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Reply To Michael W. Pearson

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Posted by Alan on June 16, 2002 03:17:08 UTC

I am wondering who is compelled to produce children, and why some people are so desperate to engage in reproductive-type activity that they are prepared to kill for it?

Surely such desparation to engage in such actions is not natural? There is a theory that people engage in such actions for misplaced purposes, to seek certain sensations that are but a poor substitute to other sensations. The theory is that if people regained the sensations of bodily aliveness and joie de vivre that they had as infants; they would not be so desparate to seek reproduction-associated sensations.

There is no evidence that the soul is not present from conception. In fact, I maintain that body and soul are as one in newborns.

In the movie "The Sixth Sense", the child who says "I can see dead people" also comments that some of these dead people do not realise that they are dead.

My comment here is that in a certain sense, all humans from shortly after birth (when they go through an alteration in body-spirit co-ordination) are "already dead". The unborn and newborn child is in a radically different state of body-spirit co-ordination: his spirit permeates and transcends and is simultaneous with his body, he has natural telepathic ability and probably teleportation ability.

Upon being born into a world of "dead people", of uncordinated humans whose souls are typically compacted and trapped into a small region behind the eyes, so whose bodies are like living corpses, vacant of spiritual coordination; the infant, on finding that it doesn't die, changes its body-spirit co-ordination. It becomes un-naturally coordinated, fitting in with the fallen human race.

If those who would kill unborn babies could only see themselves as the newborn and just born babies can see them; they would almost really die of shock at how corpse-like and dead they look to the vibrant spiritually animated living newborn infants.

The following comments were posted at Counterbalance once in response to a website's arguments:

Subject: I'm skeptical
From: Alan
Date: Sat Aug 11 3:13:08 2001

Hi Luis, Thanks for the website. The quality of argument, full of non-sequiturs, hasty generalisations, circularity, irrelevance, seems very poor at the website though.

Remember 'slavery'? Remember the 'arguments' constructed to blur these people as 'legal non-persons'? Much of the slavery rhetoric seems to have resurfaced.

"Are very much to applauded.." Cui bono? - who profits? "..likely to be used by large number of people". "Slavery" fits so neatly into this guy's arguments!

Non-sequitur: he refers to the fact that people exploit children now. So what? It doesn't follow that we are right in exploiting them; let alone can justify child-labour, etc. etc. Saying 'we use people' thus 'we can use people' is circular.

"Still loved"...yeah, and when you want the kid now adult, to have an operation to remove a body-part, then what? Violence. Assault with intent to injure. He's not being realistic!

Someone says that "it's not clear that a clone is a moral agent" Excuse me? Not clear to who? An identical twin is a clone. I rest my case!

He makes a 'straw man' and knocks it down. So what if some people are stupid enough to think it's relevant that 'IVF" people or 'cloned people' might be discriminated against? Irrelevant! Arthur Schopenhauer says "to exist as an end in oneself" is an "unthinkable" expression. No logic here! Unthinkable to who?

So Schopenhauer wants to use something other than "Existence" as a reference point? If you do not differentiate patterns using Existence as your 'rest-position'; you end out like the lying witness in a court case, having to make more lies to sustain the first one. Your patterns become increasingly out-of-touch with reality.

"The intention for creating spare embryos" for reproduction (IVF) is stated as blurring with the intention of creating spare embryos for research. Not valid. There is an invalid tacit assumption that creating 'spare' embryos for reproduction is O.K. Once again; we see rhetoric; and the Gobbel's specialty, of propaganda. The word "spare": spare to who? Certainly not the embryo! Strategic choice of language for political propoganda!

"The manufacture of consent" as Noam Chomsky might call it. Just as the elite Nazi's understood the word "jew" to incorporate the meaning "to be exterminated"; so we find the word "spare" fraudulantly attached to the word 'embryo' without acknowledging the political content of this. That embryos exploited for IVF are regarded as spare to the purposes of their slave-masters is irrelevant to his argument. It does not follow that there is any blurring with embryos enslaved for research. Both cases involve indefensible enslavement of embryos. He assumes that IVF is O.K., so maybe research not so bad. IVF is not O.K.; research just as bad!

"Only if we establish such embryos are persons, which most parties agree they are not"- not valid! Generalisation is not true. Numerous parties contend that embryos ARE persons. So he made a false generalisation. And just because people 'agree' on something does not make it a valid premise.

"Every worth is a quality of comparison, refers to a standard" -not so. It is a contradiction in terms to seek proof of an ultimate explanation; as there are no 'something elses' in terms of which to do the proving or explaining. If there were, it wouldn't be an ultimate explanation. Ultimate explanations just ARE. So we have "Existence" as the ultimate explanation. When "Existence" is used as a standard, a worth; you have no standards more basic to refer to. As "Existence" is the most basic standard; his whole argument collapses; the value of Existence is indeed Existence. This is not circular, but ultimate. There can not logically be any 'something elses' available more basic to use as premises.

Example: Ultimately locality is non-locality. To be local, is to be distinct. To be distinct, is to be different. To be different, is to be differentiated. To be differentiated, is to be non-local. To exist is to be non-locally local; infinitely finite.

"Although the contingent future person into whom the embryo might develop could be harmed"- example of strategic use of propoganda. There is no such thing as a "contingent future person". That idea is a myth. Inductive arguments are not logically valid. People are people when they are people, obviously. That occurs at conception. He has presupposed that at some unspecified moment the embryo 'becomes' a person. By what criteria does he differentiate that moment? He can't. When an assault occurs, and a woman loses her baby in the womb; this is regarded as a killing of the baby. Experiments have shown that 1yr olds recognise music they've never heard other than that it was repeatly played to them 3 months before being born.

When you were little, you no doubt felt as much really you as you do now. There is no evidence that this doesn't go back the whole way. Any other subject; and people would investigate the history of the issue specially where there is a dramatic gap in the data. But people are amazingly lacking in skepticism about the situation surrounding the gap in their own recall of their own history.

"In the light of these arguments, most of us would now agree that there is nothing especially problematic about embryo research" "because there is nothing especially problematic about abortion"- Non-sequitar, and false premises! His 'arguments' show no such thing; his conclusion does not follow. The website has more holes than a Swiss cheese!

"We believe that a lot of the so-called debate in this area is merely hysteria"- regardless whether there is a lot of hysteria or not; this website also seems to be a case of "so-called debate" of poor quality. "We have shown that reproductive cloning, therapeutic cloning, stem cell research and stem cell technologies present no harm and many benefits"- false. They have shown what Harv might call "delusional reasoning"! No harm to who? Many benefits to who? "Therapeutic" to who? Not the baby! I have indicated above that 'one lie' leads to many lies; they have no case. Well, that's my skeptical take on this!

Any comments?

Interesting discussion.

-dolphin

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