go read
* from the editors at NRO: "If Iraq ever descends into a real civil war, we won't have to debate whether it has happened. It will be clear for all to see. The military will dissolve into ethnic factions, and the government will collapse. That hasn't happened, and so declarations of defeat in Iraq — of the sort our founder and editor-at-large William F. Buckley Jr. made last week — are pre-mature." (link)
i wonder if they intentionally hyphenated 'premature', perhaps demonstrating that they are, themselves, pre-mature.
* maha:
"Now I want to confuse everyone by arguing that “when life begins” is the wrong question. It’s the wrong question because life doesn’t begin. Or, at least, it hasn’t begun on this planet in a very long time. However life got to Earth — between 3 and 4 billion years ago, I believe — once it established it hasn’t been observed to “begin” again. It just continues, expressing itself in countless forms. The forms come and go — in a sense — but not life itself.
It will be argued that fertilization marks the beginning of a unique individual and is, therefore, a significant moment in the life process — the point when a life begins. But let’s say a couple of weeks later the egg divides into twins or triplets. Did those individuals’ lives begin with the conception? Or, since they didn’t exist as individuals at conception, is the cell division something like an existential reboot?"
2 comments:
Re Maha: That's a very interesting point indeed - " is the cell division something like an existential reboot?"
The Christian view is that conception creates a human being which possesses a soul as part of this creative act. Some Hindus believe in transmigration of the soul from one life to the next . Here the soul enters the body with the very first breath. Prior to that the foetus is a protoplasmic organism which has a separate identity from the mother only in a cellular, organic sense. This is the point that Maha makes quite nicely: if you define a soul, an individual, as existing from conception, then you have no adequate explanation for twins or triplets. Fair point.
It goes a little further than this, however. The idea of soul or, in modern parlance, "personhood" only has meaning in a setting where we can know things outside us, where there is a distinction between our own feelings and the world around us. We wander around collecting facts and believing we 'know' things because of our existential separation from everything around us, a separation that grows as we progress further from our mothers into adult life. Some scientists and philosophers have seriously suggested that our sense of 'knowing things' is an illusion, neuronal firngs that just create warm senses in our body, and thus an illusion of knowledge. Yet toothaches are real and our ideas have consequences in the real world. So this can't be right.
So how do we know what we know?
Thomas Aquinas battled with this one for years and wrote a library of explanations. Yet a few days before his death he came from Church and told people he had had a vision that made everything he had written seem so inadequate as to be worthless.
And as Socrates grew older he challenged more and more ideas about himself until eventually he could truthfully tell people that he 'knew nothing'. Of course he knew what day it was, when to pick the fruit in summer, and why the square root of two had to be an irrational number. But his 'existential ignorance' grew.
When we stand under a bright street light at night unless we know better we can believe the world is a circle about ten metres across. We can even build our lives around it. But if we step out of that circle and are patient enough to accustom our eyes to the dark then the world stretches away in every direction. Then what we don't know provides meaning to what we know. Only then do we understand how little we know. Only then is humility forced upon us. Only then do we understand that humility is the natural and appropriate human condition.
God says this in the Koran: "No one comes to me except in abject submission".
And Buddha said it when his disciples engaged him in a lengthy debate. We've lost his reply, but his words disarmed them:
"And all at once their minds were open and they saw that they were as a bubble held in the hand of the universe, forever lost and forever saved."
gday chillout. nice to have you here.
thanks for the thoughtful pos.
similarly, Descartes' cogito ergo sum. if only we could all realize how little we know...
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