Quote from: af_newbie on December 07, 2019, 04:16:57 PM

Quote from: IadixDev on December 07, 2019, 02:56:23 PM

Quote from: af_newbie on December 07, 2019, 02:11:24 PM

Quote from: IadixDev on December 07, 2019, 02:02:30 PM

Quote from: af_newbie on December 07, 2019, 01:55:16 PM

Fertilized eggs are not beings, never mind human beings.

Ontologically speaking even a stone is a being Cheesy

So now we play with words.

You know what I meant, a sentient being, not that it merely exists.

Words are important

Edelman and the likes show that its not that easy to know where sentience and consciousness really starts or ends.

At which point you consider a cell or a group of cell is sentient or not ?

It is hard to determine exactly when this happens as it is a cumulative process, and it is dependent on the environment and genetics.
It is also species-dependent.

To be aware of your environment you need some sort of complex brain. In the case of a human pregnancy, I am sure that in most cases, a viable fetus is a sentient being.

Consciousness is a result of your brain processing all the inputs, current and past. When you deprive your brain of oxygen, it slowly dies, when all cells die and the RNA/DNA in your brain cells fragments, there is no going back, your brain is dead forever, and your consciousness ends forever.

The claim made earlier in this thread that a fertilized egg is a human being is so ridiculous that it blows my mind how people can be so dogmatic.

I only entertained it to lead them out of their logical fallacy.

Its not a very good answer, edelman first got a nobel prize studying imune system, and in itself its aware of its environnement, able to have memory, detect infectious agent / toxins, albeit not being directly connected to the central nervous system.

If you follow edelman boostrap theory with the reentrant connection and different level of consciousness, it show higher cognitive function are still heavily dependant on feedback from physiology. Essentially in this theory what drive the developpment of higher cognitive function is fitting physiological input, and physiology depend on chemical interaction and physical constraint etc

Even monocellular organism can display a form of sentience, and awareness of environnement with "intelligent" reaction to promote its survival and reproduction.

Just throwing this also as "food for thought"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/choosy-eggs-may-pick-sperm-for-their-genes-defying-mendels-law-20171115/

Joe Nadeau, principal scientist at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute, is challenging this dogma. Random fertilization should lead to specific ratios of gene combinations in offspring, but Nadeau has found two examples just from his own lab that indicate fertilization can be far from random: Certain pairings of gamete genes are much more likely than others. After ruling out obvious alternative explanations, he could only conclude that fertilization wasnt random at all.

Its the gamete equivalent of choosing a partner, Nadeau said.

His hypothesis that the egg could woo sperm with specific genes and vice versa is part of a growing realization in biology that the egg is not the submissive, docile cell that scientists long thought it was. Instead, researchers now see the egg as an equal and active player in reproduction, adding layers of evolutionary control and selection to one of the most important processes in life.

Its really not simple to answer that.

Well its clear we dont observe the manifestation of consciousness outside of a body, but in itself it also its hard To say where sentience really start, descartes tried to find this "seat of reasonning", which he located in the pineal gland, but now we know this to be false, and we still dont really know which organ or which part of the brain really make us sentient, if Its located in the brain at all.

For me from the moment there is a will to survive and grow/reproduce it imply a form of sentience.