The point at which an abortionist realized he was wrong

But there is a life or death difference between you being incorrect and me being incorrect.

If I am wrong, it means nothing really.  If you are wrong then 500,000+ people a year in the US are slaughtered and most often just out of inconvenience. I have seen far smaller numbers of intentional death referred to as genocide.

But we do not generally base opinions or choices through the process of risk minimization as the primary reason, otherwise no medicine should exist for example. I base my opinion on this subject on what I believe is correct. Also, we will never arrive at the absolute truth so one could ask if it is even possible to be objectively wrong.

I rebuke your statement that is has no consciousness and you stated earlier we cannot prove when this happens. So with that being said, you cannot prove a fetus is not consciousness nor has a soul.

Soul is too abstract to use as a tool to determine, but I didn’t say consciousness can’t be proved. You can’t say exactly when consciousness is developed in advance, as you can’t say exactly when your chest hair starts to grow, but it is possible to detect when consciousness developes through following when thalamocortical connections in the brain develop via scans, and it can be tested to see if that is what is the determining factor via stimuli checks. Fetuses without thalamocortical connections are unable to react to stimuli or anything, meaning they react the same way dead bodies react. They don’t.

And I rebuke the idea entirely that the unborn person has no intrinsic value because maybe it does not have consciousness.

That is the fundamental disagreement we have and why I feel like the conversation will just spin circles forever. Because I believe consciousness is the thing worth protecting, as people with non functioning hearts can be held alive with a pacemaker but the second your thalamocortical connections are permanently damaged and your brain stops working and you cannot deploy consciousness, you are pronounced dead. The only reason braindead people are held on life support is the hope that their consciousness gets back, if there is no way for it to get back, the person is not worth protecting anymore and dead. As for fetuses, when they get aborted there is no conscious experience or ”life” that ceases to exist in my opinion.

The framework?  I would call that reality and or the way we define the world around us.  Call it science if you want, call it observation if you wish.

A unique set of human DNA or let’s say human attributes are human.  It’s in the words.  If I pointed at a butterfly and asked you what that was would you call it a set of meaningless random attributes?  No you would call it a butterfly because it is a butterfly.  And again, a fetus, collection of cells , a single cell are all by definition alive. So an unborn child is a live human.

Yes I would like to hear your framework and reasoning other than ”that’s just how it is”. I will give an example. Many people would answer heartbeat as the determining factor for life. The framework and justification would be something like ”heartbeat is the only muscle keeping us going every second through our lives and it circulates the blood which is necessary to stay alive, and when we are dead the heart stops”. But my issue with heartbeat is that we can in fact live without a functioning heart if we have a pacemaker, some animals can survive completely without a heart and if heart is the determining factor then pulling the plug would be murder. Some might bite the bullet and say pulling the plug is murder, but then they would have to accept that abortion before development of a heart is justified.

As for your framework, I still do not know why DNA is the determining factor when we can chop off limbs which have DNA but are not considered living humans, why is not a sperm’s DNA sufficient as its DNA is not identical to the man ejaculating. The sperm needs to be alive to fertilize the egg, and it has human DNA so why is sperm not a potential human life like a fetus is, when it has human DNA but is not the exact same DNA as the man ejaculating?

Also, why are dead people ”dead” when they have DNA still. I feel like using DNA to determine life has so many inconsistencies that it just feels like a way to justify in hindsight a pro life stance.

Please define consciousness and prove to me that you have it.

I would say consciousness is the ability to react to your surroundings and being aware of it. I could prove it by showing I have the capability to react to my surroundings and being aware of things happening. If your question is metaphysical like how do I know my experiences are real, I cannot answer that but at that point nothing can be ever proven.

Obviously, a baby that is alive is not dead.  It is a living organism.  A corpse is an organism where life has ceased and is therefore dead.

But what determines death? Is it DNA ceasing to exist? You already know my answer to this, life begins and ends with consciousness. When you have one, life starts. When it ends, you are dead. A fetus, a braindead person and a dead person with no functioning organs I consider unalive and not worth protecting.

People can learn and people can progress.  But they have to be willing to do both.  You are willing to neither.  Like many cultists you assume you are correct to the point of refusing to consider new information as it would give credence to the notion you might be wrong.

I have readjusted my position on many things, abortion being one of them, but that requires evidence or a logical explanation, not empty statements.

I am talking life and death here.  By your own description we are talking about possibly murdering half a million children every year because they are inconvenient based on things not definable.

This seems to be yet another appeal to emotions. The argument of ”think about the children”.

It’s so entirely ironic how people who claim faith in God is a sign of low intelligence or being fooled.  But you can turn around and have such faith in science that you are willing to kill people based on it because when you kill them you consider them not people.

I do not find it ironic, the existence of God is something that has never had any bit of evidence, it’s all word of mouth and ”you just have to believe and not think”. Everything we have today, the development and progress of medicine and literally everything that has progressed human life expectancy from 30 years to 80 years is based on gathering information from previous generations and working on that. If we would disregard what other people have created and come up with, and only live based on our own instincts and experiences we would still be cavemen. This is a crucial difference between humans and animals, as animals are not able to stockpile information from other animals and expand on that information, but everyone starts from zero.

I think belief in something like a God worked as an explanation to things that could not be explained before, like people could not study or explain the concept of something like rain 1500 years ago so it was ”idk some magical guy in the sky probably creates it. Just believe it.”

But you can turn around and have such faith in science

In terms of brain function and its link to consciousness, it passes the theoretical and practical trial. It has a theory about a certain function in the brain required to deploy consciousness, and it passes the practical test by seeing if a fetus can react to its surroundings before the said function and after.

The answer is, a fetus cannot react to stimuli before the thalamocortical connections develop, it can react suddenly after they are developed, but once they get severed a human suddenly loses its ability to deploy consciousness. That’s a lot of coincidences for it to not be true.

That’s like saying we cannot trust car mechanics who theorize a car cannot run without gas, even if it is tested that cars cannot run without gas, with gas they suddenly can but after they run out of gas they cannot function anymore. Car mechanics have gotten a lot of things wrong in the past, we can’t trust them! But don’t worry, God is actually the one who starts the car.

Would my answer satisfy you more if I told you that God said to me life begins at consciousness?

If you fall into the freezing cold ocean in Alaska,  it does not need your agreement to be cold nor does it require your belief in it to swallow you up.

Nope, but it has a scientific explanation to why freezing cold and hypothermia negatively affect humans and lead to death. If you wanna disregard the explanation because people have been wrong before, go ahead. Try throwing a person with strong belief that God will protect him and he cannot freeze and drown into the ocean and see if his belief can outdo science.

It’s literally impossible for me to explain this any clearer than I have.  A “fetus” is human. A fetus is clearly a living thing.

I would rephrase that as ”it’s literally impossible for me to explain with a clearly structured framework so I will just repeat a statement with no explanation”. I could also argue the oppsoite and have my explanation as ”it just is like that whether you like it or not”.

Exactly.  So if you cannot prove this point for yourself why are you advocating it must be proven for others otherwise it’s morally acceptable to kill them.

This is just pointless at this point. If you want to talk about metaphysical consciousness and experiences then you can’t prove fetuses even exist at all, as literally nothing exists at all necessarily. Not even you. But you don’t need to prove everyone that you exist, we all take for granted that we do not live in a metaphysical reality and we all believe you exist without proof needed. This feels like a hail mary to muddy the water, some things needs to be proven but not everything.

If I walk into a class in Harvard and the professor is like who are you and why are you in this class. I need to have proof that I got accepted and enrolled there, but I do not need to prove my consciousness and existence is real. Telling the professor ”how can you prove you exist, and that your consciousness and experience of me being an outsider here is actually real?” is not a suitable argument.

OK, so you are either just trolling me now or you just refuse to accept anything that conflicts with your agenda.

What is death?  Are you serious with that?

The absence of life is the answer. You have used the word corpse several times.  So I am certain you are familiar with the concept of life and death. And as I mentioned you cannot achieve death without having achieved life.   The corpse is a corpse as it was once alive and is now dead.

DNA has nothing to do with if something is alive.  We have recovered DNA from many things long since dead.

You disregard my point by claiming I am trolling, and then you do not answer it and just handwave it. I am not trolling, being disingenuous or have an agenda, I’m sincerely curious to know your rationalization.

I think a good way to measure if someone is sincerely participating in a debate or conversation and not just spewing talking points is if they are able to summarize the other person’s points correctly, so by all means correct me if I am wrong.

So you believe life starts at conception because that is the point when the unique set of human attributes, DNA, is established, therefore a new living human being is ”born” and starts being worth protecting. The absence of life is when something is dead or ”unalive”, but when talking about the point when something is no longer alive, suddenly DNA is not anymore the indicator because you believe ”DNA has nothing to do with if something is alive”.

My question to test your framework is, why is the unique set of attributes, DNA, the indicator for when a life starts, but not anymore the indicator to when life ends? Then what do you believe is the indicator to when someone dies, and why is it not the same indicator to when a life starts? Is pulling the plug from a braindead person who will never gain consciousness as much of a murder as abortion?

You claim I am just echoing propaganda and say anything to justify it, but I have a clear and consistent framework for my belief. I think a person not able to deploy consciousness is not alive, whether it is permanently braindead or a fetus without consciousness. They are not alive, no matter if their other organs are still functioning. I don’t like using movie references or fiction as supprt for arguments, but in sci-fi movies about AI taking over, we consider them alive (or as alive as technology can be) when they are able to deploy consciousness and think and react for themselves.

I don’t know if you have watched Dragonball, but there is a moment when Captain Ginyu (bad guy) uses a body change technique on Goku (the main hero), so their consciousness is now in the other person’s body. If Captain Ginyu’s body (with Goku’s consciousness) would die, I would argue Goku is dead and Captain Ginyu is alive, even if Goku’s body with his unique DNA, heart, organs etc are still alive but has Captain Ginyu’s consciousness.

I would say your framework is incredibly incosistent, if you even have one, and change the indicator of life and and your arguments to what supports your agenda. You seem to start with a conclusion that abortion is bad, and work backwards to justify an explanation to why aborting is wrong by saying the unique DNA is what determines if it is alive or not, but switch quickly the indicator when talking about death because you do not wanna bite the bullet and say people are alive as long as they have DNA.