Mass Effect 3 Disappointment Was Expected

As this article, weirdly on LiveScience shows, some people seem to think that video games are a new form of story telling. They are not. They do not "free" story telling from the shackles, because story telling is inherently a one-way street. If the person listening to the story becomes involved, they must be involved within limits else it turns into role-playing... which is why role-playing games are called role-playing games. If the ending changes, it is not the same story.

World of Warcraft is not a story. Yes, there is an overarching story that drives many of the major events, but millions of players have nothing to do with that. They spend all of their time wandering around the open world, "writing" their own story. Yes, there is a narrative to it, but a story must have a purpose; it must have some end. And in games, that some end must be pre-determined. And even with games where there are multiple endings, there is always one ending that is counted as the true ending, which is usually the one that takes the longest to achieve and must match a set number of variables in the game. Unless you count Silent Hill's "dog" ending.

For example, if we wanted a game to be a real interactive story, there would never be something like a "game over" state. All endings would be a true ending. But in many games, you can die within the first thirty seconds of game time. To call that a legitimate ending would be absurd. There must be limits. In a real story, there are no limits, only a creative vision. It is obvious why this is so: a player can easily exceed the limits of a created world, because any created world must necessarily be finite.

Games will never be pure stories because they must be within the limits of game rules. For example, I love Halo. I read the Halo novels like Fall of Reach. While far from sci-fi genius, they were decent fluff. The problem is that the stories didn't make ANY sense in relation the game. The description of the super-soldiers (of which you play one in the game) is so beyond anything, that they would have been an unstoppable juggernaut. Strong enough to lift cars. Can run at 60mph.

Perhaps a more famous example, at least in the world of video games, is that of Final Fantasy VII. This was an era-defining game. It is frequently held up as the first truly cinematic attempt at making a video game. It also includes one of the most famous deaths in all of video-gamedom: Aeris. Only, according to the rules set out by the game, it doesn't make sense. On any given play-through, Aeris could have died dozens of times; you could always resurrect her with a spell.

Why should her scripted death be any different? Because it was required by the story. There are some games that try to get around this, by making in-game deaths permanent, one that sticks in my mind is the (old) game Gain Ground. But that was part of the game. Everyone understood the rules because they were communicated explicitly to the player. In a narrative game, if deaths are always made permanent, the player is left in a state of confusion. Should they restart? Is this death avoidable? Is a death at this point necessary?

You'd have crazed players replaying the same part of a game over and over in an attempt to save everyone's life. Conversely, you can have players who charge through a game with reckless abandon, and are left with no one alive, crippling the possible story in that way.

No, I'm sorry. Games are and always will be an imperfect story medium. They are no more liberating from the shackles of story requirements than Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Granted, there are advantages to this. A game should not be seen as a story. It should be seen as a game with rules where certain narrative bits are essentially rewards for completing tasks. To go back to the Silent Hill example, that dog ending doesn't make any sense. It's absurd beyond reason. And that's great! In a real story, it would be bound by the limitation of having only a single ending, which in the terms of a story isn't much a limitation, but it's still a limitation as regards entertainment. In a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of concept, the author can write tons of endings, some of which make no sense, simply because it's funny.

Working toward surprises, hidden rewards, undiscovered narrative elements, it's all part of experiencing a set narrative more fully. For example, people love to discover unfinished versions of books or movies. Deleted scenes, unfinished scripts, all of them are gobbled up by dedicated fans of something. They do this because it is the exact same process as going through a game and finding hidden bits of the story. It is a narrative that isn't simply delivered. It is a narrative discovered. That is what makes games both less and more than a book or a movie.

A Second Thought On The New iPad

I was reading over a few reviews of the New iPad, and many of them have a similar sentiment to them: the new iPad is cool and all, but is, in many ways, a "meh" sort of product. Why is it "meh"? Because it doesn't blow the earlier versions out of the water. They are actually upset that the new version of a product doesn't render the old version obsolete and useless.

Seriously? Maybe I'm a total curmudgeon. Maybe I'm old and and cantankerous long beyond my years. But this just seems absurd to me. These reviewers are actually desiring the seeming need to buy a new, expensive toy, every year. I'm all for consumerism, afterall, it drives the American economy, but this just seems ridiculous to me.

I love PC's because it takes forever for my PC to become obsolete. I've been rocking the same laptop for four years, and many parts of my desktop are over a decade old. I very much enjoy indulging in the newest bits of technology (I was a serious, overclockin', water coolin', SLI'n PC gamer for awhile) but when an industry is predicated on people flipping out over the next shiny thing every year, and when you don't provide them said flip-out-worthy shiny thing, they get angry, the industry is broken.

No wonder you can't actually get anything done on an iPad. It's not meant to have anything done on it! It's meant to be a casual distraction. And with iPad versions having a lifespan similar to fruit flies, serious developers aren't given a stable-enough platform on which to do things. This might help to explain why the majority of both paid and free apps on the App Store are games.

I don't mean to be a cranky jerk. I don't mean to rain on people's parades. Man, if I wanted to go after conspicuous consumption, the iPad is a pretty minor offense. I think it irks me because computers are so great. They are a democratizing force. And instead of seeing computers heralded for their potential, they're being used to sell wan distractions to a bleary-eyed populace. Instead of people who worked to turn computers into a foundation of modern society, Steve Jobs, a man who sold "magical" stuff, gets candlelight vigils.

The iPad could be great, but in the mad rush to sell simple bits of wow to as many people as possible, and every year have an orgasm with the newest iProduct, it's not happening. I don't want to be hit with "wow" every year. I want a product that does something that I will want it to do for me, every day, for the next ten years.

My Experience With The New iPad (3)

I'm not a big fan of tablets. I think that the "post-PC' era isn't post-anything. I don't like Apple. Truly, I am a massive curmudgeon. As such, my following, short criticisms of the iPad should be seen through that lens. Still, I hope to explain myself.

I got a chance to play with a new iPad today. The beefiest version of it, loaded with LTE internet access. As is always the case with Apple products, it felt nice to hold. It was firm, with an excellent tactile quality to it that absolutely every other company on the planet lacks.

The screen is very cool. At normal holding distances, the resolution gels in such a way as to make it a perfectly-solid, moving image. Colors and contrast are the best that I've ever seen out of an LCD. In fact, I loved the screen so much, I wish that it was slightly bigger and attached to a laptop.

Other than that, the thing that struck me as I caressed this beautiful thing, and as I swiped around and jumped in and out of programs, is that it is a toy. Pure and simple, it is a toy. I see potential for it to be used for other things (a medical environment really sticks in my mind), but other than potential, it is an expensive toy.

I could never imagine writing on this. Doing graphics work on it. Editing photos. Creating a presentation. Doing deep, serious research. In fact, aside from casual media consumption, I could not see myself using this for much of anything.

That's not to say that I won't ever. The platform works. The platform is popular. With those two variables accounted for, cool things will undoubtedly happen in the future. For example, whether Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo want to admit it, I think that the New iPad, more than anything else that I have held, screams loud and clear that this is the future of gaming.

Yes, we will always have dedicated gaming systems for people, but that will be a comparable niche. The Playstation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and any future home gaming systems will need to make massive strides in every element of their business model to compete with this.

This again confirms my belief that tablets are not the future. The argument that they are the future is essentially a marketing pitch, fueled by magazine writers searching for something, anything, to write about. This damned iPad cost nearly $1,000 after all was said and done, thus allowing me to play old Playstation games and browse the web. Both are things that I can do on a $400 laptop... and much more.

I understand that tablets can do many things that laptops aren't terribly good at. They conserve power. They turn on instantly. They can be thrown into a bag more easily. But even then, with a cell phone that sports a 4.5" screen,  I already have a tablet. The always-with-me computer that acts as my clock, planner, navigator, and impromptu gaming device is already with me. I don't need another one.

I wasn't impressed with the iPad, the iPad 2, or any of the two million Android tablets littering the market. They don't feel like a step forward for me; they feel like a step back. A step back to an era when computers were obsolete two days after you bought them and everything about their use was a concession of some sort. I don't want that. It took us a long time to get our computers to the point where they are at, today. The desperate need for the next shiny thing from Apple distracts people from the cheap, useful, powerful tools that modern computers have become. They are epic, life-changing tools. Tablets are not.

And why get up in arms? Why not let people spend their money as they see fit? Because we already are rocking more personal debt than any other country on Earth. We are already consuming more resources than any other country on Earth. It is annoying to see an entire industry geared up to seduce the market with yet another product that it doesn't need, and if sales of Android tablets are any indication, doesn't even really want.

Support The Middle Class

An economy is predicated on the strength of its middle class. By middle, I mean those individuals in the 40th to 60th percentile of income.

I have a decent economics background, but I don't claim to have incredibly deep knowledge. But for the purposes of this post, that doesn't matter. A focus on the middle class is something that pretty much all mainstream economists agree on. That is why you have both parties talking about supporting the "working man," or "salt of the Earth," or the "Everyman," or "John Q. Public," or any other such ridiculous euphemism for the 40-60.

The problem is that we know full well what kinds of legislation helps the 40-60. We can find examples in dozens of first and second-world nations. Unions, labor protection, cheap education, low income inequality, etc. These are known things, and yet we somehow have huge debates that rage in the public sphere. Indeed, if not for the recent hay-making about female contraception, that would undoubtedly be the primary talking point in contemporary politics.

Unfortunately, the debate actually has nothing to do with what is ostensibly being debated and is actually predicated on underlying assumptions about the state of the world that go unspoken in the debate. The argument is actually entirely concerned with value judgments about segments of the population, and you can see it easily in the toxic words used to describe the "enemy."

For example, medical care. The actual debate is about whether people deserve to die or not. The conservative viewpoint is that if you do not have the money to pay for medicine, you do not deserve the medicine. The progressive viewpoint is that everyone deserves medicine. There are major logical problems for both viewpoints.

The progressive viewpoint cannot answer the one million dollar pill problem. Basically, if a pill is invented that guarantees an extra year of life, but that pill costs one million dollars, who gets it? Everyone obviously can't. There is no answer in the progressive viewpoint. The conservative viewpoint handles this easily. The ones who get the pill are the ones who can afford it. No judgments. No morals. If you've got the money, you get the pill.

But outside of raw hypotheticals, the conservative viewpoint isn't very strong. It says that people who cannot afford medication deserve to die if their condition is life-threatening. That isn't a very easy sell to an emotional public. It's actually rather heartless.

So instead of stating their actual viewpoints, conservatives couch their arguments in dodge words. They try to argue that their plans will offer more medical care. Their plans will grow jobs. Thus we have the now famous, and incomprehensibly ridiculous, statement from Senator Mitch Daniels in response to the 2012 State of the Union Address.

We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have nots; we must always be a nation of haves and soon to haves.

Mitch Daniels

Statements like this reveal either abject cluelessness or intellectual dishonesty of a Brobdingnagian level. Their ideas will achieve none of the things that they claim. And of course they won't, no one thinks that they would. But the argument isn't actually about that. It's about fueling ideology.

And that isn't to say that progressives aren't frequently just as ideological as the conservatives. Frequently, they are even more so, rejecting evidence in favor of an idealized world view. And don't even get me started on libertarians/communists. But that's beside the point.

I was sent on this tear by two recent articles, one discussing the rise of the Mexican middle class, and how the border wars near the US are as alien to cosmopolitan Mexico as they are to SOHO, and a second discussing how China now outpaces the United States in smartphone sales and activations. Why is this happening?

There is only one reason: we are sending all of our manufacturing to these two places.

Manufacturing is critical because it provides an economic base that doesn't require pre-investment on the part of employees. You show up, get the job, and learn as you go. Degree-requiring positions, which I argue frequently don't even need the degree, require a large investment on the part of the applicant. We cannot have an economic base that requires more than two hands and a desire to learn.

As education gets more expensive, the need to have an extant support system to see you through the necessary schools becomes ever more important. In our "idea" economy, we are speeding toward a system where it will be nearly impossible to rise from the lower economic classes to the higher ones.

Furthermore, manufacturing is important because ideas, in the "idea economy" are an infinite good. Once created, they are everywhere. The creation of an idea has value, but the idea itself does not. The idea must then be attached to something that does have inherent value, and that means physical goods. Value creation, real value creation that conjures value from the ether, requires the making of something noncorporeal, corporeal.

As such, we take time and physical labor, two non-corporeal things, and apply that to corporeal materials which have set value, and the rearrangement of the materials injects value into them from the work and time. Raw materials are made more valuable than they were alone, thus creating genuine, palpable value that wasn't there previously, thus growing the economy.

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There are three pillars to a strong society, and these have existed since the beginning of civilization: the market, the welfare state, and the educational system. There is a fourth pillar, the military, but that doesn't have to do with the actual state but is instead focused on other states and possible threats.

The system works by generating money and value in the free market, which then fuels the welfare state, which gives people the foundation necessary to aspire to education, which then fosters ideas and growth in the free market.

We suck at all three pillars. Our market is wildly unfair, our welfare system is broken and overly expensive, and our educational system deprives those in the greatest need and prices the majority of people out of higher education.

An unfair market is not necessarily bad. It is supposed to be wild and wooly. The problem is when that market becomes unstable and unregulated it can put the stability of the entire system at risk. In a perfect cycle, this would be a small risk; even if the free market causes the collapse of business, the welfare state is there to provide for those ejected into poverty. They can find their feet and head back out, knowing that the state has their back, as it were. Our current system is generating poverty¹ and leaving them with little protection.

The welfare state is perfect when it provides all elements of basic life to all people in a society. Three meals a day, a fixed address, and access to cleaning and grooming. If the farthest that people can fall is a dorm room with three meals a day, then they can always get back up again. We aren't doing this. We half-ass everything. Instead of developing and providing food directly to people, we use the inefficient food stamp programs.²

Instead of providing to everyone, we kinda'-sorta' provide to families and children, but then rip our support away at arbitrary times, thus negating all of the benefits that we provided earlier. Our welfare state shoots itself in the foot constantly.

Our educational pillar isn't as hosed as the other parts. Our public education system is actually quite good and our universities and colleges are the best in the world. The situation for particular demographics is awful, though, and things are getting worse.

Those that need the education the most are getting the least. As our society becomes more delineated between the haves and the have-nots, money is flowing out of schools with large populations of underprivileged kids. When budget cuts need to happen, the schools are the first to feel the pain. Scientifically proven programs like Head Start get gutted as step-one. These issues matter little for wealthy schools and families that send their children to private institutions. But for everyone else, things are getting worse.

Again, the economic arguments that I am making are pretty widely accepted. Unless you are an Austrian School lunatic like Ron Paul, these are things that are understood. Yet we have legions of people willing to argue their heads off that these concepts are completely mistaken. Those economists with their fancy degrees don't know shit! But what can one do? Again, the wellspring of this resistance is not logical. There is no arguing.

What really blows my mind is the blockheadedness of opponents. "It's my money!" they yell, without any comprehension about what money is. "Taxes strangle business!" is another popular line.

Let's assume that these people are correct. They are "job creators" and/or the "productive class." What do they think allows them to be job creators and/or productive? The hoi polloi. The legion of socioeconomic bricks that make up the vast majority of the economy. By strengthening them, you become stronger.

Everyone benefits when the working class is made stronger and richer. The economy is more stable and more easily absorbs the fluctuations inherent to a free market. By resisting support to the working class, everyone is shooting our collective foot. We are knee-capping our economy just when competitors are rising with an eye on our crown.

But, yet again, this all has little to do with logic. It has to do with the poor being scum, trash, unworthy of love. And all of their pain, their loss, their suffering, and their want is perfectly deserved. Deserved because how couldn't it be? That world would be unimaginable.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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1: According to the US census, the poverty rate plunged by half from 1959 to 1972, then leveled off. We saw spikes during the 1980's and early 90's. The poverty rate in 2010 was the highest since 1993 and it's continuing to go up. Along with this, income disparity is the highest in the Western world (we're just below Cameroon), a majority of bankruptcies are triggered by medical issues, and as the working class earns less, corporations earn record profits. 


2: I don't mean inefficient in the way that conservative pundits mean it. As the system is designed, it works very well. I mean that all programs rely on people going to for-profit businesses to buy food with government money. That means that a percentage of tax dollars is going directly into the pockets of grocery stores instead of into the stomachs of the people who need the food.


A better system is government-purchased food, bought for cheap in bulk, and then distributed free to anyone who wants it. I argue that this would result in growth for grocery stores since people could get simple food for free and save their money for the more elaborate and expensive foods available at private companies.

Piracy Is Destroying The Entire World

Southern Poverty Law Center Addresses Men's Rights

The Southern Poverty Law Center, famous for studying and keeping tabs on hate groups, has published a detailed analysis of the garbage being spewed by the "Men's Rights" movement, such as it is. Almost needless to say, their thoughts are not kind.

I feel vindicated by this after my first experiences with the men's rights movement from my first videos and posts about the subject. I was subjected to the most awful comments of my online writing career. Nothing I have written has elicited a response of such a nature. Not even close.

These men, and a few women, are angry. And for someone who is used to listening to generally level-headed people make attempts at cogent conversation, the vitriol that I received was jarring. It hurt. For a long time, I tried to change minds. I cared what these people thought of me.

I began to stop caring about their comments after it hit me that they are, by and large, no better than racists. While I will not tolerate a white supremacist, I don't pay them much emotional mind. I don't care what they think, I only care insofar as those thoughts may trigger behavior.

In a not-too-distant past, I would have loathed these people. Now, I feel simply sad. What strange precedent caused them to become this way? How terrible the world that they inhabit must be. I don't mean to try and reduce their awfulness. They should be attacked (not physically, obviously), argued with, belittled, and otherwise reduced. Their hate cannot be allowed to perpetuate. But at the same time, responding with hate does little to help us. It doesn't help us advance our own perspective on the human condition, which needs to be regarded dispassionately, even when it turns so dark.

It Is Not A Post-PC World

The seemingly endless talk about the "post-PC" era is beginning to drive me up a wall. There is no such thing. It reminds me of the same hollow buzzwords being thrown about in the "cloud" computing framework, even though EVERY idea in the "cloud" has existed, and in many cases been implemented, for a couple of decades. All that was missing was the bandwidth.

Likewise, I think that "post-PC" is a buzz word because the technology might be changing shape, but it is still the same technology. It's the same protocols, the same concepts, all simply shoehorned into a different interface. It sounds like I am belittling the advances made that allowed touch to work, of which there are many, but I am not. I am saying that the advances that were made had less to do with paradigm and more to do with form.

For example: touch and tablets. The iPhone was the first fully-touch interface that worked. Was there something paradigmatically different about it? No! Windows Mobile, Palm, and Symbian all could have done similar, even on older technology; they simply couldn't see past their old interface ideas and look at it from a true UX perspective. It was a problem of perspective, not technology.

Even if the pundits are correct, and the primary form of computing in the future is a tablet of some shape, it is still not the post-PC era. We will still have a dock at home, with a keyboard and most likely a mouse. All that has happened is that the PC has been made modular, which is a form in which we have seen experiments like the Asus Transformer tablet, Motorola's WebTop, and the recent announcement of full Linux running on cell phones. But even there, that is a transition that won't happen for some time since all it will do, at least initially, is increase cost and reduce performance.

My own experiences with consumers also do not support the new post-PC party line. No matter what cell phones or tablets people own, at the center of their technological world is a laptop or desktop. I know only a single person who actually relies on their iPhone for computing. Truly, nothing I have experienced indicates that the post-PC era is post-anything, much less the PC.

So from whence comes this talk of the PC's end? Magazine and internet writers in desperate need of something to cover are assuredly part of the drive. Sales for PC's aren't the shooting star that cell phones and tablets have become, which makes a numbers game especially conducive to this argument. But I don't think that either of those are truly the root of the debate.

I think that it is marketing, plain and simple. Marketing, specifically, from the very companies that conveniently have post-PC products to sell us. Apple started it, Google, Samsung, and Motorola all jumped on board. Now Microsoft is even making similar noise. That marketing people from the various companies both birthed and are now driving the post-PC conversation leads me to believe that they have... ulterior, motives. A recent computer purchasing trip revealed them to me.

My mother's computer recently, how shall I put it, shit the bed. So of course I, being the technowonder that I am, was called upon to make the situation right. After analysis of the nearly-seven-year-old computer, I decided that a new rig¹ was needed. I didn't have the time to design and build her a computer, so I hit the interpipes looking for a good one.

The old computer was a Sony Vaio, purchased in 2005 for about $950. It had decent hardware for the time, including a PCI Express slot for an external video card. It served my mom -who was the kind of user to simply install things until the computer stopped- in a more or less problem free manner. If her room hadn't been filled with dust and cigarette smoke, the computer would be 100% usable even now.

Think about that. A computer that is nearly seven years old still does pretty much everything she could ask of it. Compare that to the early 1990's. Imagine buying a computer in 1990, then trying to use that same computer in 1997.

In 1990, you probably would have had a 20Mhz Intel 486 (or AMD/Cyrix if you were a rebel), 4MB of memory, and a 50MB hard drive. The idea of external video processing was a dream, and CD storage of data was something that only the techno-elite had.

In 1997, you would have had a Pentium MMX 200MHz with perhaps as much as 64MB of memory, a 20GB hard drive, CD's and CD burners were becoming common, and Vérité Quake had been out for a year. The two systems were in different leagues. The old system would have been essentially useless.

This was the era that birthed the complaint "I buy a computer and it's immediately obsolete!" Because, at the time, this was somewhat true. Computer hardware remained up-to-date for fleetingly short times. Today, people repeat the complaint, but it doesn't mean the same thing. Today, the complaint means "I just bought this shiny thing and now there's a shinier thing!"

And that is the root of this marketing-fed nonsense known as the post-PC era. A good computer from five years ago will do most of what you could want of it today. That is not sexy. That is not a money-maker. That doesn't drive sales numbers up. Companies don't like it when the turn-over rate on their products is measured in decades. That's why the "planned obsolescence" of the American auto industry included cars that rusted into piles after five years.

Initially, companies didn't need to worry about this. Through the likes of Dell, Gateway, and Compaq, they commoditized  high-turn-over computers below $1,500, then $1,000, then $500, and finally $200. Then, to the various computer companies' horror, even cheap, crap-boxes of computers started lasting for two, three, five years. Meaning that razor thin per-unit profits had to be stretched out over longer periods of time.

For example, the new computer that I bought included an AMD FX-4100, a 1GB Radeon HD 6670, 8GB of memory, and half-a-terabyte of hard drive space. Total cost: $600. That hardware will last, easily, for five years. So I could buy a high-powered computer, capable of doing anything that I want... or I can buy a tablet that is capable of doing little more than surfing the web. And, importantly, it will be obsolete in a very short time: awful for me, but great for the company.

Look at the way companies treat their cell phones, even though they already have a natural life-span of two years. They try their damnedest to get away with not releasing the newest versions of operating systems to them, even when the hardware in the phone could easily power it. They want to make the phone obsolete, because they are desperate to stop smart phones from turning into PC's. Glorious, beautiful, cheap, user-friendly, democratized PC's.²

This reality is being intentionally obfuscated by the companies who want our money, but it is also being unintentionally ignored by users because everyone has a computer. They are simply part of life. But to say that we are moving past this common aspect of everyday life is like saying that we live in a post-refrigerator world because they don't get coverage in the news like they did in 1910.

We are not in the post-PC era. We are in the PC's golden age. It is an age when a powerful computer that will last for years and do everything that a user could ask of it, including games, can be had for the price of an iPad.

This golden age is not sexy. It is not highly profitable. It is not predicated on accelerate obsolescence. In many ways, it is an era in the control of the users and not the companies who are trying to define and control a new zeitgeist. And that is why it's being ignored.

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1: Rig is an ultrageek term for a computer. It stems from us geeks usually custom building our own "rigs."
2: Apple doesn't feel the need to do this since they play the "this new thing is shinier than my old thing" market like a fiddle.

SOPA and PIPA Would Destroy The Entertainment Industry

The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, is so far-reaching, and so wildly inappropriate, that it is actually becoming part of the conversation of people outside of copyright law circles. This is quite the achievement. I'm very much against both it and its sibling, The Protect Intellectual Property (PIPA) Act.

What hit me today, though, is not that the RIAA, MPAA, and anyone else who supports this is borderline-evil, it is that if these acts go through, and the various organizations who want to stop file-sharing actually succeed, it would destroy their business.

I listen to tons of music. Almost all of it is on TheSixtyOne.com. All of that music is free, much of it is free to download, and still more of it is Creative Commons. I have not listened to music from a major artist in years, excepting when I cleaned out an old hard drive and had to delete music that I no longer wanted.

Likewise, most of the good songs from any given major album are released as singles, and are thus available on YouTube. So if I really want to, I can listen to them, there. The only reason why I, and while I know that my social circle is not exactly representative, most of my friends even know about most major releases is because we can get the songs for free online. If we couldn't, we not only wouldn't want them, we wouldn't even know they existed.

This aspect of the argument is, I think, ignored because of the belligerent and confrontational nature of the debate. The various media companies are wrong. Basic economics proves them wrong. But those same economic arguments mean that if the media companies somehow succeed -I don't think that they will, but hypothetically speaking- they will quite literally be the harbingers of their own destruction.

The basic economic mechanisms by which the music industry is growing today would be circumvented, thus propelling the music being made at the fringes of the industry, indie music and self-produced bands, directly into the lime light. Truly, the success of the MPAA and RIAA would be the greatest boon in history to smaller groups trying to get heard, since they would no longer have to fight with the big boys for market space.

I don't think that this will happen, of course, since both PIPA and SOPA are catastrophes of legal garbage. Still, it's funny to think that if they did manage to get through, it could be the final nail in the coffin for the very industry that is so desperately trying to pass them.

Medicine And Metaphysics

I have oft lamented the state of medicine in the United States. I find that when it comes to moralizing, the US is #1 in the world. There is so much moral baggage wrapped up in care in this country that Hippocrates must be spinning in his grave.

What do I mean by moralizing? There is a deep thread of what people "deserve" and what is "right" as opposed to what reduces suffering. For example, pain killers. Women complain less, but receive less medication when they do complain. That means that women are receiving fewer prescriptions for more pain. Why? Because women complain. And even if they are in pain, they deserve the pain because they need to "toughen up."

It is not just women. It is everyone. Doctors are fanatical about pain killers, even when a person is in obvious pain. Why? Because they don't want to give people "hits" of fun stuff. Compare pain killers to antibiotics. There are known, significant dangers to antibiotics. They can cause massive digestive problems, are breeding scary things like MRSA, and can trigger lethal allergic reactions in a significant percentage of the population. Do you see doctors withholding antibiotics? Nope. In fact, doctors are so free with them that their overuse is one of the issues causing the quick evolution of things like MRSA. There are fewer concerns because antibiotics are not fun.

Obviously, they all will couch their reticence in terms of avoiding addiction, and this does truly have a great deal to do with it, but the rest of it is a belief that having fun with drugs is "bad," and that whatever pain the patient is feeling cannot be real. This is one of the biggest issues with male doctors and female patients. Because remember, women are not actually in pain, they're just complaining.

The root is a disconnect between our knowledge of someone else and the reality. The reality is something we cannot know. I can never be in someone's mind. Our language encourages us to feel like we can, and we have mirror neurons that help us "feel" someone else's emotions. But mirror neurons can only mirror what they sense, which is behavior. So if someone happens to be stone-faced, there is nothing to mirror, and thus we cannot feel their pain as Clinton so famously said.

I have actually heard multiple doctors tell patients in regards to pain killers or other "fun" drugs like Valium, which is non-addictive, that a certain dose works for him, and as such must obviously work for the patient. Subtly saying that if the patient says otherwise, the patient is lying. This is not specific to men, but most of the people who I've seen display this hilarious bias have been men.

In an absence of information and behavior, our own biases and emotions fill the gaps. And frequently, even if we are seeing behavior, our extant biases will affect our interpretation of that behavior. I have not experienced pain of a magnitude to require twenty oxycodone, thus that pain does not exist.

I don't mean to harp on men, but their behavior is the worst. For example, a study came out showing that men more so than any other group, if they had never experienced sexual abuse, either believed that accusers were lying or that whatever happened didn't actually cause any harm. Only the men who had experienced sexual abuse believed it to be real.

I focus on men, there, but my point applies to everyone. We allow morals and a belief that I know what you are thinking! to infect our medical treatments. I know! I know your world! I know what you deserve! Because my world and your world are the same! That means that whatever ridiculous way I view the world is the right way and applies to you!

This is a wild disconnect between reality and this metaphysical world that these blithering idiots want to believe exists. Other minds do not exist. My mind does not exist to you, and your mind does not exist to me. To base beliefs on anything but behavior, on empirical evidence, is grasping at the nether. To base medical care, where other people's well being is dependent on you, on anything but rigid empiricism, is cruel and, I would argue, borderline criminal. A doctor who believes that he or she knows what another persons' world is like can be accurately described as evil. They give primacy to their worldview over the empirically verifiable care of another person.

I'm not entirely sure why, but this moral/metaphysical thread is woven more tightly through American medicine (I am obviously ignoring third-world countries, like Islamic countries where only men can be doctors, and men cannot directly look at a woman's vagina, thus necessitating exams through a mirror). Look at the jack-off pharmacists who will not provide Plan-B pills or even correct medical advice involving possible abortion or birth control. Doctors who will not discuss condoms. They don't give two shits about the actual care of the patient. They care about maintaining their worldview's consistency by forcing it on others.

It's so easy to moralize from a high horse. That is why it's always so immensely satisfying when they fall off. I'm looking at you, drug-addicted/gay/secretly-pregnant/infidelitous Republicans!

A Long Discussion On Personhood

I had a long argument on Facebook with a friend who is a closeted pro-life advocate. I thought enough useful stuff was said to warrant getting it onto the web. Names have been changed.

Steve:

I don't really know how I feel about prop 26 for Mississippi. In truth, it's the real question that has to be answered to solve the entire debate about abortion. I have three real perspectives on personhood.

First, personhood could be an artificial construct imposed by society and therefore flexible in it's application. Thus, whatever the social contract dictates is legit despite personal conjecture (because humans create and apply the idea of value). I find in the real world this view isn't really picked up that much, but the real world also doesn't critically think.

For my second and third view, I assume personhood as a reflection of reality. The first and most obvious quality is life at conception where the indefensible ought be protected with laws and rights endowed to all citizens. I'm sure we're all familiar with the pro-life ideas. That is rough to swallow at first, but if it is assumed to be true then all the scary consequences that follow suddenly make sense (no abortions, restrictions on birth control etc) even if we don't like them because it makes our lives more difficult.

The second quality of innate value would be a cognitive value that is fundamental in all things that are sentient or self aware. This one seems to be the one I find pro-choicers take in most cases. I'm not sure when babies can form cognitive thoughts, as I'm not even sure what the nature of cognitive function is, but I'm relatively convinced it wouldn't be at conception.

Most other arguments I hear are typically incoherent or downright silly so I didn't mention them. I just hope we come to a consensus so that lil bitches like me and congress can stop wasting time on this argument.

Me:

The problem is that it is not an argument. One side is rational, the other is not. It's like the evolution "argument." How can it be called a debate when one side says "My reasons are A, B, and C." While the other side says "Nuh unhh! You're wrong because my god says so!"

It can't be, because it's not. This "argument" has nothing to do with ethics. It is irrationality clashing with rationality, and there is absolutely no solution and there never will be. All that can happen is either the rational win, and we continue to move forward as a functioning Western nation, or the irrational win, social evolution takes over, and our society falls from grace.

Steve:

Well thats more my point, personhood in and of itself. I think the only "real" solution to this that is nearly proveable is that value is a thing that exists only in humans. The value of human life won't stop the sun from exploding because it cares we exist, it's something we bestow upon ourselves. Now, granted I'm wrong I put up the other two scenarios, and I admit Mississippi's prop 26 is complete hocus pocus Christian right wing propoganda, but ultimately I think this is a real question. It's a question we as a society ought to answer as well. We legaly need to draw a line in the sand so people can stop bitching.

Me:

Ok, I think I see what you're getting at. But that is an ethical question, and this is not an ethical debate. They are not actually asking the question in a more lucid way than how we are already doing so for our legal definition of a person. Truly, the genesis of their argument, dating back to the early twentieth century, has nothing to do with fetuses, but with the oppression of women.

Most states define a person, essentially for the purposes of determining if a murder has taken place, as a self-sufficient, viable baby that has gone through birth. Anything before that is not a person, but, for lack of a better term, the property of the mother. While there has been a little muddying of the legal waters over the years, this definition holds up pretty well. We have a definition that works.

Donna:

Concerning your original post: I'm not seeing an argument here. I'm seeing vague philosophical statements circumlocuting something. As Aaron pointed out, what you're grasping for is a clear cut definition. And we already have one. In the grand scheme of things, the idea of being against abortion because of "moral" reasons of "thou shalt not kill" is relatively new. The origins of the anti-abortion movement was rooted in "if we let women have abortions, they'll become promiscuous". It had NOTHING to do with saving the "life" of a blob of cells. I fail to see how a party that only seems to be concerned with the preservation of life when it comes to fetuses can call itself ethical. (I will refrain from using the word "moral" because I don't think that concept holds water.) If you are pro-life, then you must also be against capital punishment, and you must be VEHEMENTLY anti-war. And last but not least, you must be most concerned with viable life, that is to say, the life of the mother. And none of them are.

Steve:

My original statement was that we need a clear legal definition of personhood. Regardless of the religious rights motives its a real question to ask. Also, the original 3 perspectives were my points of view of how we might define life as valuable and thats all. I have no defined view. I just agree for a definition of personhood. If the current definition is baby is spit out vagina I find that unsatisfactory to the idea that humans have innate value. But then again, maybe it dosnt.

Me:

Actually, baby spit out of vagina isn't the definition. Birth means a viable baby leaving the mother, and that can include caesarian. That's the reason why no one either legally can, or is willing to, provide an abortion past 24 weeks. After that, in some cases, the baby is viable. In most cases, it isn't, but we have hedged our bets.

This legal definition has been working just fine for a long time, probably because it is such a large hedged bet. Truly, many ethicists argue that a baby doesn't even become a "person" until some time very close to, or possibly even after, natural birth. The only ethicists of which I'm aware that vehemently argue otherwise are all explicitly religious.

The attacks on this definition come not from legitimate concerns in the area of jurisprudence or ethics, but from fanaticism. We have no reason whatsoever to change the definition, unless, as you pointed out, we believe facepalm nonsense. Our definition works in the only way a definition can ever work: in practice.

Steve:

So my question to you Aaron is why does viability satisfy the legal status of a person? I assume that by viability you mean the ability to live physically seperate from the mother. Do you think this is just a common agreement of society that the line in the sand is physical independance from the mother?

Me:

It satisfies it because other definitions result in practical problems for society. Putting value earlier has problems: when a mother's health is in danger, rape pregnancy, when a child is guaranteed deformities or mental retardation, or making illegal any behavior that increases the risk of miscarriage.

Putting it later also has issues. We have child labor, mistreatment and abuse, or psychological issues for the children after they attain "personhood." For example, back in the day, say 100 years ago, children were frequently not named until their 3rd birthday. They were not counted as people nor as part of the family because so many children died young. Just imagine the psychological damage to those poor kids.

There are no such issues with placing the laws at the viability of the child. Dangers to the mother's health are either already set or have been eliminated. Rape pregnancy is already either aborted or accepted. Developmental issues are known and either aborted or accepted. And miscarriage is fleetingly rare.

This placement also makes good common sense. When is a child a separate person? When it is biologically separate. This isn't an arbitrary line drawn by society, it's the only line that makes practical sense.

We cannot know what's going on inside the "mind" of a fetus. Acting based on ignorance is just plain ridiculous. We may as well assume that all babies can telepathically communicate à la "Look Who's Talking." It is identical.

Steve:

I understand this argument, but the line is drawn on a cost/benefit scenario except for the part that a relys on physical separation. While you say the line isn't arbitrary, and maybe arbitrary is a bad word to use, the outcome is based on social implications. The aggregate good is maximized by this definition. But this definition is only true when we presuppose the value of a life is determined by its effects on the social contact. I'm ok with that line of thought. However, that leaves me with no defining trait of what makes people have value. Thats ok too as I am hard pressed to believe in absolutes, but accepting this definition means the value of a life is determined by its role in society.

Me:

While I think many people would admit that this perspective is inherently utilitarian, I don't. I am not actually making positive statements about the inherent value of a human. I'm saying that "inherent" or "transcendent" value is metaphysical, which is nonsensical.

We cannot act upon, nor can we even discuss, nonsensical transcendent values. Moreover, these values, if they are to mean anything, must be empirically applicable to the world. If application of these values results in widespread societal problems, how are we to say that they are fundamentally correct? We cannot.

In the same way that neutrinos are not seen, only experimentally confirmed, ineffable ethical truths must be applicable in some effable, empirical way. The final judgment, even if we assume transcendent values, must be application.

So, again, I am not saying that society or aggregate good determines value, I'm saying that even if transcendent value exists for a "person," we must experimentally determine that value via application to the empirical realm. Thus, if someone argues that an unborn fetus is a person, even though we have no experimental way to test that statement, and the consequences are widespread societal problems, there is no way to argue that it is somehow ethically "right" because that sends us back into an ineffable, metaphysical realm.

P.S.

I am not determining the value of a life vis-a-vis society. I'm arguing that an unborn baby isn't actually a life.

Steve:

I shall define personhood as I use it to mean a human worthy of legal protection. I completely agree with you about the ineffability of innate value. If we are to expect value to be a human construct then everything you are saying makes complete sense. However to be clear, and I assume this is implied, unborn babys are alive just not people like you and me in the way an acorn is not a tree. But isn't that like saying a toddler isn't as human as a middle aged man? A newborn baby still needs parents to feed it, so this "viable birth" is still dependant on others to live. I only probe because I find most points of view that are coherent, like yours is, boil down to a version of the there initial axioms I mentioned. I have no concrete pov which is why I keep asking questions because people with concrete views have reasons. I think this post may seem like a tangent but my co-workers are blasting bachata and its hard to concentrate lol.

Me:

"unborn babys are alive just not people like you and me in the way an acorn is not a tree."

That's an acceptable analogy. An acorn is not a life. It is the basic programming that can enact itself to form life. When exposed to the necessary environment: dirt, sun, water; it can grow into life, but as it is, it is not life.

An unborn baby is best understood as an organ of the mother. If we accept an unborn baby as alive because it is an organomechanical "thing" that takes in chemicals (food) and puts out other chemicals (waste), than every organ in every body counts.

"isn't that like saying a toddler isn't as human as a middle aged man?"

Not even remotely. A toddler is able to interact, express, manipulate, communicate, and do all of the other things that we consider part of life, just as the man. A fetus cannot. A zygote certainly cannot. To say that something is alive, much less a person, requires us to be able to measure that quality. We cannot. If it does not walk like a duck or talk like a duck, it's not a duck.

"A newborn baby still needs parents to feed it, so this "viable birth" is still dependant on others to live."

So are we all. I would not do well without farmers, firefighters, and doctors. The difference is that I can seek out the help. When left alone, basic functioning still takes place. My heart still beats, my lungs still breathe. I can project my internal environment into the external world. If I removed a fetus from a mother and placed it on the ground, it would die quite quickly. Remove me from society, and if the guttersnipes of 19th-century Britain are any indication, remove children as young as 4 from society, and we stand a chance at survival.

My response to your comment was predicated on the nature of your post. It was primarily non-substantive, but you expressed interest in the question of what constitutes a person and ethical considerations therein. I argued that if this is truly in what you are interested, you should be against Prop. 26 because it has nothing to do with that. It is irrationality clashing with rationality. The answer you seek will never be answered by these people.

I then said it is also a misdirected quandary. There is no question. The question has been answered as effectively as it could ever be, because whether we accept transcendent values or accept the subjectivity of morals doesn't matter. The morals must always come back to application, and it is absurd to argue that applied morals could ever result in suffering, as Prop. 26 will do if passed. I would not be surprised to hear that 100% of secular ethicists, when surveyed, expressed disagreement with Prop. 26.

But, again, true ethical considerations are not the concern of these people. They are religious fanatics, and they do not care about pain, suffering, metaphysics, linguistics, or any other subject we have just discussed. They care about forcing their baseless, nebulous beliefs on others. The fact that this "question" is being asked in the fattest, stupidest, most religiously fanatical area of the whole of the Western World is not at all surprising.

Steve:

While I'm certainly not for prop 26 because its simplicity leaves out considerations for so many things and lacked what a discussion of personhood really means, I do think the concept of personhood should be a real discussion. The religious people who drive "Concieved in Rape" busses require you to be Christian to agree in their point. I am not, so I don't. As I've mentioned previously I have no concrete perspective, but at some point in my life I've beleived in all of the three propositions I've stated.

I have reasonable doubt in all directions when thinking about any of these topics because they all are ultimately coherent. You made mention of this point:

"An unborn baby is best understood as an organ of the mother"

I don't really agree. Physically it has it's own set of DNA and goes through growth patterns. If anything, it's probably best understood as a parasite of the mother if not a unique human being. Due to this, if we accept foundational ideas of our own social contract such as: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." So basically if you read this literally with men being humanity an embryo really is a human in its earliest stage of life. Thats where people get caught up, is the embryo being a unique organism. The start of a new life. And, if we are to assume an embryo is a human we must assume that since they cannot speak for themselves it is our job to do so on their behalf.

"So are we all. I would not do well without farmers, firefighters, and doctors. The difference is that I can seek out the help. When left alone, basic functioning still takes place. My heart still beats, my lungs still breathe."

This presumes life is deserving of legal protection assuming it can function on an internal level on its own. However, what about people who rely on machines to live, who take pills when they are sick, or who need assistance living? Does this hinder their rights for protection because the way they need help is different? This would all make sense if the embryo was simply a parasite until viable. And maybe it is, but it's hard for me to find that true. Just because the embryo can't ride a bike or give a high five dosn't make it any less deserving of legal protection if we assume that all life is created equally and that those legal protections are unalienable. While I understand Roe vs Wade decided the term "person" didn't mean fetus (as this is where viability with exception of the mother's health comes into play) I don't necessarily agree with that.

I understand that you are saying a "seprate" life is created when it becomes viable to sustain itself without the mothers help. You've definately explained why its socially better to allow abortions up to a certain stage in reproduction on a practical basis (which I beleive you stated as a condition for a working definition of personhood), but if that social benefit is bought at the cost of killing younglings (pardon my Star Wars reference) then all the negative backlash that may come from life at conception might be justified.

Randomly, in regards to prop 26 I saw on Rachel Maddow tonight that the numbers for/against prop 26 in the latest polls show 45/44 for and against. If it does pass, then this discussion will get a whole lot bigger as it probably will immediately be blocked by the courts until it rolls up to the supreme court to be the new Roe vs Wade of our generation (which could seriously backfire on those people in Concieved in Rape bitches).

The idea of personhood has always intrigued me because it seems like the answer should be black and white but always ends up being various shades of gray simultaneously at the end of these conversations. At least to me...

Me:

"If anything, it's probably best understood as a parasite of the mother if not a unique human being."

That phrases it in even more negative terms than mine. We have no reason to assume anything about its nature. We don't even "know" its potential. It may be destined to miscarry. If we cannot even be sure of its potential, the nebulousness goes ever deeper and laws become an even worse idea. Not only does it not look or quack like a duck, it may very well turn out to be a badger.

"The religious people who drive "Concieved in Rape" busses require you to be Christian to agree in their point."

Yes, but if we accept the value of an embryo as a pukka human life, that is the necessary result, regardless of religious creed. If an embryo is a human, than whether it is the result of rape or not doesn't matter. We are putting the pain of a human who is demonstrably a person below the potential of a duck that may be a badger. That is absurd.

"So basically if you read this literally with men being humanity an embryo really is a human in its earliest stage of life."

First, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with this quote. If we read it literally, as it was intended, slaves and women don't count as people.

Second, I ask you to return to your acorn analogy. It is potential. It is genetic code. To call that a life reduces the term "life" to meaninglessness. We are one step away from calling sperm and ovum similarly because, just like the fertilized egg, all they require is the correct environment to grow. Then we may as well call stray carbon compounds life, because it is one environmental trigger away from forming RNA.

I won't quote your next paragraph. I will simply address it point by point.

It's not that human life is "deserving" of legal protection at that point, it's that for society, and thus laws, to function, we must protect the substantive, constituent elements of that society. What I'm arguing is that active humans are demonstrably, experimentally, empirically verifiable as living, feeling entities. They are active gears in society. An embryo is not nor could it ever possibly be. We must make laws for the active elements of society. We cannot make laws for ineffable, undetectable, "things" that may or may not exist outside of perception.

A person on a ventilator has empirically shown themselves to be a person. They have acted, spoken, done, and all of the things that we take to mean "person." An embryo has not. A better example would have been the Terry Schiavo case, where the very same wingnuts we are now discussing tried to "save" her. She was braindead. She was not a person. She was a body being kept alive with machines. The laws did not protect her because she was not alive. They tried to change the laws, but luckily, cooler heads prevailed. She was not a person, nor is an embryo. But even there, the body had once shown that it housed a person, Terry's earlier life, so people were reticent, and I understand that emotionally. But appreciating someone's emotions and passing laws are two very different things.

That gets to my positive statement about what a person is. A person is an abstract construct that we create based on differing behavior between humans. A person is something that doesn't exist in any coherent sense of the term. A person is contained within a body, and the only way that we can make the assumption that an abstract entity exists is through experiment. If I tell you that a rock is intelligent, even though it will never respond, there is no way that you can positively argue with me. All you can say is that there is no reason to believe that an entity is housed therein.

Whether you agree or not is immaterial. There is no logically, linguistically, or empirically coherent way to define a person that includes an embryo. Compliments of science today, we now have a deep understanding of neurology, so we can be assured with essentially 100% certainty that no pain is felt, no thoughts are thought, and no action could ever be enacted.

"but if that social benefit is bought at the cost of killing younglings"

If, yes, but we aren't. If that statement is made it must be backed up with evidence, of which there is none. No suffering is happening. No babies are buried.

"the answer should be black and white but always ends up being various shades of gray simultaneously at the end of these conversations."

I think that it is black & white. A "person" is someone who acts like a person. It's the reason why I'm very icky about the prospect of killing chimpanzees and orangutans. They ACT like people sometimes. Or that dog who saved his friend from a highway in Chile. When behavior becomes so person-like, I get concerned. But an embryo in no way could ever be a person, because it is not. A person is an actuality, not a potentiality.

Steve:

"That gets to my positive statement about what a person is. A person is an abstract construct that we create based on differing behavior between humans. A person is something that doesn't exist in any coherent sense of the term. A person is contained within a body, and the only way that we can make the assumption that an abstract entity exists is through experiment."

Thats the kick! So your view rests on the idea that personhood is an abstraction that we create. And, therefore, its value is determined by society. In such, the second part of that "all men are created equal" speach becomes relevant: " That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." This phrase basically says society is what makes up and enforces these social truths. If we all vote and say "when it is viable it's good" then thats socially black and white. It's different when the supreme court says it because thats the opinion of 9 or less people.

However, your opinion is solidly an opinion just like mine are. There is no reason to consider an embryo not a person physically. That is about as empirical as you can get. Its the "value" we add on after the fact that might make us think differently. I'm not arguging your point of view is wrong by any means, I'm saying that it's not at all less coherent to say human life starts at conception and should be protected or that a person comes to be when they first begin to be cognitive. The last two I just mentioned though rely upon an absolute axiom that people tend to accept, that human life innately has value.

If I am correct, you are not presupposing this because it boarders on the metaphysical (or at least approaches the subject of the metaphysical). But for a lot of people who assume life innately has value, the idea that life is an abstract construct is waaaaaay over the heads of people in this nation (although that certainly dosn't make it incorrect). And, if life does have some sort of innate value seprate from a social context we would need to figure out why. Life at conception assumes that all humans from start to finish have value. Life from consciousness assumes that once there is a working "mind" they become a person (and life at conception is even less metaphysical than life at cognition).

Thats more the reason why it's not black and white for me. Because innately I feel as if human life is important, and has some sort of intrinsic value. The rational side of me has no proof. I can't put 10 grams of human value on a scale. Therefore, it could be that our value is dictated by the people in our society. Our "personhood" is a measure of whatever society makes it. Viable birth, life at conception, life at 21, its all what works best for society as a whole.

However, there is so much people don't (and maybe just can't) know about this life and universe that I would never rule out that maybe human life really is more valuble than that of a pig or rock or molecule from a third person perspective. But, if it is we should know why. Thats why I always think about those other two options too, because they both make coherent sense too.

What a book we are writing, lets publish this.

Donna:

This isn't a book. This is two white guys arguing about something, and I don't mean this in a mean or hurtful way, they have absolutely no say in. Aaron is pro-choice, which is all well and good. Steve is closeted pro-life, but doesn't want to be lumped in with religious assholes (understandably). But the fact of the matter is, this is the ONE thing in which the voice of a white male should carry no weight. You don't have the right to interfere with the body of any female. If she doesn't want your baby, leave and find another female willing to procreate with you. End of story. I know this must annoy the shit out of many men (white ones, in particular, who are used to being heard and having their opinions be the only ones of worth), saying they have no voice in the matter, but welcome to the world women and minorities had to live in for CENTURIES. And, to be fair, as the pay disparity becomes more and more a thing of the past (we aren't quite there yet, I know, but that day is coming soon), a man who wants nothing to do with the baby his partner chose to keep should be legally free to walk away - no financial or emotional obligation.

Me:

On your first paragraph,

I am not talking about social constructions or socially constructed value. I'm talking about it in an ineffable almost Wittgensteinian sense. It is the same way that we create colors or "feel" someone else's pain. The word evolved from use in trying to explain our inborn, intuitive assumption about the existence of other minds. I assume that a human has a mind, why? Because of behavior. It's the only thing that I can see and the word and concept arose from the empirical world.

Again, this isn't a positive argument, but an argument of non-choice. It is the only non-arbitrary way to determine what makes something else like "me," whatever me is. If something else acts like me, then it must be like me on the inside. If we accept other ways of determining this, such as social constructions or dogma, we accept nebulousness, which is the antithesis of philosophical inquiry.

We say "when it's viable, it's good," we're saying that because any other statement results in problems, not because of inherent truth behind that statement.

On your second,

"There is no reason to consider an embryo not a person physically."

I see every reason to do so. It does not look, act, sound, or in any way appear as either human or an abstract entity based on behavior. Again, if we try to call a clump of cells a person because of potential, it's a slippery slope and there are many things that we can call people.

Even if we accept the validity of all opinions, only certain opinions can fly as far as law is concerned. Assuming the value of an embryo assumes the existence of humanity past the point of experiment. This means that this opinion is predicated on non empirical grounds. Laws, though, must always apply to the empirical realm. That means that, ideally, laws are grounded in the empirical realm.

Yes, what I say is an opinion. But by that point, all words are opinions and a declaration about the existence of reality is also an opinion. You dance very close to skepticism. When we use a word, we must achieve a definition that is functionally accurate, useful, and refined. Using the word "person" to define a non-sentient clump of cells pushes that word into uselessness.

I am a person. Why? Because I am using the word "person" to define an ineffable concept that is based on what I feel "inside." I say this because I am not my arms, legs, organs, and meat. I am contained somewhere inside. I then assume that other things have similar inside worlds. The only way that I can determine that is via experiment. All experiments show that an embryo has no internal world. Therefore, it is not a person.

Now, should we value things that are not people? Perhaps. Are you a vegan? Do you avoid stepping on ants? If a wasp was stinging you, would you not kill it? All of these things can demonstrably suffer pain.

If you can say yes to these things, my argument loses some power, but then I would counter saying that eventually, the applications of value become so widespread that the concept of value itself loses meaning.

On your third,

"life at conception is even less metaphysical than life at cognition."

I assume that you mean "person" and not just life in general.

Not at all. One is based on a clump of cells that might or might not become a person. The other is based on measurable behavior. Modern psychological research is explicitly based on this paradigm. No psychologist assumes the existence of an internal world, all they assume is that there is behavior that can be coded. This is taught in Psych 101.

On your last two,

"Because innately I feel as if human life is important"

That's totally fine. That is not a foundation for laws, though. Laws are real-world, their rationale should also be real-world. Prop 26 is a law based on a bunch of uneducated people's metaphysical opinions.

"However, there is so much people don't (and maybe just can't) know about this life and universe"

Also correct, but we know, without doubt, that there is nothing inside of an embryo that could count in any linguistically or logically useful way as a person. Saying that a "person" is an entity that behaves as such is not necessarily the absolute truth; that would be a positive statement that I am not, in this case, making; but it is closer to the truth than other applications of the word because it has fewer logical consequences and the strongest delineations.

Steve:

" I don't mean this in a mean or hurtful way, they have absolutely no say in."

Maybe, but I don't think so. It takes two to make a baby, and this is a question about a definition of personhood. I think thats something everyone should be involved in. The fact the embryo is woman-exclusive dosn't change that fact it just means women shouldn't be ignored in the conversation. Equality is about being equal not about woman having more of a say over something than men do or vice versa.

I tend to stray away from behavioralism when talking about this stuff. If there was a robot that did everything a human did and looked like a human, would you call it a person? Maybe we should, but it has no human DNA. Value, as I am using here, I shall define as a level of worth greater than that of something else. Prop 26, while created by inbreds, will have a huge affect on our legal system nationwide if it passes. It will jump to the supreme court where it will challenge the view that the fetus is not a person, and will likely issue a legal definition for what person means. The empirical part about is that the embryo quite seriously a human with its own dna that so happens to be in a parasitic relationship with the mother. So, it's completely reasonable to argue that an embryo is physically human and that the basis for legal protection should apply to all humans. That is a secular argument, not a hocus pocus I sprinkled some soul dust on your baby argument.

Behavior is the only thing that can tell us what someone is feeling, but I can still feel things when behavior isn't there. After 10 weeks the kid starts brain development. While I doubt it could use a calculator its stuff like that which gives me pause.

Donna: I'm not actually pro-life at all. In fact I probably have a much more depressing take on the whole thing than you think. But, I'm always open to the idea that I'm wrong and like talking about the subject with people who have informative things to say. In fact, this has been some of the best thought provoking discussion I've had in a long time and I'm quite enjoying myself.

Donna:

But I thought you were pro-life. Everything you've said pretty much is loosely draped over the fact that you are. You've even said it to me in the past that you are. Maybe you've since changed your mind? In fact, I remember being confused as to how someone with a background in philosophy who identifies as an agnostic could possibly be pro-life. I recall thinking it had to do with early religious programming you had as a child, just something you've had trouble letting go of. I also can't see how someone who supports equality, and who therefore must also be a feminist, could assert that he has a say over a woman's body. I understand you believe this is a question about personhood, but once you've parsed through all the philosophical pop-phrases, it comes down to the fact that you want a say in whether or not a pregnancy is terminated.

Steve:

Well the reason I disagree with you is because the fact that if affects women dosn't make it a decision to be made by exclusively women when another person is involved. If the embryo is a human you are involving two people, as a consequence you are burdened with responsibilites you may not want. This is, of course, if you consider an embryo a person which you don't. But, its not unreasonable to do so if you equate humans with persons.

No, I am not pro-life. I'm pro-nothing I have no super clear view. I have been pro-life in the past. However, if you ask me today, my current view is that unless there is some sort of external force elevating the status of humanity with equality for all then this discussion is ineffective as personhood is a social construction where value is determined by society. So, effectively, whatever society says goes. As Aaron said earlier, I dance very close to skepticism. I can not know the answer to something and be comfortable with that fact.

Me:

"If there was a robot that did everything a human did and looked like a human, would you call it a person?"

It depends on what is known about the underlying functionality. If I talked to the programmer and he was able to explain all of the underlying equations, than probably not. But if I just found a robot, and it acted like a person in every way, you're darn-tootin' that I would call it a perons. It was a cog in the world's machine.

Not to geek it up too much, but Data in Star Trek was a person. The lack of DNA does not negate the existence of underlying quality, because I can experiment and determine that there is something, ineffable though it is, there.

"The empirical part about is that the embryo quite seriously a human with its own dna that so happens to be in a parasitic relationship with the mother."

An acorn is not a tree. An embryo is not a human. There is no stronger delineation possible aside from saying that a rock is not a human.

As such, it is not at all reasonable to argue that the embryo is physically human. It might be genetically human, but genetics do not make a human. Enacted genetics make a human. Just the same as computer code does not make a program; compiled computer code makes a program.

"I can still feel things when behavior isn't there."

Yes, but that is you inferring what may or may not be there. And when inference comes into play, errors occur because we are, consciously or not, projecting our biases onto whatever we believe exists. Again, to mention the Terry Schiavo case, some of her family believed that they were somehow communicating with her. Doctors assured them that this was not the case. It didn't matter. They FELT that something was there. After she died, an autopsy revealed that over half of her brain had liquified. There was nothing actually there, even though they felt it.

"After 10 weeks the kid starts brain development."

Nerves do not a person make, nor joints and bones a skeleton. I can appreciate your reticence, and many in the medical community share the same reticence, which is why few-to-no doctors will do abortions past 22-24 weeks. There is still no evidence to indicate that a person, even in some proto-functional state, is there, many feel that by that point, the possibility is there.

But again, things that give us pause, or make us feel icky do not constitute the firm building blocks of laws. Using that justification validates any law for any reason.

About Donna's Comment:

I firmly side with Donna. Equality means having a say over one's own body. Would you like a law that forced you to have sperm removed from your body if your wife demanded it, and then forced you to stick around?

Baby production is 99.9% the work of the female, as such, the only law that makes any practical sense is one where absolute primacy is given to the female. It is an unfortunate reality for any man with visions of bouncing babies in his mind: a woman doesn't need a man to produce a baby, but a man does need a woman.

And, I think importantly, this isn't a bad thing. All a man has to do is find a woman who wants to start a family. Boom. Problem solved.

Me:

"dosn't make it a decision to be made by exclusively women when another person is involved."

There is no other person involved. The man was involved in the insemination, via sperm, but the actual baby production is 100% female. And if the embryo is a person, then a woman has responsibilities, but there is no way to coherently call it a person.

And, as we see with the religiously-minded, when our conception of a person, and thus of what we should value, is based on ignorance and projection of what might or could be, our biases come into play. The worst of racism, sexism, and misogyny are given fertile ground.

From that, we have the absurd statement that women impregnated by rape MUST go through with the pregnancy. Or that unwanted pregnancy is divine judgment for being a slut.

"its not unreasonable to do so if you equate humans with persons."

Yes it is. Equating humans with persons is incoherent, since if I could upload my mind, intact, onto a global network in the future, I am still me. I am still a person, even though I am completely free of anything related to a human.

Steve:

"An acorn is not a tree. An embryo is not a human. There is no stronger delineation possible aside from saying that a rock is not a human."

What about this analogy? An acron is not a tree, but it is a plant. An embryo is not a man, but it is a human. I, regardless of abortion or not, have always viewed an embryo the most basic structure of a human. It's unique combination of dna makes it alive and unique. Because of this we then ask the question is it worthy of legal protection. I understand how from your perspective thats not satisfactory, but its also black and white to say human = person. Thats why the prop 26 definition is so simple but has HUGE problems for women and science alike who enjoy the current legal itteration of viability.

To be fair, if I knew Data for real I may have a fondness for Data but wouldn't consider him human most likely or even deserving of rights. We don't give animals rights either because we are in the race for our own species. I find this highly hippocritical, but commonly accepted. But, I can see how the walk like a duck talk like a duck thing would as a consequence leave Data a person.

Amy:

I am going to be an ass and really break up this serious conversation. How about this analogy? "An acorn is not a tree. An embryo is not a human. But you can eat both of them." Think about it.

Steve:

‎"There is no other person involved."

For clarity, the other person would be the embryo. And you can coherently call it a person if human = person.

"Equating humans with persons is incoherent, since if I could upload my mind, intact, onto a global network in the future, I am still me. I am still a person, even though I am completely free of anything related to a human."

This is why I think the definition of personhood is important, because what it means to be a person is the real core of this entire debate. Personhood as viewed by any perspective is dependant on what a person means to you. A pro-life secularist or religious nut ball would think everything you said is crap (it's not) just as you think religious nut balls are crap.

It is coherent to say if a human = person then the embryo is deserving of protection. Thats coherent, it just dosn't mesh with your perspective very well.

Me:

"An acron is not a tree, but it is a plant."

No, it's a seed. A seed is something that can, if planted, become a plant. A seed alone does not grow, it does not photosynthesize, it does not change color in the fall. It is not a plant.

"but its also black and white to say human = person."

Not at all. I see more shades of grey in that than in "behavior=person." For example, imagine a giant blob of cells that, through an environmental fluke, developed into a 180-pound pile. The DNA is human. It should be human. Is it? Or my mind on a network example? Am I no longer a person?

"have always viewed an embryo the most basic structure of a human."

That is, at its root, metaphysical and borderline spiritual. Most basic how? Structure? How is a human constructed? Again, that's all fine, but it is not suitable material for a law.

"To be fair, if I knew Data for real I may have a fondness for Data but wouldn't consider him human most likely or even deserving of rights."

Than I would argue that your moral compass is so twisted as to be cruel. You would assign more value to something that is nothing more than a few stray strands of DNA contained in four cells, than to a demonstrably feeling entity that can suffer at your hands. That, for lack of better words, is fucked up.

"And you can coherently call it a person if human = person."
"Personhood as viewed by any perspective is dependant on what a person means to you."
"Thats coherent, it just dosn't mesh with your perspective very well."

It does less than simply fail to mesh with my worldview, human=person is internally and fundamentally incoherent. Ask anyone whether they feel that they are still themselves after losing an arm, and they will say yes. Two arms? Legs? Body? Different DNA? 100% of people will say yes. Or look to my above examples.

That metaphysical conception of a person is based on my own internal world and the assumption of other people's internal worlds. The position that I am positively arguing for practical application is based on behavior, since it is the only position tenable via evidence. A person is an entity that behaves like a person. What does that mean internally? Nothing. It only has meaning externally, just like laws.

Steve:

Than I would argue that your moral compass is so twisted as to be cruel. You would assign more value to something that is nothing more than a few stray strands of DNA contained in four cells, than to a demonstrably feeling entity that can suffer at your hands. That, for lack of better words, is fucked up."

People eat meat, even beef. To do so we need to kill animals, many of which endure very harsh lives in factory farms. But, it is allowed because they are not human. Our species is set up to exist for itself. Humans are seriously selfish creatures. That is the hipocritical perspective I'm viewing it from.

Human = person is completely coherent. The reason it is coherent is because you can empirically identify it as human. As far as what you said about a 180 pound blob, thats a great counter argument to the idea but if I said "yes" what would you respond with? You innately "feel" that perspective is wrong. But if you assume the initial conditions it is still coherent.

"That is, at its root, metaphysical and borderline spiritual."

Not really, because if you had to trace a living organism from start to finish you would start at the point it was concieved. You can trace that organism back to conception before it is no longer that unique organism. The sperm and the egg lack the dna needed to actually be a human. In their combination you have a definate starting point. Nothing about that is metaphysical, its just the start.

"As far as what you said about a 180 pound blob, thats a great counter argument to the idea but if I said "yes" what would you respond with?"

And a counter argument would be that it is human if it follows a generic growth trend common to all humans.

Me:

Yes. But there are many people who are vegans for precisely that reason. I am assuming that, since I have seen you eat meat, you eat meat. Again, you are ascribing lesser value to something that can demonstrably suffer at your hand. That is a wildly twisted moral compass. Admitting hypocrisy is the antithesis of philosophical inquiry, which leads me to believe that you have no interest in actually answering the question and are simply trying to validate your extant belief.

I do not posit that because I "feel" that the blog is not human. I posit it because admitting it results in a reductio. If you do say yes to the blob argument, that means that your conception of both human and person is actually DNA. So, what DNA? At what point does change in the DNA code result in something that is non-human? What perfect DNA should hold up and say that this specific code means "person."

"you would start at the point it was concieved."

Why? Now I can accuse you of "feeling" something is right.

"The sperm and the egg lack the dna needed to actually be a human."

No they don't. A woman can, through the wonder of laboratory manipulation, fertilize an egg with her own DNA. They both have complete genomes, but they exist in a mechanism that takes half of each. Just as the combination exists in a mechanism that then enacts that code into a full human.

You can argue that the resultant DNA is unique in comparison to both parents, but every sperm and egg starts off with slightly different DNA, both from each other and from the parent. Take an egg, nail it with a dusting of cosmic rays and you have unique DNA.

"And a counter argument would be that it is human if it follows a generic growth trend common to all humans."

This evinced an inherent circularity that I had missed. This argument essentially said "It's human if it grows like a human." That still fails to answer what a human, much less a person, is. The DNA argument is entirely void because the concept of human existed long before DNA was discovered.

We are left with "A human is human because it has human DNA." And, "Human DNA is the DNA of a human."

Steve:

‎"This evinced an inherent circularity that I had missed. This argument essentially said "It's human if it grows like a human.""

I disagree. Humans develop in a very specific way. The process can actually be falsifiable. For example, you can say its false that the heart develops two weeks after conception. Could it happen? I guess so if the growth is accellerated, but in the norm there is a defined process that the fetus goes though. As long as it conforms to the general guidelines of what we have previously observed you can be highly confident it is human. Just as teenagers go through puberty...

"No they don't. A woman can, through the wonder of laboratory manipulation, fertilize an egg with her own DNA. They both have complete genomes, but they exist in a mechanism that takes half of each. Just as the combination exists in a mechanism that then enacts that code into a full human."

Like cloning? I have a wierd view on cloning that you really are the same person as your clone unless you assume cognition as the definition of human life. But its a wierd theory. Otherwise I don't get this.

"Why? Now I can accuse you of "feeling" something is right."

I'm basically saying the start is the start. It is circular, but all true arguments basically are circular.

" Admitting hypocrisy is the antithesis of philosophical inquiry, which leads me to believe that you have no interest in actually answering the question and are simply trying to validate your extant belief."

I don't think so. I like to be right. However, I'm always plagued with doubt. I mention the hipocracy because everyone is hipocritical to some point if they eat meat. I'm not saying I would punch Data in the face either, more that if I had to save a human or a robot from falling into a well I'd pick the human. Just like if I had to drop a cat or a human into the well it would be a cat.

Me:

Yes, humans develop in a specific way, but what a human IS is determined by the end point. The developmental argument does nothing to determine what a human is, only that once we know what a human is, we can then track its development. You mention guidelines, by what model do we determine the guidelines?

Not like cloning. As in, they can take a woman's DNA and turn it into sperm and then inseminate an egg with it. Epigenetic factors come into play resulting in a unique genome. Although they haven't do so yet, the reverse will eventually be true, turning a man's cells into an egg.

All logically true statements are circular, pragmatically true or practically true statements are not. In fact, for a statement to be pragmatically true, circularity is impossible.

While I agree most people are hypocritical about things, the goal of a philosopher is to not be hypocritical about anything. I am not hypocritical about eating meat because I only care about animals that behave in particular ways. I would never consider eating chimpanzee meat, though.

And this statement about Data is much less extreme. Here, you do not negate that you might support laws giving sentient robots rights.

And maybe it's just me, but if I had to save the only sentient robot in existence or a person, I'd pick the robot.

Steve:

Well, I'd probably support rights for Data like I'd support rights for animals. When robots seek equality then at that point society can come to terms and decide if thats the right thing to do.

Human development can be tracked based on the embryo's gestational age and it's correspondance to normative growth patterns. Anyways Jill is kicking me off so I can see a movie with your bfgf. Peace!

Me:

Yes, but the phrase "human development" presupposes our ability to use the term "human." What is a human?

Also, Data did seek rights. It was in season 2: The Measure Of A Man.

On Personhood And Oppression

I have been only somewhat following the Personhood spat going on down in ol' Mississip. In general, I don't worry much about them seeing as they are the fattest, dumbest, most religious area in the whole of the Western World, so I come very close to seeing it as worrying about what a bunch of crazy homeless people choose to do.

What I have noticed online, though, is a large contingent of commenters who try lines similar to this:

"While I agree that a person begins at conception, I do not agree with Prop 26. I think that there are grey areas to this debate and it cannot be black & white."

Perhaps. I will give, at least for now, that the concept of "person" has some grey areas, but what people like this are oh-so-politely advocating is not just a definition, but oppression. They are arguing that women should be forced to give birth because the fertilized egg is just as good as a person. They believe this to be righteous, and for the sake of this post, it doesn't matter.

Regardless of the moral rectitude of the oppression, it is still oppression. These people, with their milquetoasty language, try to butter over the fact that they seek, or believe it is right to seek, control over a woman's body. That is black and white.

Ignoring that calling an embryo a person reduces the term "person" to uselessness, I will not abide this. You seek the oppression of certified people for the sake of potential or hypothetical people. That is stupid. And even if it wasn't stupid, do not be surprised when those same people you seek to oppress rip back control of their bodies either through illegal birth control, back-alley abortions, leaving, or all-out violence. Because, then, it doesn't matter how righteous you are.

Trademarks Do Not Exist For The Company

I am growing increasingly disapproving of Apple. I've never liked their product model: exercising direct control over every stage of interaction; but it was just that, a personal preference. Lately, though, they have turned into the bully-like Goliath that they supposedly stood against in its early days.

The number of lawsuits filed by Apple continues to skyrocket, and they are also filing lawsuits that are flat-out stupid. For example, they recently filed a suit against a small German cafe called Apfelkind (translates to Apple Kid or Apple Child) for infringement. I have presented both logos below for your consideration.

NO ONE would mistake the two logos. Trademark law exist explicitly to help the consumer, not the company. It does not give a company absolute control over some image. Apple does not control all images of apples everywhere! And, importantly for my opinions of the company, trying to do so cements their position as a belligerent piece of crap.

In case someone from Apple is reading this, let me educate their dumb self. Trademark law is intended to protect people from buying something from a company other than they think they are. It is entirely consumer-oriented as a protection to stop them from being scammed. It is not AT ALL a protection for companies.

For example, Apple has a trademark on their permutation of the apple image because if I see that image, I believe that I am buying an Apple product, which I want. It is my perception that is important and needs to be protected. Because in this equation, I am the one who is harmed the most. Apple, at most, is out a single sale. But I am deprived of significant funds which are much more important to me than to Apple. I am absolutely harmed while Apple is only theoretically harmed.

That's why trademark law has the "idiot in a hurry" litmus test. If, upon inspection, an idiot in a hurry would not mistake the two trademarks, there is no danger to the public, and as such, the suing trademark holder can go screw.

And that is exactly what I am saying to Apple. Go screw. Any company that would bully a small German cafe that caters to parents is a company with which I want no part.