6 ms·

Am I the only one who faces a weird sort of existential lump in the pit of my stomach when I think about how, in the world "we're" creating, I never would have

• BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
  > if you'd killed me as an embryo, I'd be every bit as dead today as if you'd killed me yesterday You wouldn't have existed in any meaningful definition of "you" if your embryo had been destroyed, so you wouldn't be dead. Being dead and being not here are not the same thing. I've never had children. That doesn't mean my children are dead.
  • ImJamal 1y ago
    Embryos are alive. Can you find an embroyotologist who would deny that?
    • Elle_Benjamin 1y ago
      Alive and conscious/sentient are not the same. Something must be sentient to be harmed. Plants are alive. You eat salad, right?
      • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
        Maybe they're a breatharian. You don't know.
      • cjbgkagh 1y ago
        I think you're defining harm based on sentience where as my definition of harm would include damage to not sentient objects.
        • const_cast 1y ago
          But if we follow that definition of harm we get to an untenable place. Big boys gotta eat, and broccoli is good for you. We have to draw the line somewhere, and I see no reason to draw the line so far back that we're considering clumps of cells on the same level as us. We can do that, sure, but what do we gain? More heartache, harder decisions, more prison time? What's the benefit?
          • cjbgkagh 1y ago
            I wouldn’t use ‘harm’ as the moral delineator, depending on the context it’s very much ok to do harm. It isn’t sufficient context on its own. I think it’s the attempt to be moral by a simplistic definition of ‘doing no harm’ that leads to the contortions to the definition of harm. In this context we’re talking about if it’s ok to harm a small set of cells, and again it depends on context. Consider the act of assaulting a pregnant woman to harm the fetus, it’s the same fetus that has come to the same harm the only thing that is different is who made the choice.
      • bobmcnamara 1y ago
        > Plants are alive. You eat salad, right? Yes. But I don't wander around saying that harvesting it doesn't harm the plant.
      • ImJamal 1y ago
        What does harm have anything to do with it? The person I was responding to said you wouldn't have existed which is false.
    • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
      The medical and scientific consensus is that embryos are cells capable of creating personhood rather than consisting of actual personhood. Not to mention the obvious difference between something that has lived experience and something that has none.
      • ImJamal 1y ago
        First, things can be alive, but not persons. Second, personhood is a philosophical thing so the medical and scientific communities' opinions are not relevant Third, I looked up lived experience on wiki and it is talking about knowledge gained from the experience. A baby who was born yesterday doesn't have lived experiences so are they not a person?
        • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
          > First, things can be alive, but not persons. Non-persons cannot be me, a person. A precursor is a precursor is a precursor.
          • ImJamal 1y ago
            Human embryos are human. Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons?
            • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
              Human embryos are special human tissue that may become human, not human. Category boundaries and specificity exist for a reason. > Are you suggesting there are human nonpersons? We quite often use the word "human" as an indicator of future or past potential or characteristic without meaning that the thing itself is a human. My dad's ashes are "human remains", but they're definitely not a person.
              • ImJamal 1y ago
                You are missing the key point. A fetus is part of human development just like toddlers and adults. Ashes are not. Just like how a sapling is a tree even if it is still in a container. You don't have to wait for the tree to be transplanted to the ground for it to be a tree.
    • LadyCailin 1y ago
      This is such a baity statement. This is literally the heart of the “personhood” debate, so you can’t sit here and pretend like this is a clear cut scenario. If you want to make a falsifiable statement, go for it, but don’t make a metaphysical statement and then assume it’s well established physics.
      • ImJamal 1y ago
        Why are you conflating personhood with being alive? Things can be alive without being a person. As far as I can tell no embryologist would deny that embryos are alive. The only debate is if they are a person. If you kill a dog then the dog died. If you kill an embryo then the embryo is dead. It is irrelevant if either of those two are persons.
        • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
          Question to understand the baseline you're coming from: Are you declaring a moral equivalence in this thread between destroying a non-person thing and a person thing?
          • ImJamal 1y ago
            No. I'm saying three things. First, embryos are alive. Second, you were once an embryo (it is a stage in human development). Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said. I'm not taking a position on if an embryo has personhood.
            • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
              I was also once the molecules from the outgassing of Napoleon's corpse and the cheesecake my dad had for dinner, and burying Napoleon differently or my dad being on a diet might have caused someone else to be born instead of me, but it's curious that I don't see us debating weight loss and the burial practices of exiled monarchs. Maybe causal chains of branching paths and being grown from cells aren't actually useful metrics for being "me" after all. > Third, destroying an embryo means you ceased to exist, not that you never existed like the original person I responded to said. Something that eventually became me ceased to exist. It wasn't anywhere close to being me yet, just a precursor, like Napoleon's chest hair.
  • smeej 1y ago
    There is no organism that is genetically your offspring, so no such offspring can have died. Totally true. But I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now. When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" that could suddenly be killed?
    • BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
      Look, up front, I get what you're saying. But people actually make decisions like this about procreation all the time. We do genetic testing of parents to make sure they don't pass on devastation to their kids. People who want kids get sterilized to intentionally halt their genetic lines all the time. People choose their sexual partners by selection criteria. This is different only by degrees. > When did something so significant happen that I became an "I" Consciousness. The "think" part of "I think therefore I am". The part that makes humans human at all. Life experience. Presumably many years of it. You aren't even the same person you were yesterday let alone the cluster of cells that never experienced consciousness. > I'm just the one organism, from all the way back then until now Stopping there is arbitrary. If some rockslide hadn't happened a million years ago then your parents wouldn't have been born. It's causal chains and forking paths all the way down. How much do you debate the morality of rockslides? We have the power as a species to stop them now. Do we stop them? Do we never stop them? Both paths are genocide, just of different groups of people who will never be. Which group is the one we should choose to support?
      • smeej 1y ago
        Consciousness? That seems...arbitrary? How do we know when that even was? I get we can know it wasn't right at fertilization, but when was it? And what level of consciousness matters? There are severely disabled adults who have never been as "conscious" as some of the more advanced other animals. Do they just not count? I don't think we are talking about a difference of degrees. That's what makes me viscerally uncomfortable about it. If this tech had been commonplace when my parents decided they wanted to have a baby and conceived me, they would have had to look at this graded set of their offspring, one of which was me, and pick me out of the group--the group of...what? The group of other embryos basically just like me. Genetically speaking, my brothers and sisters. And then they pick me (or don't pick me!) and the rest just...die. Or languish, frozen, in case they chose one that didn't work out, or they want more later. The ordinary process of IVF is weird enough to me. Adding this dystopian layer of trying to select for the best of your offspring based on genetic hypotheses about their future and disposing of the rest makes my skin crawl.
• nathanaldensr 1y ago
  The movie Gattaca addresses this very topic.
  • smeej 1y ago
    Back when I watched it, I thought it was a dystopian film. I seem to have interpreted it differently than a sizable portion of today's tech elite.
• matthest 1y ago
  I would argue this has more or less been the case for most of history, in a different form. It used to be that most people died young. If your genes weren't strong enough, disease would've knocked you out before you became a teenager. It's only relatively recently that we've made it possible for people of all genetic types to survive into adulthood.
  • smeej 1y ago
    It has, but in an accidental way, in a, "Shit happens," sort of way, not in a, "My parents looked at me, decided I was faulty, and never gave me a chance," sort of way. This is much more akin to the old practice of leaving babies to die by exposure if they seemed sickly/weak, which still turns my stomach. I think it would even be a different thing to me if we were screening sperm and ova for their genes and only combining the best sets than screening the embryos.