gender of sorts. I call my dog "she" and I surely don't think it's a person. — Hanover

Then how do you explain:

:point:

The genitive form its has been used to refer to human babies and animals, although with the passage of time this usage has come to be considered too impersonal in the case of babies — Wikipedia

I mean I understand your point - the usage of words are a matter of convention and don't reflect a point a view of those who utter/write them. Yet, as the quote above, from Wikipedia, clearly shows, people do care about people's choice of words i.e. they read intent into them. I was simply following the crowd. Erroneously perhaps.

Ah! I see what you're getting at but I don't think time is necessary to make sense of coming into being.

A fetus begins its journey in the plane of existence when sperm & egg unite into a zygote. Nowhere in the preceding sentence did I employ the concept of time. — TheMadFool

TMF!

Not sure I'm following you there. Again, for the sake of 'logic', if time is required (logically necessary) for human existence, the personhood argument becomes irrelevant. Think of it as an existential argument.

(Your "journey" requires time. Time is necessary to make sense of Being.)

TMF!

Not sure I'm following you there. Again, for the sake of 'logic', if time is required (logically necessary) for human existence, the personhood argument becomes irrelevant. Think of it as an existential argument.

(Your "journey" requires time.) — 3017amen

From the last discussion I had with you, I'm beginning to think time isn't an objective part of reality. Consider an object and suppose it appears red to you, blue to me, and yellow to someone else. From this fact alone - that the color of the object differs from person to person - I can draw the conclusion, on pain of contradiction, that color isn't an objective property of give object - objective properties don't change like that. Similarly, as the theory of relativity entails, my time is neither your time nor anyone else's i.e. it changes with perspective, or with what physicists call "frame of reference". Doesn't that indicate that time isn't an objective part of reality?

I mean I understand your point - the usage of words are a matter of convention and don't reflect a point a view of those who utter/write them. Yet, as the quote above, from Wikipedia, clearly shows, people do care about people's choice of words i.e. they read intent into them. I was simply following the crowd. Erroneously perhaps. — TheMadFool

Word choice is obviously important, and in formal settings (politics, business, law), people are very careful how they phrase things. I would assume a pro-life person would be very careful to call a fetus a she and a pro-choice person would call it an it, but I'm not sure it would amount to a massive blunder for a pro-life person to call a fetus an "it," so much so that you could declare the pro-lifer as admitting the fetus really isn't a person.

I mean maybe pronoun choice is one piece of evidence you could look at in deciphering community views regarding fetuses, but it seems like a really small piece of information that wouldn't carry a whole lot of weight.

These word usage and syntax arguments have come up in other threads in other contexts, and it seems like they always break down to being just the peculiar way English is structured and it's hard to extrapolate much more from it. As noted, French is going to assign a gender to everything, Japanese isn't going to assign a gender to anything, and English is going to assign a gender to some things, but I really doubt that means the French, the Japanese, and the English all have profoundly different worldviews regarding what is male, female, animate, and inanimate.

Word choice is obviously important, and in formal settings (politics, business, law), people are very careful how they phrase things. — Hanover

They call it political correctness I believe.

I mean maybe pronoun choice is one piece of evidence you could look at in deciphering community views regarding fetuses, but it seems like a really small piece of information that wouldn't carry a whole lot of weight. — Hanover

The limits of my language are the limits of my world — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What do you think Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by that?

The limits of my language are the limits of my world
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

What do you think Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by that? — TheMadFool

That an event that cannot be reduced to language didn't occur in any meaningful way. I don't think it means words carry pinpoint precision that cannot cause confusion due to their inherent ambiguity.

But, I could be wrong in interpreting Witt, and it's hard to know if I'm right or wrong, because, as far as I can tell, nobody ever really agrees over what he meant.

From the last discussion I had with you, I'm beginning to think time isn't an objective part of reality. Consider an object and suppose it appears red to you, blue to me, and yellow to someone else. From this fact alone - that the color of the object differs from person to person - I can draw the conclusion, on pain of contradiction, that color isn't an objective property of give object - objective properties don't change like that. Similarly, as the theory of relativity entails, my time is neither your time nor anyone else's i.e. it changes with perspective, or with what physicists call "frame of reference". Doesn't that indicate that time isn't an objective part of reality? — TheMadFool

TMF!

You are referring to attributes of the object. We are parsing the existence of the physical object itself, the fetus.

In either case, the distinction there is that you are highlighting manifestations of time. Meaning, the manifestation of time is demonstrated by being, whether it has a color and whether it exists or not. Using strict definitions of Being, we know time is logically necessary for its existence. The manifestations of color, presumably also requires time for its existence. Time is essential to either property of existence. There is no escape, is there?

From memory, I think in our discussion about time, we concluded that time itself wasn't an illusion, it was only the concept of change presenting the illusion and paradox. Like time zones, time travel, relativity, mathematics, etc..

I would assume there are languages out there that lack the personal pronoun altogether (as I'm told is the case for Japanese), but I don't think we can then say the Japanese don't fully recognize the difference between people and hats. — Hanover

Japanese have plenty of personal pronouns, or none, depending on how your linguistic theories define the terms. All the Japanese pronouns are structurally identical to Japanese nouns, so you could say there's no need for the word-class, but there are functional equivalents to pronouns in English.

For example, there are two third person singular pronouns in Japanese: "kare" ("he") and "kanojo" ("she"). I'm not entirely sure, but I think their both derived from nouns for boyfriend ("kareshi") and "girlfriend" ("kanojo" - identical). There's no third person neuter pronoun that I'm aware of, and Japanese has a tendency to use proper names or nouns where we'd use pronouns, so the pronouns are quite a bit rarer than they would be in English (also because you can generally drop the subject of a sentence).

Japanese pronouns are a nightmare to learn, since you need to be able to properly judge your social standing as well as the formality of the current situation. For example, a boy talking to his friends might use "watashi" for himself ("I"), but it'd probably sound feminine (he'd be expected to use "boku"), but if he'd talk to a stranger on the street "watashi" would be gender neutral (and "boku" would be a social faux pas). I don't speak Japanese; I just looked into it at university to see a different system (and I like to watch anime).

None of that impacts your point. Languages encode different things differently, and what's not encoded can still be expressed. So the question remains how language relates to cognition. And that's a huge question. A one-to-one comparision between word-classes is often not going to be useful, because it tends to rais questions that are irrelevant to the topic (like "does Japanese have pronouns?"), and simultaneously narrows down the question too much.

I'm German. We have grammatical gender in German. The definite article "the" splits in three: "der" ( the - masculine), "die" (the - feminine), "das" (the - neuter). The German word for "girl" is "Mädchen", and the noun is neuter. There's a grammatical reason for this. The -chen suffix is a diminutive, and all diminutives are grammatically neuter. I'm perfectly fine with this. I don't even register a problem when speaking. "Das Mädchen" (grammatically neuter) refers to a girl (conceptually feminine). There's no conflict at all in my mind. However:

Rules of grammar would dictate for consistency that I use the neuter personal pronoun when refering to a grammatically neuter antecedant. I refuse. It feels outdated to me, and I'm uncomfortable using "es" ("it") for a girl. The notional antecedant overrides the grammatical antecedant for me. I've gotten into trouble for this in school, but not reliably.

So why am I completely comfortable with a gender neutral article, but not with a gender neutral personal pronoun? That's a cognitive question about the relationship between formal grammar and language in use. Saying that grammatical gender (wherever it's encoded) is a 1:1 correspondence to notional gender is clearly wrong. But saying that grammatical gender is irrelevant to notional gender is also clearly wrong. That's a difficult question even within one language, and it becomes even more difficult to answer once you compare languages.

It's an interesting topic, though.

That an event that cannot be reduced to language didn't occur in any meaningful way. — Hanover

Or...that my words reflect my worldview.

we know time is logically necessary for its existence. — 3017amen

All I can say is we don't see eye to eye on this issue. First, we should agree on time being relative - a well established fact, entailed by Einstein's work, as the GPS on your phone will attest to. Now consider another concept that's relative - motion. Right now I'm in my chair typing this text on my keyboard. I'm at rest with respect to my chair but with respect to the sun, both my chair and I are in motion, hurtling through space. That I'm in motion/rest is not something absolute and objective, it's a matter of perspective ergo, not objective. Doesn't this mean that time too, being a relative concept, is not objective?

What's a two month fetus have on a 10 year old chimp? — Coben

What do you have on Nikola Tesla? What do you have on Elon Musk? How many rockets have you sent into space? What does Musk have on extra-terrestrial life forms who may possess intelligence on different orders of magnitude than our own?
In fact, what do you have on a $3.99 calculator from Staples? Can you compute numbers faster than it? It is evidently absurdly flawed to found such ethical arguments on these metrics.
And if that is not enough, you must produce your case as to why it is ethical to kill a ten year old chimp.

Doesn't this mean that time too, being a relative concept, is not objective? — TheMadFool

Your example seemingly wants to speak to dualism. And your latter question speaks to metaphysics, the nature of time itself.

Succinctly, I would say you are parcing subjective time, which is an experience. And Objective time meaning it's determinable and measured.

I'm talking about change viz personhood. Your argument, is really not germane.

Perhaps let's try to start from the beginning, refute the statement: Human beings require time for [to maintain] their own existence. (Would it make a difference if we replace time with change from the forgoing statement?) Human beings require change for their existence.

True, false or something else? You seem to be saying it's false because time is an illusion. What follows then is that personhood must also be an illusion? Even so, personhood similarly becomes irrelevant, and abortion and procreation an illusion too. Hence making you yourself an illusion because you don't exist in time.

Pragmatically, politically, or even philosophically, I'm not convinced that square's the circle of personhood.

(I happen to believe that human beings require change for their existence. Personhood then becomes a non-issue.)

I don't think time and the physical are so deeply connected that the latter can't exist without the former. As an example of existence being independent of time I'd like to point you in the direction of theism which has god existing but outside of time [and space]. If theism has any relevance here, it's that existence doesn't need time. I maybe wrong.

The genitive form its has been used to refer to human babies and animals, although with the passage of time this usage has come to be considered too impersonal in the case of babies — Wikipedia

Actual numbers or this is meaningless.

Please examine pain more carefully. — TheMadFool

I don’t understand what you’re getting at

When you say that you find it ridiculous that people should engage in the procreative act 24/7 if they're not to deny life then you should know how equally, if not more, ridiculous it is to say that you should use Hydrogen and Oxygen to put out a fire because water is H2O. — TheMadFool

I cannot for the life of me see how these two examples relate in any way. All I’m trying to say is that “denial of life” is not a valid objection to abortion since if it were it would be an objection to every second spent not having children

Likewise, the question of personhood - the possibility of murder - arises only after fertilization has occurred. — TheMadFool

Again, it would need to be established that a fetus is a person for this to be an issue. I think the inability to experience pain, or to think combined with a high likelihood a fetus is not even conscious disqualifies it from being considered a person

All I’m trying to say is that “denial of life” is not a valid objection to abortion since if it were it would be an objection to every second spent not having children — khaled

I get your point. But if pro-lifers should be having sex 24/7 as you seem to be implying, pro-choicers should be trying to enforce a moratorium on sex. After all, if the issue of abortion begins with intercourse for pro-lifers, in all fairness, the same should apply to pro-choicers. Since, pro-choicers are not seeking a ban on sex, it follows that the abortion issue has nothing to do with the act of intercourse itself but what follows from it viz. the chance occurrence of impregnation.

"In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its mother's womb, a condition neither merely bodily not merely mental, but psychics- a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no self, as yet nothing impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject, the single self of the two. The mother is the genius of the child; for by genius we commonly mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence of its own, and constitutes the subjective substantiality of someone else who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal independence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of existence, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiently and realized activity.." Hegel in Philosophy of Mind

So I've been convinced to be pro-choice recently. The above quote shows Hegel would have taken this stance too. I think before birth only the subconscious mind exists, and it hasn't had material to do anything with yet. The first real experience of a child is birth

"In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its mother's womb, a condition neither merely bodily not merely mental, but psychics- a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no self, as yet nothing impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject, the single self of the two. The mother is the genius of the child; for by genius we commonly mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence of its own, and constitutes the subjective substantiality of someone else who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal independence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of existence, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiently and realized activity.." Hegel in Philosophy of Mind — Gregory

Fashionable Nonsense OR I'm an idiot.

Did you guys know that the pro-choice Catholics actually have a point that the Church hasn't said when the soul joins the body? Thomas Aquinas said the soul enters weeks after conception and the decree on the Immaculate Conception by Plus IX speaks of Mary's "conceptions" (plural). I checked the Latin text on the latter, and with regard to Aquinas he was quoted in one of the opinions at Roe vs. Wade.

It is true that the Church still condemns abortion as at least 2nd degree murder, but pro-choice Catholics claim this is not infallible and that Rome is being overly scrupulous about the whole matter

don't think time and the physical are so deeply connected that the latter can't exist without the former. As an example of existence being independent of time I'd like to point you in the direction of theism which has god existing but outside of time [and space]. If theism has any relevance here, it's that existence doesn't need time. I maybe wrong. — TheMadFool

TMF happy Saturday!

You and I both can appreciate the concepts of eternity, timelessness, mathematics, Platonic ideals, abstracts, etc.. Unfortunately, our particular 'existence' relates to temporal time.

For example, relativity has taught us that in principle, at the speed of light time stops. The concept of time stopping is what is known as the concept of timelessness or eternity. In cosmology, the theory that creation requires a force existing outside of time, that creates temporal time, is a logical consequence in trying to rationalize creation ex nihilo.

However, in our context, the act of creating another human being (human's procreating) in our world of temporal time, that analogy or concept of timelessness would not be germane. We are time-dependent beings. Even whether time/change in itself is illusionary, it still doesn't preclude our requirement for the dependence on same.

And so if the dependence on temporal time, and change, is required for the existence of human beings, how does personhood affect the process of procreation? In other words, in what part of the process does a person become a person?

at the speed of light time stops — 3017amen

Right! Doesn't that imply that time isn't real? I mean what's the difference between time stopping and time not being their. After all, time stopping means elapsed time = 0 which, put differently, means time is no longer real. 0 dogs = No dogs, right? 0 seconds [elapsed] = No time.

Doesn't that imply that time isn't real? I — TheMadFool

I'm not following that, are you trying to imply that personhood is not real?

I'm not following that, are you trying to imply that personhood iss not real? — 3017amen

Suppose, only for the sake of argument though :wink: , that I'm a person and also consider that I'm travelling at the speed of light. Time would come to a stop but would I cease to be a person or would you say that a person is moving at the speed of light?

Time would come to a stop but would I cease to be a person or would you say that a person is moving at the speed of light? — TheMadFool

How is that germane to personhood?

How is that germane to personhood? — 3017amen

First, time isn't real - as you said it's value reduces to zero at light or a faster speed which essentially means time no longer exists. Ergo, I don't think it sensible to attach anything that has to do with reality to something that isn't real.

Secondly, even if time were real, it's not something that has causal power over reality. I consider time and space, in conjunction, to be the passive, causally inert, backdrop against which all phenomena occur.

To be fair though I remember physicist Sean M. Carroll claim that if time were to stop, nothing would happen and I guess that includes becoming a person.