Most conversations around abortion are incomplete and leave unexplored questions on when human life begins, what it means to be an individual, and where discrete lines must be drawn. The right questions are infrequently asked and usually descend into vague platitudes on “my body, my choice” or “the sanctity of life.” Neither are illegitimate concerns; life ought to be considered sacred and the living ought to have bodily autonomy, but scarcely does anyone ever try to reconcile these complementary values. A definition of life ought to be pursued as questions about sentience, artificial intelligence, cloning, and the like will be salient in shaping the upcoming decades and this necessitates organizing a moral consensus and an accompanying legal regime.
THE QUESTION of MORAL INTUITIONS
To begin, any answer on where life begins will also have to be grounded in our moral intuitions. The feelings of disgust and revulsion we experience weighed against our varied intuitions for fairness, autonomy, self-interest, and so forth are where moral reasoning comes from; post-hoc rationalizations, however elaborate, are just that.[1] This is not an endorsement of surrender to the first instinctive reaction, however. As an algorithm for providing shortcuts on how to respond in the ancestral landscape — from at least our first vertebral ancestors to now — emotions have had to be updated due to novel circumstances and changes in the environment. Leaving aside speculation on time preferences and so on, updates have continued to the present across populations.
Rapidity provided by emotions enables animals to know how to quickly respond to predators, prey, food, potential mates, rivals, and other dangers and enticements. Likewise in humans, emotions make social interactions possible. In The Righteous Mind, Haidt writes of individuals with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex — stating that while “they even scored well on Kohlberg’s tests of moral reasoning”[2] the lack of emotion impaired their ability to rule out actions and behaviors. Haidt elaborates:
Damasio’s patients could think about anything, with no filtering or coloring from their emotions. With the vmPFC shut down, every option at every moment felt as good as every other. The only way to make a decision was to examine each option, weighing the pros and cons using conscious, verbal reasoning. If you’ve ever shopped for an appliance about which you have few feelings—say, a washing machine—you know how hard it can be once the number of options exceeds six or seven (which is the capacity of our short-term memory). Just imagine what your life would be like if at every moment, in every social situation, picking the right thing to do or say became like picking the best washing machine among ten options, minute after minute, day after day. You’d make foolish decisions too.[3]
Emotions are an algorithm — they necessarily must be powerful enough to compel us to expend precious calories — and provide the basis upon which moral intuitions emerge. But moral intuitions only needed to be a net positive for survival, and consequently they could still mislead many others towards dead-ends and destruction when the algorithm is not optimally calibrated for the environment; leading to poor decisions. Nonetheless, the inescapability of moral intuitions and everyone’s tendency to engage in post-hoc rationalizations constrains where and how far our moral reasoning can go. Perhaps in the future I will elaborate more on these thoughts here. For the time being, what we can do is establish some principles where I expect most peoples’ overlapping intuitions are and from there argue where the lines are to be drawn.
Human life is sacred.
Bodily autonomy is necessary and should only be rescinded when an individual presents a threat to others.
A standard for what constitutes human life ought not to be one that would justify killing those who are sleeping or comatose on a whim.
When there are ambiguities, it is better to err on the side of life instead of risking killing a living individual.
Before anthropologist types come to tell me human life is not sacred because of any number of obscure tribes, let me be the first to say I am well aware that even infanticide has been common throughout much of human history. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker excerpts Larry Milner’s The Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life, including the following portion:
It did not seem rational that evolution would maintain an inherited tendency to kill one’s offspring when survival was already in such a delicate balance…. But the answer which has emerged from my research indicates that one of the most “natural” things a human being can do is voluntarily kill its own offspring when faced with a variety of stressful situations.[4]
The key here is that infanticide occurs under conditions of high stress. Pinker goes further on to write:
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson tested the triage theory by examining a sample of sixty unrelated societies from a database of ethnographies. Infanticide was documented in a majority of them, and in 112 cases the anthropologists recorded a reason. Eighty-seven percent of the reasons fit the triage theory: the infant was not sired by the woman’s husband, the infant was deformed or ill, or the infant had strikes against its chances of surviving to maturity, such as being a twin, having an older sibling close in age, having no father around, or being born into a family that had fallen on hard economic times. The ubiquity and evolutionary intelligibility of infanticide suggest that for all its apparent inhumanity, it is usually not a form of wanton murder but falls into a special category of violence. Anthropologists who interview these women (or their relatives, since the event may be too painful for the woman to discuss) often recount that the mother saw the death as an unavoidable tragedy and grieved for the lost child. Napoleon Chagnon, for example, wrote of the wife of a Yanomamö headman, “Bahami was pregnant when I began my fieldwork, but she destroyed the infant when it was born—a boy in this case—explaining tearfully that she had no choice. The new baby would have competed with Ariwari, her youngest child, who was still nursing. Rather than expose Ariwari to the dangers and uncertainty of an early weaning, she chose to terminate the newborn instead.” Though the Yanomamö are the so-called fierce people, infanticide is not necessarily a manifestation of fierceness across the board. Some warring tribes, particularly in Africa, rarely kill their newborns, while some relatively peaceful ones kill them regularly. The title of Milner’s magnum opus comes from a quotation from a 19th-century founder of anthropology, Edward Tylor, who wrote, “Infanticide arises from hardness of life rather than hardness of heart.”[5]
Preserving the life of those within what Pinker calls the “circle of sympathy” is intuitive and people only make sacrifices under extreme stress. The Better Angels of Our Nature also addresses the issue of female infanticide in more detail, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
Meanwhile on bodily autonomy: preventing coercion by other individuals or an increasingly ideologically possessed state is good. Killing people in their sleep is bad, and so is withholding life support against the support of the nearest kin or instructions to the contrary. Making decisions on where the right to bodily autonomy begins and when an individual’s life support should be withdrawn is contingent on determining who is living and who is not.
WHEN DOES LIFE START?
The biological definition of life encompasses matter that can self-replicate, metabolize, and react with the environment. Viruses are at the edge of what is living and what is nonliving. Under such a definition, sperm cells are alive; sperm cells react to the environment, metabolize, and replicate (to put it mildly). Nonetheless, this definition does not meet our intuitions on what we are trying to save, and this becomes obvious when we consider how little regard is given to microbial life.
Obviously then merely fulfilling the biological definition of life is insufficient. What is to be preserved is human life. A more rationally consistent approach would be to save sentient life. A sperm and egg cell, while possessing half of the genetic material each to produce a human, do not come close to qualifying as having a distinctly human life.
Then the next most obvious standard for life becomes conception, and the argument easily runs aground. Religious thresholds for when life begins range from conception on one end to when the child says “amen” on the other.[6] Setting aside answers from the different religions, is there an independent way to verify life begins at conception?
Even if all existing religions were untrue, that would not necessarily rule out the possibility that souls exist and that ensoulment occurs at conception, with the first breath, or any other threshold offered by different faiths. On the conception question, I again introduce Pinker, but this time the excerpt is from his book The Blank Slate:
But just as a microscope reveals that a straight edge is really ragged, research on human reproduction shows that the “moment of conception” is not a moment at all. Sometimes several sperm penetrate the outer membrane of the egg, and it takes time for the egg to eject the extra chromosomes. What and where is the soul during this interval? Even when a single sperm enters, its genes remain separate from those of the egg for a day or more, and it takes yet another day or so for the newly merged genome to control the cell. So the “moment” of conception is in fact a span of twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Nor is the conceptus destined to become a baby. Between two-thirds and three-quarters of them never implant in the uterus and are spontaneously aborted, some because they are genetically defective, others for no discernible reason. Still, one might say that at whatever point during this interlude the new genome is formed, the specification of a unique new person has come into existence. The soul, by this reasoning, may be identified with the genome. But during the next few days, as the embryo’s cells begin to divide, they can split into several embryos, which develop into identical twins, triplets, and so on. Do identical twins share a soul? Did the Dionne quintuplets make do with one-fifth of a soul each? If not, where did the four extra souls come from? Indeed, every cell in the growing embryo is capable, with the right manipulations, of becoming a new embryo that can grow into a child. Does a multicell embryo consist of one soul per cell, and if so, where do the other souls go when the cells lose that ability? And not only can one embryo become two people, but two embryos can become one person. Occasionally two fertilized eggs, which ordinarily would go on to become fraternal twins, merge into a single embryo that develops into a person who is a genetic chimera: some of her cells have one genome, others have another genome. Does her body house two souls?[7]
Although the circumstances Pinker brings up are exceptional cases, it is still worth asking when exactly life begins if conception itself is messy. While we do accept babies born with physical deformities to be human, what do we think of twins? I cannot rule out the existence of “philosophical zombies.” I also cannot rule out that souls exist and some may be deformed, misplaced, swapped, and so on. Otherkin and the transgender aside, I am not familiar with any claims that can be vaguely interpreted to that end.
Doubtless it is true that Pinker does not actually believe in “souls,” or what he calls the “ghost in the machine.” Pinker here really is arguing that conception is a poor threshold for when life starts. I agree with Pinker regarding souls and using conception as a threshold. Merely possessing human genetic material is unsatisfactory as if it was true then we should ban all amputations. Potentiality is not satisfactory either as I will elaborate on later. Neither addresses the issue of what it means to be human and that is fundamental to this question.
Returning to chimerism, the problems are not limited to what Pinker mentions in his excerpt. In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Carl Zimmer writes “all pregnant women have fetal cells in their bloodstream at thirty-six weeks. After birth, the fraction drops, but up to half of mothers still carry fetal cells in their blood decades after carrying their children.”[8] What about the sisters of these fetuses? Zimmer mentions a University of Copenhagen study in which the researchers “reported that twenty-one girls—more than 13 percent—had them. Because the girls did not have sons of their own, the scientists concluded that their Y-chromosome—carrying cells originated in their brothers, were left behind in their mothers after birth, and then made their way into the bodies of the girls while they were still fetuses.”[9] Do mothers possess the souls of their children? Do these sisters also carry a portion of the souls of their brothers? Note that mothers almost certainly have the genetic material of their daughters and brothers probably also carry genetic material from their sisters; these studies were limited to finding DNA from sons and brothers as these studies were searching for Y-chromosomal DNA in women.
Microchimerism is not unidirectional. Zimmer goes on to write “According to one estimate, 42 percent of children end up with cells from their mothers.”[10] In mothers of mice at least, these cells make their way to the brain:
Fetal cells don’t simply migrate around their mothers’ bodies. They sense the tissue around them and develop into the same types of cells. In 2010, Gerald Udolph, a biologist in Singapore, and his colleagues documented this transformation with a line of engineered mice. They altered the Y chromosomes in the male mice so that they glowed with the addition of a chemical. Udolph and his colleagues bred the mice, and then later they dissected the brains of the mothers. They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.[11]
In humans, these fetal cells are very much alive and active, sometimes stepping in for essential bodily functions:
She discovered a mother’s thyroid gland packed with fetal cells carrying Y chromosomes. Her gland was badly damaged by goiter, and yet it still managed to secrete normal levels of thyroid hormones. The evidence pointed to a startling conclusion: A fetal cell from her son had wended its way through her body to her diseased thyroid gland. It had sensed the damage there and responded by multiplying into new thyroid cells, regenerating the gland. In another woman, Bianchi discovered that an entire lobe of her liver was made up of Y-chromosome—bearing cells. Bianchi was even able to trace the paternity of the cells to the woman’s boyfriend. She had had an abortion years before, but some of the cells from the fetus still remained inside her. When her liver was damaged later by hepatitis C, Bianchi’s research suggested, her son’s cells rebuilt it.[12]
Zimmer mentions a study in which fetal cells might have helped women defeat cancer, though the sample size is small.[13] Whatever the case, many (if not most) people are genetic chimeras and these other microchimeric cells are very much alive and active. Do most people have multiple souls then?
Perhaps then ensoulment is the wrong argument for life at conception and maybe a different standard would justify that threshold. In order to sidestep the issue of chimerism, perhaps we add the caveat that because chimeras do not, and have never, split into multiple humans then we can safely assume these individuals have one soul. Perhaps humans become chimeras if only the other fetuses sharing the womb lack a soul? And microchimeric cells will not become a distinct individual naturally without artificial tampering. This also raises problems. Returning to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate:
if human cloning ever became possible (and there appears to be no technical obstacle), every cell in a person’s body would have the special ability that is supposedly unique to a conceptus, namely developing into a human being. True, the genes in a cheek cell can become a person only with unnatural intervention, but that is just as true for an egg that is fertilized in vitro. Yet no one would deny that children conceived by IVF have souls.[14]
If your intuitions lead you to believe people generated through in-vitro-fertilization are not sentient, then congratulations and I have nothing to say. For everyone else, maybe the boundaries should be sharpened: maybe what “unnatural intervention” takes place prior to conception is irrelevant, but once conception happens what is important is that a zygote is intended to become a human being.
Even that has several serious problems. A fifth of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortions,[15] and these are not completely accidental as male fetuses are spontaneously aborted more often than female fetuses especially when conditions are difficult,[16] which points to some biological calculation shaped by evolution. Biology appears to care very little for the sanctity of life. Maybe the intelligent designer has His reasons, but the rationalization required to justify this becomes increasingly convoluted.
Another threshold is the heartbeat, but as symbolic as it is for being noisy in comparison to other physical systems, I am not sure the cardiovascular system has a special status above the respiratory system, the digestive system, amongst others. If we did accept the heartbeat as the beginning point for life, then we can run this in reverse: what does it mean when a heart stops? Then what do we make of people whose hearts have been restarted with defibrillators: do they have new souls or are they “philosophical zombies”? What happens when a heart is transplanted?
Viability is another poor threshold. All viability is able to tell us is how sophisticated our technology for saving fetuses is. Does God set the beginning of life earlier each time there is a medical breakthrough in this area? Maybe if a working artificial womb is invented then it will force God to set the beginning of life at conception.
Birth is a strong standard for the beginning of life, but not satisfactory. If physical separation from another living being constitutes life, then what do we make of conjoined twins or fetuses born many months prematurely, but incapable of surviving without the assistance of technology? Something other than the act of separation must be what determines the beginning of life.
Another threshold could be when a child becomes conscious and self-aware, but then again that also runs aground, because any reasonable person will agree terminating the life of someone who is unconscious would be reprehensible no matter how heavy a sleeper an individual is or even if they are comatose. The same is true of those who suffer severe mental handicaps and show no outward signs of self-awareness. While some tribes and societies might have engaged in killing their own when they fell into some of these categories, we are not under the same severe resource constraints and therefore we should err on the side of life.
What would be the most responsible answer for the beginning of life to guide law and public policy? A rational answer would use information from studying the fetal brain. A 2005 piece from The New York Times brings up the issue of brain death, an irreversible state after which an individual is irrecoverable and gone forever.[17] Rational consistency would then require applying the opposite. The New York Times piece argues that while there is brain activity early on, activity around weeks five and six are less “coherent” than the “activity seen in a shrimp’s nervous system, and even around the thirteenth week.[18]
Michael Gazzaniga, the author, must be taken seriously. He was a pioneer, along with Roger Sperry, in researching individuals with brains severed down the middle (more on this later), as well as the monumental finding that (at least) simple decisions in the brain occur before conscious thought catches on.[19] On our question he leans toward the twenty-third week as a threshold but leans too heavily on viability.
Another obvious problem is the difficulty of determining when exactly regular brain activity begins. One issue is that fetuses keep moving inside the uterus and this makes imaging difficult; there is still much being learned in this field.
A final answer will require further forays and studying in this area. While the human brain does not mature until well into the twenties, some line should be delineated between lower animal level brain activity and higher, distinctly human functions. Given the fact the brain is still rapidly developing in the third trimester, the answer is anything but simple; for instance brain volume increases from three ounces at the outset of the third trimester to eleven at the end.[20]
Beyond the issue of brain death, several other reasons exist for privileging the brain above other functions. Imagine all the different parts of the body that can be amputated. Is personhood sacrificed if an arm is removed? Is the conclusion any different if other internal organs are transplanted? Personhood replete with the conscious experiences that accompany being human are contained within the brain. The brain is the sole indispensable component to being a particular individual. What is important is being a sentient organism and the unique capabilities and experiences this permits. If we had the ability to surgically swap brains between the bodies of two living individuals, then we would consider the outcome as being one in which two people swapped bodies.
Imagine humanity succeeds in developing a highly advanced 3D printer with the ability to arrange all the atoms so precisely that it prints an entire human body right down the DNA in each cell and a plausible set of neuronal connections that could be expected in a modern adult H. sapiens. Yet, this 3D printed entity that has the exact shape of a human being, down to the last molecule, is not alive merely for having the shape of a human being and would only be alive if this entity were able to have conscious experiences. Imagine also that a benevolent, fully sentient extraterrestrial visitor is trapped on Earth in a life-threatening situation.
You have the option of saving the 3D printed entity in the shape of a human or the space alien. Who do you save? The rational answer is the latter. Having a human form and human DNA is not sufficient. The experiences that make us distinctly human are what matters.
Nonetheless, there is some level of species chauvinism that is applicable here. Most well-adjusted people freed from extreme resource constraints would not endorse casually killing the retarded nor would we say casual indifference to the lives of those sleeping or in a coma is justified. While infants may not be totally sentient in the way adults are, moral disgust at killing children is still good. Some degree of speciesism is good and justified. Nature is anarchic and the only way to ensure the perpetuation of sentient beings capable of experience and life is the ruthless pursuit of survival. Absent existential threats, inflicting suffering on sentient beings is immoral and we must err on the side of life.
CONTAINING MULTITUDES
What do we make of split-brain experiments? Can the brain really be said to be synonymous with the individual if we are multiple entities in one?
In the 1960s, the surgeon Joe Bogen tried to solve the issue of some severe epileptic seizures by severing the brain’s corpus callosum to prevent the spread of seizures from one hemisphere to the other after noticing severing the brains of animals laterally down the middle left them normal.[22] Complexities of human behavior introduce unique complications. Jonathan Haidt, in The Happiness Hypothesis, writes:
Gazzaniga took advantage of the fact that the brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres—left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left’s mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body. Nobody knows why the signals cross over in this way in all vertebrates; they just do. But in other respects, the two hemispheres are specialized for different tasks. The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being “right-brained” and scientists being “left-brained”). Gazzaniga used the brain’s division of labor to present information to each half of the brain separately. He asked patients to stare at a spot on a screen, and then flashed a word or a picture of an object just to the right of the spot, or just to the left, so quickly that there was not enough time for the patient to move her gaze. If a picture of a hat was flashed just to the right of the spot, the image would register on the left half of each retina (after the image had passed through the cornea and been inverted), which then sent its neural information back to the visual processing areas in the left hemisphere. Gazzaniga would then ask, “What did you see?” Because the left hemisphere has full language capabilities, the patient would quickly and easily say, “A hat.” If the image of the hat was flashed to the left of the spot, however, the image was sent back only to the right hemisphere, which does not control speech. When Gazzaniga asked, “What did you see?”, the patient, responding from the left hemisphere, said, “Nothing.” But when Gazzaniga asked the patient to use her left hand to point to the correct image on a card showing several images, she would point to the hat. Although the right hemisphere had indeed seen the hat, it did not report verbally on what it had seen because it did not have access to the language centers in the left hemisphere. It was as if a separate intelligence was trapped in the right hemisphere, its only output device the left hand. When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to the two hemispheres, things grew weirder. On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that “goes with” what he had seen. The patient’s right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, “I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain.” Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, “Oh, that’s easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on whatever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self’s behavior. For example, if the word “walk” is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, “I’m going to get a Coke.” The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so. Science has made even stranger discoveries. In some split-brain patients, or in others who have suffered damage to the corpus callosum, the right hemisphere seems to be actively fighting with the left hemisphere in a condition known as alien hand syndrome. In these cases, one hand, usually the left, acts of its own accord and seems to have its own agenda. The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out. It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person’s conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person’s own neck and tries to strangle him.[23]
The weirdness does not stop there. In Conscious, Annaka Harris writes:
To the surprise of the first neuroscientists to conduct such experiments (and to the rest of us!), it seems that the same person can have two different answers to a question, along with completely different desires and opinions in general. And even more astonishing is the discovery that the feelings and opinions of each hemisphere seem to be privately experienced and unknown to the other. One “self” of a split-brain patient is as puzzled by the opinions and desires of the other as another person in the room would be. Whether or not both points of view in split-brain patients are conscious is difficult if not impossible to answer, but we have no reason to doubt that there is an experience associated with the thoughts and desires of each, and most neuroscientists believe that both hemispheres are in fact conscious.[24]
Another example of the separate experiences, now from Homo Deus, which also shows the tendency towards denial:
In yet another experiment the non-verbal right hemisphere was shown a pornographic image. The patient reacted by blushing and giggling. ‘What did you see?’ asked the mischievous researchers. ‘Nothing, just a flash of light,’ said the left hemisphere, and the patient immediately giggled again, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Why are you laughing then?’ they insisted. The bewildered left-hemisphere interpreter — struggling for some rational explanation — replied that one of the machines in the room looked very funny.[25]
In certain cases the left hemisphere of the brain — which controls the right hemisphere of the body — cannot even acknowledge the left hemisphere of the body even exists. For instance:
In fact when the right hemisphere is no longer available to bring the left side of the body into being, the left hemisphere may substitute only a mechanical structure of inanimate parts down that side. One patient described by Ehrenwald reported that, following a right-hemisphere stroke, ‘where the left half of his chest, abdomen and stomach should be, he’s got only a wooden plank.’ It goes right down to his anus, and is divided into compartments by transverse planks … food doesn’t follow the usual path from the stomach through the intestines, ‘it gets sucked into the compartments of this scaffolding and it falls through the hole at the bottom of the framework’. All this is only on the left side. On the right the organs are all perfectly in place. And Ehrenwald records that it was not just a delusional idea, but a percept: he could see and feel the plank.[26]
McGilchrist further goes on to say:
If the right hemisphere is not functioning properly, the left hemisphere may actually deny having anything to do with a body part that does not seem to be working according to the left hemisphere’s instructions. Patients will report that the hand ‘doesn’t belong to me’ or even that it belongs to the person in the next bed, or speak of it as if made of plastic. One patient complained that there was a dead hand in his bed. A male patient thought the arm must belong to a woman in bed with him; a white woman thought hers belonged to ‘un petit nègre’ in bed with her; another complained that there was a child in the bed, on his left. Yet another was convinced that the nurses had bundled up his arm with the dirty laundry and sent it away to be washed. One patient believed quite firmly that the paralysed arm belonged to her mother, though in all other respects her conversation was quite normal.[27]
Given the fact that severing the brain down the middle creates two distinct and conflicting conscious entities, what does this mean for personhood? Why does splitting the brain create these distinct conscious entities? Does this seriously challenge using brain activity as the threshold for personhood?
FOLLOWING THE TRAIL
Presently three possible theories on the origin of consciousness are viable: materialism, dualism, and panpsychism; each has its philosophical arguments. In sum: materialism assumes consciousness cannot be separated from the material universe. Dualism accepts these as distinct. Panpsychism argues consciousness is intrinsic to the universe and perhaps more fundamental than spacetime. Each of these theories have numerous problems and upsides, but I argue consciousness has to be fundamental to the universe for experiences to exist. Maybe David Chalmers’s philosophical zombies are more than a thought experiment and are real, but there is something unique about sensing the world that is irreducible even if sentience, intelligence, and memory emerge from a highly complicated system interacting with itself at rapid speed — pointing to something like “formless consciousness” that Phillip Goff describes in Galileo’s Error.[28] That argues against materialism. Meanwhile we are not “ghosts in the machine” and consciousness has an obvious impact on thought, which limits the explanatory power of dualism. Working through these two assumptions leads to something like panpsychism.
In this view severing the brain does not split a soul into two as there are no souls to split — at a basic layer matter is already accompanied by characteristics necessary for consciousness and the emergence of an intelligent, sentient organism like Homo sapiens. However, after severing an individual’s corpus collosum there really are now two distinct conscious entities — as seen in the experiments mentioned earlier — as there is nothing to permit the high volume of communication between the hemispheres that creates a unified consciousness. The divine spark is unnecessary when matter arranged appropriately and set in motion will give rise to the extraordinary fact of experience.
If this model of consciousness is correct, then that opens the way to exploring some intriguing ideas. First, this is not an endorsement to treat individuals like dirt — being composed of matter capable of generating this experience is not an invitation to dehumanization and this does not deny the dignity of the individual and the significance of life. What this does do is endow the world with far more special significance. Suddenly there is more significance endowed to one’s land and country — the matter composing the earth works its way through plant life and animals, because being consumed by you and that matter is then resynthesized into you. From soil to blood and blood to soil, you will return to this same earth and your ancestors are fused with this land. Passion for one’s country has emerged coincidentally, but the continuity with one’s land and ancestors is deeper than memories, tradition, and a self-replicating molecule.[*] If sentience and qualia emerge from matter and we agree human lives and experiences are superior to a formless consciousness, then that is also an argument for large families, long lives, and spreading humanity as far as possible.
Religions that believe in reincarnation like Hinduism and Buddhism are onto something, though the matter that composes you will be resynthesized into microbes, fungi, and plant matter before constituting an animal. The probability the matter will be resynthesized into another human immediately after the last is low. So while a reincarnation of a sort is not wrong, the claim of a soul being transmitted into a new body is wrong. Approximately four-fifths of the biomass on Earth is locked into plants, with humans constituting a meager 0.01% and the total for animals altogether is forty times higher than our species.[29] In religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, returning as an animal is a downgrade so this should not endear devout members of those faiths.
Nonetheless, when we recall that 98% of the atoms in an individual’s body are recycled in a year[30] and given the vastness of geological timescales, a lot of the world around us will cycle through us at some point. Citizens are very much tied to their land and ancestors. Lion King stumbled upon something very true.
A naïve reader may assume this means nature worship is not altogether irrational. That would be as incorrect as converting to Hinduism or Buddhism based on the technical truth of reincarnation. Nature does not love you — it is not a singular entity, but much of what is in nature is perfectly willing to let you starve or absorb your matter to metabolize and resynthesize into itself regardless of how painful the process may be for you. Tribes that practice(d) cannibalism sidestepped this by consuming other humans directly, though they certainly were not absorbing the powers of the deceased, and consuming the brain, where personhood is housed, can induce terminal prion diseases like kuru.
An obvious objection to what I propose may be that sentience is far too complicated to emerge by chance. That appears to be untrue; a computer simulation by the late John Conway called the “Game of Life” from over five decades ago demonstrates highly complicated systems can result by letting a system with a handful of rules operate as in this clip,[31] watching which is a prerequisite to understanding this paragraph. Conway’s simulation does not prove the lack of an intelligent designer with the intent to produce conscious entities but does show that is not a necessary condition. If there are multiple universes, then perhaps in some fundamental laws will be conducive to the emergence of highly complicated systems given a narrow set of conditions and the anthropic principle limits what alternatives can be sampled.
Assuming that it is true that 98% of all of the particles in the human body are replaced each year,[32] and almost all cells are replaced every fifteen years,[33] then this raises more questions. Are you even the same person? The “you” that is continuous is the pattern, but still the “you” that exists at present is bound to fade out of existence and new particles will take over these slots and experience consciousness. In that case hedonism may be a temptation, but it should not be for the same intuitions that led Edmund Burke to describe social relations as an intergenerational covenant — you have a duty to your future self as the present generation does to subsequent ones. An ambitious generation of strivers as a model for an individual engaged in self-improvement.
Given the transient nature of the matter constituting conscious experience, this also introduces a new dimension on the abortion question: matter from crops and livestock will most likely be resynthesized into a human, if a fetus is destined to have genetic defects that would prevent it from living a full life, would it not be more moral to send those particles to constitute an individual who can live a full life?
CONCLUSION
Personhood is contained within the brain and consistency would mean using regular brain activity as the point at which life begins. In this view personhood is also identified with the “pattern” from the start of consistent brain activity to the end, By identifying sentience with brain activity we also make sense of split brain experiments and address the ensoulment question. Determining the point at which matter is not merely matter, but alive requires grappling with materialist, dualist, and panpsychist beliefs for where consciousness comes from. From there we can create a more informed understanding of where sentience comes from.
Maybe the reader here will ask: why is life important saving at all? This may be something I should have addressed at the start of my piece, but I am waiting until now because my answer would not make sense without a walkthrough of my view on how consciousness originates. To a degree, we lean on intuition. In the future I may elaborate more on where I believe morality comes from, but for now we will have to make do with the following: we can all agree human lives are, on the whole, preferable to being a formless consciousness. In the absence of an immortal soul, being bound within a sentient entity may be the high point of existence for any bundle of matter (at least on Earth). Maybe we just believe this because of our preservation instinct. The suicidal might disagree and the dead are too dead to care, but experience and the richness of life is far superior to its absence and the universe is richer for these experiences.
This also justifies chauvinism on the part of our species and is a reason why consuming meat is moral. Perhaps a chicken would be better off if it was resynthesized into a tree, but I am unwilling to take that gamble and believe it would be better off if at least a portion of its matter was resynthesized into a human.
All of this also means that the human species is worth preserving and perpetuating; we also ought to do what is necessary to ensure H. sapiens is spread across the cosmos and that means preserving conditions and necessary level of self-sacrifice that permits the perpetuation of humanity and its civilizations across generations. Though humans are loosely eusocial, the importance of individuation and its importance to cultural evolution and the perpetuation of the superorganism that is civilization means a substantial degree of liberty and bodily autonomy is worth preserving.
If we were able to determine an alien sentient finds its existence to be more enriching and this species wanted to kill and eat humans, would that be preferable? Or even to subjugate or destroy humanity to allow the perpetuations of that alien species? I would say no for two reasons. First, if we are even able to determine objectively an alien existence is superior to ours, that does not necessarily mean humanity could not find ways to enrich its own existence. Second, species chauvinism is good because it ensures the perpetuation of sentience.
Finally we may ask: if we place such value on sentient life, at how many weeks does sentient life begin? I am prepared to use the twenty-three week threshold from Gazzaniga earlier in this piece. I would also be comfortable at setting a hard line at twenty weeks until we can determine what constitutes regular brain activity. After nearly seven thousand words this is probably a disappointing answer, but these are prerequisite to finding a final answer.
What happens to the fetus when we determine it is alive? The bodily autonomy of the fetus would then have the same status as that of the mother. Beyond this point abortion for even rape and incest would not be permissible as the moral status would be equivalent to that of a living person; would you execute an innocent adult if they were conceived through rape or incest? But the life of the mother should still be weighted more heavily should medical complications cast this into doubt. Even if the lives of the mother and the fetus then have an equivalent moral status, what we must account for is the impact the death of the mother or the fetus would have on others.
So from the beginning of life then life would endowed with a basic right to life. The point at which this right ends will necessarily have to rely on brain activity falling below a threshold. It still remains to be seen whether brain death is reversible and it is not impossible to imagine a future in which individuals whose entire bodies have been shutdown can be reanimated within a period of time. Death, then, will necessarily have to be beyond a threshold of brain activity.
This utilizes the best medically understood definition of when a living individual has passed into death and is the most logically consistent in reverse. Such a threshold marries science and reason with an intuitive sense of what it means to be alive, choosing to err on the side of life without seeking to embrace unreasonable criteria for human life. Perhaps most consequentially, this threshold is very sensible and has the added benefit of preserving the inviolability of the bodily autonomy of all — including a fetus, with an exception for the life of the mother — and thus elegantly reconciles the prolife and prochoice stances.
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[*] Caveat: this only really applies to individuals throughout most of the history of the Earth who lived near a subsistence level. Food today can be imported from anywhere on Earth, so this applies less.
[1] (Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion 2013)
[2] (Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion 2013, 39)
[3] (Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion 2013, 40)
[4] (Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined 2011, 416)
[5] (Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined 2011, 417)
[6] (Bayme 1994)
[7] (Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature 2002, 225)
[8] (Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity 2018, 388)
[9] (Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity 2018, 388)
[10] (Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity 2018, 388)
[11] (Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity 2018, 389)
[12] (Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity 2018, 390)
[13] (Zimmer, She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity 2018, 390)
[14] (Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature 2002, 225)
[15] (Griebel, et al. 2005)
[16] (Pennisi 2014)
[17] (Gazzaniga 2005)
[18] (Gazzaniga 2005)
[19] (Harris 2019, 26)
[20] (Fetal Brain Development Stages: When Does a Fetus Develop a Brain? n.d.)
[21] (Roelfsema, et al. 2003)
[22] (Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom 2006, 15)
[23] (Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom 2006, 16-17)
[24] (Harris 2019, 58-59)
[25] (Harari 2017, 295)
[26] (McGilchrist 2009, 55)
[27] (McGilchrist 2009, 67)
[28] (Goff 2019, 214)
[29] (H. Ritchie 2019)
[30] (Kestenbaum 2007)
[31] (Fetal Brain Development Stages: When Does a Fetus Develop a Brain? n.d.)
[32] (Kestenbaum 2007)
[33] (Sundermier n.d.)